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INDEX FOR JULY-DECEMBER, 1959

America’s Leading Liberal Weekly Since 1865.

The following letters are used to indicate
the type of article:

Correspondence
Drama

Editorial Article
Music

Moving Pictures
Poetry

Signed Article

indexed

Book reviews and reviewers are i
separately in the Book Review Section.

221-240 Oct. 17
241-260 Oct. 24
261-320 Oct. 31
321-340 Nov. 7
341-368 Nov. 14
101-120 Sept. 5 369-388 Nov. 21
121-140 Sept. 12 389-408 Nov. 28
141-160 Sept. 19 409-428 Dec. 5
161-180 Sept. 26 429-456 Dec. 12
181-200 Oct. 3 457-476 Dec. 19
201-220 Oct. 10 477-496 Dec. 26

1- 20 i 4
21- 40 July 18
41- 60 Aug. 1
61- 80 Aug. 15
81-100 Aug. 29

Aaron, Benjamin
Le FE LT) OS] RE ge I it 373
Abraham Lincoln School. See Guatemala
Ackerman, Paul
On “payolas”’ ; payment for song and record
“plugging”; S 414
Actors. See Theater
Adams, Francis W. H.
On “The Shame of New York”; C, opposite
321; see also New York City
Africa; what Negroes are thinking; E .......... 371
Africa, South. See Union of South Africa

Air pollution; smoke and smog; E .. . 459
Alaska; acer O. Colvin; S . . 166
Alexander, E ,
On article on “urban vacuum’’; C, opposite
41; see also 11
Algeria
And France; and the United States. A.
DSL REN SNS ME rica t Fess dascaisde esses ec +aneas . 147
At the United nations; M. Rossi; . 146
Book, La Gangréne, banned by govern n'
in Paris. R. N. Ae Sisiiiae.. ncnke 23
Hitchhiking across. S. and ite Mage; S ...... 45
Refugees; help asked for. M. S. Salcrest;
C, opposite 477
Allen-Bradley company; attack on Hexaebs
chev visit to the United States; E .... 141;
see also C, opposite 201
All’s well that ends well. Reviewed by H.
iene) ca ftem ee ees: 79
Altbach, Philip
Student peace union; expansion of; C, oppo-
site 457; see also S 39533. opposite 429
Altshul, Frank
Comment on advertisement, in New York
Times, of The Nation’s editorials on
Khrushchev visit to the United States;
C, opposite 181
America. See United States
American Friends service ae asks
xe for Algerian refugees. M. S. Salcrest;
opposite 477
Sponsorship of Which way the wind, “docu-
drama”; C, Opposite 389
a ; convention; Nixon address; -
CPOE «sSaasertea 08s <<rayessheaescsc.dte Sritsi---» 102

INDEX TO VOLUME 189
JULY to DECEMBER, 1959

PAGE

Wetterman quarrel with Senator Young; E 477
Anaesthetic, the. D. Galler; P 178
sy oad of a murder. Reviewed by R. Hatch;

Serer eer te reece ete nS es 39

Anders, Smiley

Letter on page 13, or on article on silent

faculty, in issue of May 16, 1959

Architecture; reviews of. See McQuade, W.
Armament

And power vacuums; E ......0..0.cccecccccecceeeeees 202

RE OBC fy eee ec abe eaceco hs arte vet ca ynisoesvist sc 389

Disarmament
Disbelief in Khrushchev peal feta 182
Pessimism on reduction. EF. M. Schwarz-
bart; C, opposite 201
Political settlement needed, before dis-
armament. J. D. Singer; S ........ 203;

E, 201
Proposals; E .............. 182; see also C,
aang ot bites Picenv cone 389

opposite 181

Technological; E

Unanimity, in principle, in the United
SRAULONS NPA ee. ae heres eas ser hicwinn neunoeae ee 321

View of Khrushchev. E. M. Schwarzbart;
C, opposite 201

Missiles
American and Russian; E ...............0.00.0-. 429
Martin company, maker, entertainment of
SIMEIT Ye OMCERRS TE) Seis assccecceuesteresevacte 457
Polaris, and two-way ice; E ............ i. G2
Money for, but not for housing; E 1
Munitions
Probe we haven’t had; E_ ............ 81; see
also C, opposite 161
Be pilige stockpile fiasco. E. W. Ziegler; Bie

Armour, Lloyd
Tennessee Valley Authority; unlearned
lesson; S 50; see also E, 41
Art

And communism; what Mr. Walter likes.
W. Thompson; § ............ 53; see also C,
opposite 101
And science in Chicago. J. Martin; S ........ 57
For reviews, see Porter,
Artist, the. (from the Russian of B. Paster-
naln). "So SteparGhey Pe oo cecscveceosdueresessbaeae 56
Asbury, Herbert
Praises The Nation for “Shame of New
York” issue; C, opposite 369
Astronautics; agencies and expenditures; E.... 221
Sense and nonsense about; Boo... 102
At the drop of a hat. Reviewed by H. Clur-
TAPE MED | assusndesti ry ices namatcantcteiskte> os hv >+=< Ce eae me 339
Atom bomb
Atomic waste; test case, New Britain, Con-
mecticuts SG 2.25. 43; see also E, 42;

C, opposite 81; 144
Dumping off Boston. G. DesChamps ;

cic. 144; see also 43; C, opposite
81; E, 142; 182
See also Nuclear energy
Fallout
In North Dakota; C, by E. W. Pfeiffer,
opposite 1;

see also article by Pfeiffer,
in issue of June 20, 1959
See also Radiation

Nuclear tests
Resistance tars Ie) SOHeI, We ....neceasiececse 21
Sanity spreading among nations: Bee 21
Television mischief. A. A. Smith; ie;
opposite 121

Testing the H-bomb in the Sahara; C,
opposite 241; see also 110
Shelters; E ............ 22; E, 122
Atomic energy. See Nuclear energy
Atomic energy commission; study of dumping
of atomic waste;

Be nurse ANA, Hig s« 242

: a Sag 4

ijt

pote,

PAGE

Data on atomic-bomb fallout. E. W. Pfeif-
fer; C, opposite 1; see also article in issue
of June 20, 1959
Automobiles; Detroit discovers the consumer.
R. P. Weeks; 151; see also C,
opposite 221
Industry as a public utility. P. Kyropoulos;
C, opposite 221; see also 151
Autumn in a word, an. L. Ferlinghetti; P .... 80
Aeris fly and be late. K. M. Ruppenthal; a
Guiddual cetesetacteawavedceeduaconrebacdscdyetevendcdeeretncde ne aeec ee 0

Bachrach, Peter

Fear of the people; § ............. 148; see also

C, opposite 201

Back to the wall. Reviewed by R. Hatch; MP 180
Barden, John

Railroad. labor erisiss: S. ....1...:0ctectievectsso0¥0 128
Barfly and Navajo. W. Eastlake; S .0.00..0...... 133
Baron, Sydney Stuart. See New York City;

“The Shame of New York,” part 3

Baseball; Chicago victory in the American
league: TS © Aeon rods eet AER cos tereeecusevszevtas 182
Beals, Carleton
Panama; invasion by rowboat; § ................ 27

Beard, Charles A.; battle over. R. E. Brown;
C, opposite 61
Bennett, Charles E.
Atomic waste; C, opposite 81; see also 43;
E, 42; 144
Berb, Max
‘Action by Western Germany against East
German regime; C, with editorial com-
ment, ayes 241; see also 206
Bernard, Sid
Projected entertainment center, New York
City; and an experience in search of
housing; C, opposite 161
Bernstein, Leonard. Reviewed by L. Trimble;
TNE co wttosiiirsnci fos ontoagen soos atti t ke aaa ines 428
Betsky, Seymour
Praise for fall book issue; C, o <—¥ Eh
Betting; bookmaking. See New City,
“The Shame of New York,’ part o
Biel, Nicholas
The. old orders FE case... dik. Ageldent 158
a? Rights fund. Mrs. E. Piel; C, opposite
3

Birth control; controversy over. 3

Borraths, iS tiud,. Stearate, Blan AI as . 431
Blackburn, Paul

Song of the hesitations; P ............-.000000.... 139
Bly, Robert

The storm swallow : mess the Norwegian

of Henrik Ibsen)? .u-tbtnied tn... 490

Bonn, Western Germany. See Germany,

Western
Borrie, W. D.

Birth control; S . 431
Boston,
waste. G. ps;

also 43; C, opposite 81;
Books

14
E, 142
Censorship; La Gangréne banned by gov-

ernment, in PATS} \ 0.1.0. iN ke 23
Censorship of books and magazines; E 411
Publishing of. See Books section of the

Index

Bowen, Robert O.

McCarthyism at Montana ae cS

opposite 101; see also E, 62; C, opposite

Boxtos Patterson-Johansson fight. R. Kahn;
“ sites aa ih dakraretae ea re : ‘i $4
Brecher, Michael

Key to Indo Chinese tension; S ..0..000........ 183

(July-December, 1959)

Index

(Vol. 189)

PAGE
Breslow, Paul

Finds fault with review of Look back in
anger, motion picture; C, opposite 221;
see also 200

Brick, Allan

Campus rebels find a cause; S ............ 395;
see also C, opposite 429 ‘

Bridges, Harry Renton. See Labor—Union
Brink of life. Reviewed by R. Hatch; MP...... 408
Brown, Robert E

Battle over C. A. Beard; C, opposite 61
Budget, federal. See United States—Finances
Bureaucrats, in praise of. L. Kean; C, oppo-

site 161; see also E, 43
Burke, Kenneth

Hie was. a aincere; etess Bo ociicicscccsosseessavs . 140
Burlage, Robb

Comment on article in issue of May 16,
1959, on The silent faculty; C, by S.
PANTCLOTE cnt cenkicsananesenne cua hchnvameansnactessateasensiemerss 13

Burman, Harold J.
Dilemma of soviet trade; § .................c0008 246
c
CIA. See Central intelligence agency
California and New York artists; exhibitions.

Reviewed iby wh. Porters isccsicevek.issedead oncse 476
Call girls. See Prostitution
Campus rebels. See Education—Colleges
Canadian broadcasting corporation; policy,

and resignations of workers; E. ..........::0:+ 43
Cancer; cigarettes, cancer and the campus.

Gort: |S. --..., 69; see also C, opposite 121
Candidates and issues. See United States ....

Politics
Caribbean seas arms) 193 Fo) oseccciccecsossseccsecsevores> 342
Censorship

Books sand! magazines 06, cccseccesesscecereczsskecsecas 411

Librarians as censors. D. E. Strout; S .... 379

Mail; without warrant. S. Meisler; § ........
207; see also E, 202

Motion pictures. See Motion pictures
Central intelligence agency; easing of secrecy; .

LG Wail at iad I | voces cstotvcoscssncsvtceecscedsanstees 342
Cézanne exhibition. Reviewed by F. Porter;

PRB PSERE crate nee cess avs esa onitsn snc den sniucoisohoadtosvaias 406
Chavez, Carlos; conductor. S. Meisler; M .... 474
Chemicals, use of, against pests. R. L. Rudd;

eee 399; see also C, opposite 457
Chéri. Reviewed by H. Clurman; D ................ 339
Cherniavsky, Nicholas N.

Television quiz show investigation; post
mortem; C, opposite 477; see also Tele-
vision

Chessman, Caryl; analysis of case. G. Marine;

Ss ee 26; see also C, 222; C, opposite

Supreme court denies appeal; E .....0.....000.... 478
Chicago; letters from

Art and science. J. Martin; S occ. 57

Saint Lawrence seaway; visit of Queen
Elizabeth II; Pan-American Olympic
games; J. Martin; Sioa. sh ic 258

Children’s fund, United nations; E . 143
China; trade with; and recognition ‘0

ARLCARILS Ras Fanaa Ss tens aus ad rc -sstmanes anaemia 143
China, communist

And India; history of relations; Tibet ques-
tion. C. P. Mitzgeralds: Sodtzesvachemae 185
Key to tension. M. Brecher; Suetiin te) 83

Fireworks; action against Taiwan, and in
India, Tibet and Laos: We: t tent 322

Lesson of Laos; E ............ 83; see also
E, 143

Porter, C. O.; new war for visa; E .......... 123

Recognition of; and trade with China; E.... 143

Vote on admittance to United nations.

K. HF W. Hilburn; C, with editorial
comment, opposite 409; see also E, 322
China, nationalist; renewed action against,

byred (Ching: Bie. opel 322
Christianity; post-Christian era. G. Vahan-

REAP actor advtalsoad ta stateuiansen Nacwsnks ieee 438
Christmas oratorio; For the time being. Re-

viewed by L. Trimble; M oon. ceticceceesscceasee 496
Cigarettes. See Cancer
“Cinderella, M.”; misuse of credit-card; E.... 222
os problems; E ............ 3; see also issue

of March 7, 1959

Problems, political. M. D. Reagan; S ........
11; see also C, opposite 41

Urban vacuum; ‘deterioration of cities. M.

D. Reagan; S 11

Civil liberties committee,
Freedom
Civil agi. See Freedom
Civil i Russian action to aid United
States. J. O’Brien; C, opposite 457; see
also 382
Civilization; our ephemeral;
paper records. D. Cort; §
Clark, Senator Joseph S.
Voice for, the cities in issue of March 7,
ya AA Re nese ake

emergency. See

deterioration of

397

Clark, Mrs. Septima; work at Highlander
folk school for racial equality, and siege
of school. D. Wakefield;
Clurman, Harold
An evening with 5 ' Montage S cacaspsaceeteson

Review of U. S.

Reviews of plays

All’s well that ends Well Woinasesccsessssesccsaaee
At the drop of a hat .......
Boy friend, the .........
Chéri Sie... 2.
Connection, the .....
Fighting cock, the
Fiorella ro ciccasecatecsocersecr
Five finger exercise .
Gang’s all here, the .
Great god Brown, the
Julius @aesar se cctessscs
Little Mary Sunshine
Loss of roses, a ......... B:
Mark Twain tonight ............ccccscsee
Merry wives of Windsor, at Stratford,

Constecticnt: “Sc oie crt
Miracle worker, the ........
Much ado about nothing
No trifling with love ......
Only in America ............
Silent night, lonely night .
Sound of music, the ...........
Take me along ........
Tenth man, the ......
Three sisters, the ..... -4
Warm peninsula the’. oe) ae ee

Codding, George A., Jr.

High cost of free television; S ........00.........
Coffee ’n confusion club. See Walker, W. A.
Cold war; and the Eisenhower-Khrushchey

talks: Jee eee «

$8 billion stockpile fiasco. E. W. Ziegler; Ss
Cole, Lester
Letter on phrase, “Pursuit of happiness”
in Declaration of Independence; C, oppo-
site 409; see also C, opposite 321
Collection, the. Reviewed by H. Clurman; D
Colleges and universities. See Education
Collins, Frederic W.
Khrushchev and the United States 1960
presidential election; S
Color scheme. H. Norse; P
Colvin, O’Carroll

Alaska’s’ “itty=nitners? °S.i5oohnecsesrccrette sts
Communism and Communists

And art; what Mr. Walter likes. W.

OMS ona ee eccrine ceseneetee mane

Ex-reds; decade of. S. Lens; S ..

Latin American; Fy cia ta pene URN acs ea eakectie

Marxist versus Marxists. E. M. Schwarz-

bart; C, opposite 201

Puerto Rico; hearings in San Juan; E ......
Conferences; Geneva; Soviet Russia the win-

HET. Ho, PASTAS Gh sr 0st -catboo tinny eae es

Summit; pre-summit contretemps; E .
Congress and congressional elections. See

United States—Congress
Conservatives; meeting of protest aguinns

Khrushchev visit. N. E. Parmentel, Jr.; S
Consumer, the. See United States—-Economics
Contests, prize;
Cook, Fre

And the charge of attempt to influence

TENOMaP e, Wo tee en atic eee
Cook, Fred J., and G. Gleason “The Shame of
New York”; special issue, October 31; see
aiso letters, opposite 369, 389, 429; edi-
torials, 409, 458
Copper strike. D. Jenkins; C, opposite 477
Cops. See Police
Cornell university; injuries to students in
fraternity initiations;

orporations. See United States—Economics
Cort, David

Cigarettes, cancer and the campus; § ........

69; see also C, opposite 121

Our ephemeral civilization; Serene of

paper records; ~ ‘

Prisoners: A self-portrait; S .

Saucery and flying saucers; S 331;

see also C, opposite 429: C, opposite 477
Costello, Frank. See New York City; “The

Shame of New York,” part 2
Cousins, the. Reviewed by R. Hatch; MP ..

‘owen, David L.

Ethical drugs and medical ethics. D. L.

Cowen; 479; see also E, 478

Cranberries; pesticide peril. R. L. Rudd;
99; see also C, opposite 457

Credit-card economy; misuse of card by “M.

Cinderella”; E
Creeley, Robert

e rain; Fe.

in a changing society; social values and
the criminal act. T. Morris; Soo...
rganized crime, and disorganized cons;
letter by R. Scott on article in The
Nation of June 27, 1959; C, opposite 41

PAGE

367
79

- 339
» 496

241
434

124
160

166

LOS

410

68
241

188
203

409

243

» 307

486

474

222
363

Prisoners: A self-portrait. D. Cort; § ........
Punishments the luxury of. G. M. Sykes;
Wave. See New York City: “The Shame
of New York”
Crime and punishment, USA. Reviewed by
Mes, latch Seite sceissssvavadeyoossncnsnserssnscoassascoueee
excmmrors puzzles. F. W. Lewis. See back
page:
Cowher: Frank H.

Germany; justification for responsibility for
Nazis stressed in motion pictures; C,
with editorial comment, opposite 241; see
also E, 142 :

Crystal palace forsaken. A. Harrington;
Ss 87; see also C, opposite 121

Cuba; arms for; E
Cullen, Hugh Ray; benefaction to Houston
university, and needs of university; E ......

Davidson, Esther H.

Praise for advertisement, in New York
Times, of The Nation's editorials on
Khrushchev visit; C, opposite 181; C,
opposite 201

Davis, Leon J. ;

Hospital trustees and hospital labor; C,

opposite 81
Davis, William Hammatt
Should labor be coerced?; § ............ 37h
see also E, 369
Declaration of Independence. See Jefferson, T.
Defense, national. See Loyalty; United States
—Defense, national
DeJong, David Cornel
De you remember?! -Py ., iiak...cdt tlie. cdeeet
Democratic party; seeks new faces. G. Sperl-

Wg p JL. 5. Sy cacarasaceonsetescnssexacctesuaaseversstyacteenate asta

“Won't do” Democrats. R. G. Spivak; S....
See also Presidential election of 1960;

United States—Congress ‘
De Sapio, Carmine. See New York City:
“The Shame of New York,” part 3
DesChamps, Grace

Atomic waste; dumping off Boston; § ........
cnc 144; see also 43; C, opposite 81;
E, 142; E, 242

Detroit; discovery of the consumer. R. P.

Weeks; S ...... 151; see also C, opposite 221

Deverill, Ed

Praises The Nation for “The Shame of

New York”’ issue; C, opeasie 369
Diplomas. See Education— olleges
Disarmament. See Armament
Dishonesty in industry. E. W. Micali’ Ss
Do you remember? D. C. DeJong; P
Doctors. See Medicine
Doctors’ dilemma in Nimer case. R. E. Tor-

nell; C, opposite 429; see also New York,

“The Shame of New York,” part 10
Dominican republic; arms for; E

Trujillo; in trouble; E
More Croesus than Caesar. J. I. Jimenes-

Grull6ng) & sccssiscss-ccssaganteenapetevcesnttenis aheaes

Don Juan; apropos of. See Books Section of
the Index

Donmanship. See Books Section of the Index,

“Supermanship”

Drug industry; research fetish; E ........ 478;

see also 3
Rosenthal, M. L.

motisviike /chiseles: Pcs cases ntascissaste

The reviewer to himself; P
Raa es Sanford

Praise for July 4 story page 9; also, com-

ment on editorial on actors; SC opposite
61; see also E, 2; 9

. 410

162

163

363

334

397
414

438
94

260
358

139

466
203

180
358

Index

Rossi, Mario
Algeria at the United nations; § ................
Rudd, Robert L.
Pesticides: The real peril; § ............ 399;
see also C, opposite 457
Rundt, Stefan: edeess on Soviet-American
trade; PCa ERE PRO ee
Russell, Earl, and others
Daring the H-bomb; C, opposite 241
Russia; action to aid United States in Civil
war; C, opposite 457; see also 382
Russia, soviet. See Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics

Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the Chessman case.

E Seiff; C, opposite 321; see also 226;
C, opposite 221

Safety, national. See United States—De-
fense, national

Sahara; poisoning of. I. V. Morris; S ....110;
see also C, opposite 241

Saint Lawrence seaway; letter from Chicago.
J. Martin; S

Salcrest, M. S.
Plight of Algerian refugees; C, opposite 477

San Francisco, California; election; Bah ces

San juan Puerto Rico. See Puerto Rico

Sanchez, George I

On Negro segregation in Texas; C, oppo-

site 341; see also 210
Sartre, Jean-Paul; play, Les Sequéstres
d’ Altona. Reviewed by O. F. Pucciani; S....
Saucers, flying, and saucery. D. Cort; S ........
1; see also C, opposite 429; C, with com-
pire by Cort, opposite 457; C, opposite
Schacht, doctor Hjalmar; financial advice for
Japan and the Philippines; E. ..........c..0.00..
Schiff, Dorothy; articles on J. E. Hoover, in
New York Post; E
Schools. See Education
Schwarzbart, Elias M.

Marxist versus Marxists; pessimism on
arms reduction; C, opposite 201

Science; and art in Chicago. J. Martin; S......

Pseudo; saucery and flying saucers.
Cort; Se 331; see also C, opposite
429; C, with comment by Cort, opposite
457; C, opposite 477

Scott, Rosemary
n R. W. May article on organized crime,
in The Nation of June 27, 1959; C, oppo-
site 41

Sculpture. See Porter, F.

Security, national. See United States—De-

fense, national

Seiff, Eric A

Chessman case, and the Sacco-Vanzetti
case; C, opposite 321; see also 226, E,
222

Sequestrés d’Altona. Reviewed by O. F. Puc-

Clans: DRS ik csisasics eer oe

Sharp, Morris

Humanists at Brown university; C, oppo-
site 241; see also 169

haw,

Advocates veterans’ organization, to be
known as VUW (Veterans of Useless
Wars); C, opposite 21

Shelters. See Atomic bomb
Shelton, Robert

Review of music

Newport, Rhode Island folk festival
Shimkin, Michael B. M.D.

Tobacco and cancer; C, opposite 121; see

also 69
Shore, Wilma

For spacious skies; short story; § ...... . 293

see also C, opposite 61
Show business. See Theater, the
Siegel, Eli

Comment on television “as clear as NBC”;

C, opposite 457
Siekevitz, Philip
Radiation problems; liaison for survival;
Ss 164; see also E, 163; E, 242
Silent night, lonely night. Reviewed by H.
Clurman;
Singer, J. David
reer eat before disarmament;
Sirens, warning; see War
Smith, Allen A.
TV mischief; on nuclear tests; C, opposite
121

Smith, Elizabeth
Shattering the crystal; C, opposite 121; sce
also 43; C, opposite 81; C, opposite 121;

E, 142; 144

Smith, Herbert L.
On the pursuit of happiness; C, opposite
321; see also 190
Smoke and smog; E

391

258

341

492

459
222

492

476

459

(Vol. 189)

Smoking. See Cancer
Snow storm (from the Russian of B. Paster-

nak). By S. Stepanchev; P
Snowfall, the: D; Justices) Ps... dinil....tke ad
Society for International Development—See

International Development
Society, marshmallow. W. Walsh; § ..............
Song of the hesitations. P. Blackburn; | ee
Song “‘plugging’’; payment for “‘payola.” P.

Ackerman, ‘Si (08 eee eae eee
Sorcery. See Saucers
Souls like chisels. M. L. Rosenthal; P ............
Sound of music, the. Reviewed by H. Clur-

man; D
South, the; advertising the south that nobody

PLOWS (3 ES oe c23sasanncspsseipnavcsczangss- eee ee
South Africa. See Union of South Africa
Southern California university; death of un-

dergraduate in fraternity initiation; E ........
Soviet Russia. See Union of soviet socialist

republics
Space exploration. See astronautics
Spain; Franco defended by Representative

(Montoya. eee ee
Sperling, Godfrey, Jr.

Democrats seek new faces; S ....00.. 0...
Spies, peace-time. C. Mackenzie; S
Spivak, Robert G.

Presidential hopefuls for 1960; S

“Won’t do” Democrats; S
Stafford, William

From the gradual grass; P ..............0:00000-

Overhearing; P
Stanton, Frank. See Television
Stassen, Harold; defeat in Philadelphia elec-

tion;
States’ rights bill; eee dealing; E ..
Stealing in industry. . W. Ziegler; S .
Stes Mitchell an on wages and profits;

See also Labor—Strikes
Steele, Paul C.

Montana university smears of L. Fiedler;
C, opposite 141; see also E, 62; C, oppo-
site 101

Stepanchev, Stephen

Snow storm (from the Russian of B. Pas-
tetnak): Pee 2s

The artist (from the Russian of B. Pas-
ternak) ;

Stolle, Jean

Peace-loving Irish? ‘SiS. ee ee ee,

United nations after camp David; S
328; see also E, 322

Storm swallow, the (from the Rongaes of

Henrik. Ibsen) Pei. See ee
Story, short; for spacious skies. W. Shore;

Siem: 9; see also C, opposite 61
Strikes. See Labor
Strout, Donald E.

Are librarians censors?; S 220...
Subversion. See Loyalty
Sullivan, Kevin

“Oathism” on the campus; § ...................:
Summit conference. See Conferences
Sunbright on a city way. H. S. White; P ....
Sweet, Frederick B.

On the quiz-whiz fraud; C, opposite 321;

see also 243
Sykes, Gresham M.
ss luxury of punishment (of cringing

TV. See Television
TVA. See Tennessee valley authority
Taft-Hartley law. See Labor
Take me along. Reviewed by H. Clurman; D
Tammany Hall, New York. See Nation, “The
Shame of New York”
Teachers. See Education
Television
“As clear as NBC.” E. Siegel; C, oppo-
site 457
Films; use of; E . AX, teins a> eee et
Free; high cost of. ‘G. A. Codding, Jr.3S

Freedom on. H. R. Korman; C, opposite 81 :

Kyrie plan. M. O'Connell; S ......... ‘

Mischief; on nuclear tests. A. A. Smith;
C, opposite 121

Quiz- whiz fraud. D, Trumbo; S ........ 243;
see also E, 223; C, opposite 321
Honesty, rigged, of television. A. W.

Langman;

Involvement of children; E. .....
Post Borat N. Cherniavsky; C, oppo:

site 477
ere roposed by F. Stanton; E ....
Uses of a ici RTE TORTI esevtintt
Tennessee palles authority; unlearned lesson.

, Armour; SWE casa 50; see also E, 41

“Yardstick’ principle in purchases; Bits.
41; see also 50; C, opposite 161

Tenth man, the. Reviewed by H. Clurman; D

)
'

(Vol. 189)

Index

(July-December, 1959)

Texas; Jim_Crow in. J. Rechy; S
see also C, opposite 341
Texas, university of; removal of R. Burlage
as editor of Daily Texan. S. Anders, C....
13; see also issue of May 16, 1959
Theater, The

Actors; open season on; E ............. 2; see
also C, opposite 61 —

Mee Li. PUCCINI S....cccneredenneviernsncy 492

Mexican. S. Meislers S wssscssssecsscsesnsenserees 159

Show business is all business. R. Hammer;

Be scl centsph tgp ocd on civn <davnediionatatri ii vewsnsutteres & 172
For r s, see Clurman, H.; Pucciani,
O. F.; Vaughan, S.
Theft in industry. E. W. Ziegler; S .............. 126
Thompson, Wade id
His crusade against college fraternities;
a ies Pee also C, opposite 241;
, 0 ite 3
What + oa Walter likes; S 53
— sisters, the. Reviewed b F nd

321

322
Tillett, Paul

Praise for The Nation
“The Shame of New
site 389 :

Time; Weekly fiction magazine. J. Gardner;
s 65; see also C, opposite 101
Tobacco. See Cancer aia
Tokyo, letter from. See Richie, D.
Tomlinson, Charles

How still the hawk; P
Tornell, R. E.

Nimer case; doctors’ dilemma; C, opposite
429; see also Natiow “The Shame of New
York,” October 29, part 10

Touré, President Séku, of Guinea, and the
BOUIN OF NeRroess FC. .....ci...saveectsscstetessceere
Tours, good-will. See Eisenhower, President

D. D.;_United States—Foreign policy

Trimble, Lester

Reviews of music
RIP RIB EPRI NS, Sree toe ccccraccss tect,
For the time being; Christmas oratorio
Philharmonia Hungarica oo.0.0.00..0..cccccces.

Reviews of recorded music .....

Records of the year; M
Trujillo Molina, Leonidas.
epublic
Trumbo, Dalton

Television quiz fraud; S 243; see

also C, opposite 321; C, opposite 437

special issue on
ork”; C, oppo

456

371

See Dominican

U. S. A. Reviewed by H. Clurman
Unions, labor. See Labor
Union of South Africa; cruelty in racialism.
H. B. Kimmel; C, opposite 41
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
And the United States
Khrushchev visit; E, 61; S, 68; E, 121;
S, 124; E, 141; E, 162; S, 188; E, 241
And the cold war; E =
And the Geneva conference. F.
And the 1960 presidential election
W. Collins; S
Attack on, by Allen-Bradley company; E
Meetings of protest by conservatives, in
New York. N. E. Parmentel, Jr.; S.
Mustn’t miss New Aqueduct race track;
Nation editorials on visit reprinted in
advertisement in New York Times;
C, opposite 81

366

Nixon’s be-tough-with-Russia policy; E....
Smog, international; E
Trade; loss by United States; E
Two-way ice, and the Polaris missile; E

Economics
Trade; dilemma of. H. J. Burman; S......

Khrushchev on disarmament. M.
Schwarzbart; C, opposite 201

United Nations

Admittance of Red China. K. H. W. Hil-
born; C, with editorial comment, oppo-
site 409

Algeria ‘at. “MieRossi :\Sit2t,.2508. eee.

ae Hungary; talk in the United nations;

Children’s fund; E ............c000
Mission, fact-finding, to Laos; E
Peace-loving Irish. J. Stolle; S
Unanimity, in principle, on disarmament;
E .. 321; see also 328
United States
Americanization; have we been American-
ized? O. F. Pucciani; review of L’Améri-
canisme et nous by C. Arnavon ................

And Algeria. See Algeria

And Germany, Western. See Germany,
Western

Congress d :
Congressional elections and foreign pol-

icy;
Democrats in the House; E ............ccc:00000
Killing of civil rights. W. Morse; S. ....
“‘Won’t do” Democrats. R. G. Spivak; S
Defense, national

PAGE

Industrial security program; struck down

by Supreme court in Greene case; E..
Pacific 7 a forward arc advocated; E
Policy for peace and security; E

Duty to achieve respect by other nations; E

Economics

RaP.

Consumer; discovery by Detroit;

eeks; i>,
Corporation profits; E i ce
Dishonesty in industry. E. W. Ziegler; S
Four-day week, inevitable. E. W. Ziegler;

Investment of Am
ern Germany; E ....
Mitchell report on wa
steel; E
Fear of the people.
see also C, opposite 201
inances
Budget; unbalanced; cheers for; E ........
Investment of American capital in West-
erm Germany sles. 6...250oe tiv... tans
Money for armaments, but not for hous-
ing; E
Foreign policy
And the elections of 1960; E oo...
Decision-making at low level; E .
In Latin Americas) E) .......0.0c:00...
Moral standards in. R. P. Wolff; S
Tours, goodwill; E 429; E, 430
Government
Fear of the people. P. Bachrach; S
Keeping the public in ignorance; E
142; see also 144
Honesty and national purpose; E
Politics
Candidates and issues; Eo oo...c.ccccccecseccsese
See also Presidential election of 1960
Society, marshmallow. W. Walsh; S
Softness, national; views of Senator Ken-

nedy; E
States’ rights bill; dangerous dealing; E....
United States supreme court; striking down
of industrial security program in Greene
A EAI Nein, 221s: Reet Me. Se era ea eee
Universities. See Education—Colleges
Urban problems. See Cities

Vacuums, power; E
Vahanian, Gabriel
Past Chinmivamiveras 6S. Peewee ioc. scneecssnanss
Van Doren, Charles; self-revelation in tele-
vision quiz scandal; E
Vance, Thomas
The maiden shrouded as a deer (After an
early Swedish ballad)i# Pe ii..........ccc
Vanzetti-Sacco case, and the Chessman case.
. Seiff; C, opposite 321; see also E,
222; 226; C, opposite 341
Vaughan, Stuart
Review of play
Heartbreales hows enc. scp turwess: cvevsixsi-avvaresvanest
Veterans of Useless Wars; organization advo-
cated. C. Shaw; C, opposite 21
Villa, Pancho; hero in Mexico. J. Bright; C,
opposite 141
Virtuous pagan. A last view of professor
emeritus J. M. M. 1871-1956 in the stacks
_ ,of the college library. A. Laing; P ........
Vision of Saint John the evangelist, by El
Greco. Reviewed by F. Porter; A

Wagner, Mayor Robert F. See Nation, The:
“The Shame of New York”

Walker, William A., and his Coffee ’n con-
fusion club, Washington, District of Colum-

Ding Se VLOIBIOT Sc Ssibeci6. cisccsssjaiy «<ssesngei ears
Walsh, William
Our marshmallow society; S .....ccccccceceeeees

Walter, Representative Francis E.; on art;

wit Mr. Walter likes; by W. Thompson;

aes HE vehsenaee aes

Evils of Reserve officers training corps;
C, opposite 321; see also 249

Cold. See Cold war

ey pee oe P. Lort-Phillips;

Warnings; sirens ; "E
See a eace

23
459
1
22

143
242

241

or 161
- 410

419
148

161
101
111
370

202
438
341

344

338

16
18

99
111

PAGE

Warm peninsula, the. Reviewed by H. Clur-
SUINNY Sih UD ec sere nite tag cuenta anenwa pace otesttowsaencehn 366
Washington, District of Columbia; letter
from; Walker’s Coffee ’n confusion club.
S. Meisler; S
Weddings and banquets (From Paroles, by
J. Prévert); poem by D. Laing
Week, four-day. See Labor
Weeks, Robert P.
Detroit discovers the consumer; S
see also C, opposite 221
Weintroub, Benjamin
Praises The Nation for “The Shame of
New York” issue; C, opposite 369
Werth, Alexander
France and Algeria, and the United, States; ;
. 14
PS 165

99
346

Two faces of France;
Westwood, Richard W.
Praises Nation article on pesticides; C,
opposite 457; see also Pesticides
Wetterman, Neil E.; quarrel with Senator
MOLLE s AIG Peete. Bee sissavbleadonsdeascxiwanhtt.a.ee
White, Hal Saunders
Sunbright on a city way; Poe
White-collar workers. See Labor
White man and Indian. W. Eastlake; S
Widick, B. J.
Anti-labor day: 1959; §
also E, 102
Bice steels DlunhGers"S visas aCe
Michigan’s scapegoat governor; §
Wilbur, Robert
Censure of R. Moses; C, opposite 389; see
also The Nation special issue on ‘The
Shame of New York,” part 6
Wild strawberries. Reviewed by R. Hatch;
Wn AREAS Aa oab ken tases cstv eortp can viaiite ica Ra aie Cinesrcasi 19
Williams, G. Mennen, Michigan’s scapegoat
governor. B. J. Widick; 377
Wilson, Edmund
Donmanship. See Books
Index, “‘Supermanship”
Witt, Harold
ELS ree Oe aah, Neste erase ee ee
Wolff, Robert Paul
Moral standards in foreign policy; S
Workers. See Labor
World-Telegram and Sun, New York. See
New York World-Telegram and Sun
Wright, Frank Lloyd; work of, and the Gug-
genheim museum. W. McQuade; S

477
179
133

wens deste 103; see
391
377

Section of the

216
419

335

¥i

Yes, as a look springs to its face. R. Duncan;
es teat Re Be oe ee Pe ce 200
Young, E. P.
Laos; lesson of; C, opposite 161
Young, Senator Stephen; quarrel with N. E.

Wetterman; E 477

Ziegler, Edward W.
our-day week, inevitable; S oo.ccccccccccn
Nixon’s “spontaneous” welcome home; C,
opposite 101; see also 62
Plus all you can steal; S
Zukofsky, Louis
Peri poietikes; P

BOOK REVIEWS

Books are indexed under author and title
and in some cases under subject.

The following explanatory letters are used
in the index:

B Book review
R Reviewer

we and pardoners; article by R. V.
REEL cnsic coccenaneevnsagepenansacbes ecegenrdapedtorskopnus solemsenie
Adams, William J. B.
On Rovere review of book on McCarthy;
letter, opposite 81; see also 54
Adams-Jefferson letters, the. Edited by L. J.
Cappo: BB. ini. ihcea eae neal
Adventures of a biographer. C. D. Bowen; B

354

Against the law. P. Wildeblood; B ................ 383
Atrica.,.Ey. Schulthess: 3 ).cetes ition cs 450
Alaska, U. S. A. By H. and M. Hilscher; B 491
Albert P. Ryder. L. Goodrich; Bo wcicccuu. 448
Altick, Richard:.G.3cW isl neitibveccnnoe 470

Americanization; review by O. F. Pucciani of
il stcahenanlien et nous by C. Arnavon;

Ancient Indonesian art. A. J. B. Kempers; B 450

Anger of Achilles, the: oa Iliad. Trans-
MACE. By, Re AVON ETD di ssdamets vtererwnibbovessants

(July-December, 1959)

Index

(Vol. 189)

PAGE
Arnavon, Cyrille
L’Américanisme et nous; Bo voces 236
Arts and monuments; fifteen books on. Re-
viewed by L. Kirstein ...........cccsesccreeseeeees 445
Auchincloss, Louis
The pursuit of the prodigal; B .................... 345

Baker, R. S.; article on the RLS factor ...... 6

Baro, Gene; R
Beat Zen, square Zen, & Zen. A. W. Watts;
B

Peed ee eo. hea tie ee athe Raat . 46

Benton, William; on Rovere review of book

on McCarthy; letter, opposite 81; see also

Berry, John

Krishna Fluting; B ...........:--sscesscees sesesees 351
Berry, John; article on notes of a novelist.... 351
Berry, John; Ro occccccsecsesssssesssesecsseeeeneenecseneestsenss 351
Betsky, Seymour; letter of praise for fall

book issue; opposite 409
Biography of Edward Marsh, a. C. Hassall; on

BB hice sedae alg eee ae canesietroneses

Black diaries of R. Casement, the. By P.
Singleton-Gates and M. Girodias; B ....119;
correction, 180
Buiézstein, Meares Ro cccccapennsarsssccnsencenssoecrccsneaperss 137
Bloch, Raymond

Etruscan arts o....0-c--..cueseseess- 446
Body’s cage, the. B. DeMott; B .. E 345
BRO eer tise Reese aces nthe oda sscclccnita. sadnakv encanta 217
Bowen, Catherine Drinker

Adventures of a biographer; B .................. 470
Bramson: Weom's ER sperestes toss casscctres coetevaneecessecxan 136

Brecht, Bertolt; the theatre of. J. Willett; B 137
Bright, John; article on Capouya’s ‘Don
Juan” and Pancho Villa; letter, opposite
141; see also editorial, 62, and 93
Brinton, Crane
A history of western morals; B .................. 74
Brinton, Crane spgitaess...crcs0cs:0slszighessrevdtrasseveass 333
Brockway, George
Letter of praise for fall book issue; oppo-
site 409
Bruckberger, R. L.
Image of America; review by G. Hicks in
Saturday Review; editorial, 22

Bruegel, Rivlin Delevoy; B ...:0:...:c.stsacascachecns 447
Buechner, Frederick
The return of Ansel Gibbs; B ..................... 345
Burns, James MacGregor; Roooococececeeeeceecee 34
Cc

Cameron, Roderick
Shadows from India: An architectural
Pal Presare 2 ES Ws sees ce cineca ouch cosecavponuienstaneeete creer 448
Canaday, John
Mainstreams of modern art. David to

RCASSO SRDS Leica cdelecceedijesvagcen eich Re eee 446
Caponya,, miles Re Wi iosfaeiie.csiseredessheegtites 214
Capouya, Emile

Article on Don Juan ............ 93; see also

editorial, 62; letter, opposite 141
Casement, Roger: The black diaries of. By
P. Singleton-Gates and M. Girodias; B...
119; correction, 180
Conner Rey“ Wisse Reese aersiaattiiities wine aes 54
Article on accusers and pardoners .............. 354
On the art of book publishing; letter, oppo-
site 321; see also Publishers, book, in
Books Section of the Index

Cavemine. Ro UP) Warrens Bi ...c.secsssccosascccsaroos 138
Chapman, John Jay; biography: An Ameri-
cCnmemingd, It, BB. Hovey 3B) oiiccscccccesscecoveyonce 423

Chevigny, Hector; R bs
PE iesreenis ODODIER Nie ee, osc, <Besccsveocsnsuckoxednsnnrsos
Churchill, Allen
The improper bohemians; B
Chute, Marchette
Two gentle men: The lives of George Her-
bert and Robert Herrick; B
Clark, William; R .....
gets Harold; R
omplete Greek tragedies, the. Edited 5
Grene and R. Lateran: B ree
Conarroe, Joel O.
Criticizes writing of article on J. D. Salin-
ger; letter, opposite 409; see also 360
Connell, Evans S., Jr.
ree ELGG Ess ES HiT Nyt a dvticit ved ica ee?
Conviction. Edited by N. Mackenzie; B ........
Cook, Fred J.; R

Cool world, the. W. Miller; Booccccccccn.
Cooper, Lady Diana
The light of common day; Boo...
Critical writings of James Joyce, the. Edited
by E. Mason and R. Ellmann; B ..............

PAGE
Cubism. 'G) Habasque* (Bio 22. ee 447
Curtis, Charles P.

Law aablarge as lifes, Bi o.cicctciecsccs:. thet 217
Curtiss; Wisias Rig ces ixsecccssmastesepsrcassssveceee eccrees 194
Czechoslovakia. Romanesque and Gothic il-

luminated manuscripts. J. Kvet and H.

Swargenala: Bo.ce se. te, freee 446
D
Dangerfield, George; R ............ 54 (see also

letter, opposite 81); 175
Davidson, Basil
The lost cities of Africa; B .............00...0.... 490
Davidson, Eugene
The death and life of Germany: An account
of the American occupation; B............... 155
Davis, Stuart. By E. C. Goossen; B .............. 448
Death and life of Germany, the: An account
of a American occupation. E. Davidson; a
Ae aISeREEIAOR wnat leon t dn anrentacmeonsunivetetacerternxisaster ae 1
Delevoy, Robert L.
Bruewelaay ye eee ee eens ccs eee 447
DeMott, Benjamin
The body’s cage; B ... . 345
DeMott, Benjamin; R 489
Deutsch, Tsaac j

SRT RES Sto cstizaenan Beas Reick eh Ene 333
di Giovanni, Norman Thomas; R .................... 422
Dolci, Danilo
Report from (Palermo; Boiiiicn....toees 422
Don Juan; apropos of. Article by E. Capouya
eee 93; see also editorial, 62; letter,
opposite 141
Dream and reality. L. J. Halle; B .................. 114
Dreher, Capt Ron occu ee eee 334
Dubiuffet; WM Ragone, 7B) its. eee 450

Duncan, Robert
Letters ih Bite cciciicd. cine andere eae ee 257

Selected poems; (B: ....c..04c.conte-tre che. 257
E

Eakins, Thomas. By F. Porter; B ................. 448

Edison. M. Josephson; B. ..........:s.ccesceeccseeseeessone 334

Pie and America, the. A. L. Rowse;
Elliott, George P.; article on realistic fiction 345
Elhott, "George Pas OR tartare et 345
Ellmann, Richard
James Joyce; B .....
Elman, ‘Rieliard se) Ro siiiissessccotseuenssce Beek T1-4
Empire city, the. P. Goodman; B oe
Etruscan artes. Bloch =) B \.. eect. 446

Failure of the ‘“‘new economics,” the: An
analysis of the Keynesian fallacies. H.
HaZiiteepyBs” Gr a. cicasssceseceesesssaseencsnt aan eeaiereens 78
Fall books issue of The Nation, November 14;
letter of praise, opposite 419
Fauvism; Jo Leymaries By icccccccesecss-cpaxathoer-nacvard 447
Ferber (sculptor). E. C. Goossen; B .............. 450
Festinger, Leon, and associates; book, “‘When
prophecy fails.”” Letter by P. E. Killinger,
opposite 429
Fiction, realistic; article by G. P. Elliott .... 345
“Why read novels’’; article by D. Jacobson 343
Ford, Ford Maddox

The .zovdreoldier sy 3b) tite.jntecsanetessormntenttvcres ood
Forster, Edward Morgan

A passage ito India’. Bo. csietasteac-or Sreshins . 351
France: A modern history. A. Guérard; B.... 15
Bretdel Brass kta, gss.scnsacs: cians tear anise 95

Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910. The first golden

age.) GG Mansons. BB ossc.c5 stointe-csrecoion 448
Frost, Robert; letter by W. Snow, on Travel-
ing and “‘the dark side of Frost’; see also
article by M. L. Rosenthal in issue of
June 20, 1959
G
Gangrene, la; banned by government in
France; article by R. N. Murdock ............ 23
Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison
vir R: A biography with illustrations; 5
aoe PEIME oa Ths ahaa a aie seSb daa veasuvecgs ticbigesocee te 451
Ginzburg, Benjamin
Rededication to freedom; B .. 14

Girodias, Maurice, and P. Singleton-Gates
The black diaries of R. Casement; B ....119;
correction, 180
Goldwater, R.
Hare (sctiptor) § Bo v.ccciheesisesoed vw» 450
Good soldier, the. F. M. Ford; B
Goodbye, Columbus. P. Roth; B

PAGE
Goodman, Paul
Thevempire city: UB) Kk. 2). eid aes 16
Goodrich, Lloyd
Albert: P) Rydergeiay.sn..22.\ii- tks ee 448
Winslow: Homer sii 3.iti assis these 448
Goossen, E. C.
Ferber” (scultpor) se 8 et oa.. ie. ae 450
Stuart. Davies, “Bi ig. testes teense 448

Graves, Robert
Translation of the Iliad of Homer: The
anger"of Achilles; (5>..2.4..4.Ateeb ton... 424
Great prince died, the. B. Wolfe; B . wa
Greek painting. M. Robertson; B ....

Greene, David H.; R ............ hs woe, DOS
Gregory, Horace; R37. nse 402
Guérard, Albert

France: A modern history; B .................... 15

H
Habasque, Guy

MC GDIS IE ESE acceaceeves.ccccachesontsctes davecerisesexts AeeevLa 447
Halle, Louis J.

Dream and reality: Whoo oc. .cceesctacsccrasemmaavesas . 114
Hare (sculptor). R. Goldwater; B ........0.0.... 450
Harris, Mark

Wake. tp; stupid sD o. iu..ccncicsantaneestadescanav ant 345
Hassall, Christopher

A biography of Edward Marsh; B ............... 402
Batch: "Robetts situ ccc oei otk pee. ctee ee 138, 235

Hazlitt, Henry
The failure of the ‘‘new economics”: An

analysis of the Keynesian fallacies; B... 76
Heart’s needle. W. D. Snodgrass; B ............ 257
Herbert, George, and Robert Herrick: The

lives of two gentle men. M. Chute; B ......... 470
Herman, BdwarduS. 3 (Ric. acctcesas scastetcnameeens 8

Herrick, Robert, and George Herbert: The

lives of two gentle men. M. Chute; B ........ 270
Hess, Thomas B.
Willem, des Kooning’ Bis. 1st... csicccatiearcassoaths 448

Hicks, Granville. See Bruckberger, R. L.
Hilscher, Herb and Miriam
Alaska, U. S. A.;
History of western morals, a. C. Brinton; B 74
1

Holy barbarians, the. L. Upton; B ............ 15
Homer, Winslow. L. Goodrich; B .................... 448
Hunter, Floyd

Top leadership UW. 'S. Aut Bo ce cancgties-anah 136
Hunter, Sam

Mionidrianis +B. iccczest->cswdeswassctusveceussec Pt en 447
Bruegel. R. L. Delévoys B. .....:::... zusteuavtene seven 447

Iliad of Homer. Translation by R. Graves;
The anger of Achilless BB i.cccccsccseccsccescestnes 424

Image: The journal of photography and mo-
tion pictures; B

Image of America. By R. L. Bruckeberger;
reviewed by G. Hicks in Saturday Review;

Editorial 2.2.) if Siedethenp eneeeetti teers teste 22
Improper bohemians, the. A. Churchill; B.... 114
In the days of McKinley. M. Leech; B ........ 403

J
Jackson, Pollock. By F. O’Hara; B .............. 448
Jacobson, Donisy Rath nattpid f.-cases ater

Article on “Why read novels?”
James Joyce. R. Ellmann; B .............. ae
Japan; four books vormgB iic.tetevetate a cccintes.
Japan: Ancient Buddhist paintings. UNESCO

world art series; B
Japanese prints. From the early masters to

the modern. J. A. Michener; B ............00000 44
Jefferson-Adams letters. Edited by L. J. Cap-
MOE cas soot ata hsh= «0x0 a0) (uaiaradena natiamce SAREE 489
John Jay Chapman: An American mind. R.
CUES SOL EAL .'24 tr disc oness s=funa caer casghs Sa 423
Josephson, Matthew
SB siete nech said nao dbevcaieaeabatcen’ tir iaveiaannaes 334
Joyce, James
Critical writings. Edited by E. Mason and
RooMinann © . FB. csxcesassacctavcsetss sleet 472
forces panes. R. -Ellmasins VB) .5.:..aapiiante 234
ung, Carl; article in book, The meaning of

death; letter, opposite 477, by G. R. Wood-
ruff; see also letters qppesite 429, and
457 (with comment by D. Cort)

Kempers, A. J. Bernet
Ancient Indonesian art; Boo... 450
Killinger, Paul E,
On “When prophecy fails,” book by L,
Festinger and associates; letter, opposite
429; see also 331

SSS OSS Sere See

— (Vol. 189)

Index

(July-December, 1959)

Kimball, Fiske, and the Philadelphia museum
: Triumph on Fairmount. G. and M.
Roberts;
Kindly contagion, a. W. Toman; B
Kings, lords, and commons. An anthology
from the Irish. Translated by F. O’Connor;
B

Kirstein, Lincoln
Arts and monuments; books on; reviews ...
Hut FOS Ste also letter, opposite 341;
R, 445
Kooning, Willem de. T. B. Hess; B
Krikorian, Y R
Krishna Fluting. j. Berry; B
Kubie, Lawrence S.
Neurotic distortion of the creative process;
B

Kvet, Jan, and H. Swarzenski
Czechoslovakia. Romanesque and Gothic il-
luminated manuscripts;

L
MMRTOHEL, VVMICET SR iiss. sesncrerssenvscesesscsorncenenricnre
Laing, Alexander; Roun... eceecsececensseeecnseeneess
Lassaigne, Jacques
PMNS EN pes uacisnnsccecrecvonsavssessrosssssseoreayssiienss¥ine
Lassaw (sculptor). I. Sandler; B
RR ETEE SNUG cays cncinsvansisncvascovsandbesscapore

Law as large as life. C. P. Curtis; B
Leech, Margaret

In the days of McKinley; B
Letters. R. Duncan;

vin, Harry

The question of Hamlet; B
Leymarie, Jean

Fauvism;
Life studies. R. Lowell; B
Light of common day, the. Lady D. Cooper; B
aey, Vachell; biography of. E. Ruggles;

Living and the dead, the: A study of the sym-
bolic life of Americans. W. L .Warner; B
Lost cities of Africa, the. B. Davidson; B ....

Magic barrel, the. B. Malamud; B
Mainstreams of modern art. David to Picasso.
J. Canaday; B
Malamud, Bernard
The magic barrel;

Manchester, ia
A Rockefeller family portrait,
John D. to Nelson; B
Manson, Grant Carpenter
Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The first
golden age; B
Marsh, Edward; biography of. C. Hassall; B
Matisse. Le Lassaigne; B
Matlack, Ralph E. Article on visit with B.
ae NEI ecu te cyinc a czann du assvesasvenatieraeracsenes
Mazo, Earl
Richard Nixon: A political and personal
portrait; B
eetly, Senator Joe. By R. H. Rovere;
Bech: 54; see also letters, opposite 81
MeCarthy, Mary

The stones of Florence; B
McKinley, William; biography, In the days

of ee ty by M. Leech;

McLoughlin, W. R
Meaning of death, ties containing an article
by C. Jung; letter, opposite 477; see also
331; letter, pre 429; letter, with

comment by D. Cort, opposite 457
Memo to a college trustee. A report on finan-
cial and structural problems of the liberal
college. B. Ruml;
Mercier, Vivian; R
Mermaid madonna, the. S. Myrivillis. Trans-
lated by A. Rick;
Merwin, W. S.; R

opposite 457
Meyerhoff, Hans; R
Michener, James A.

Japanese prints. From the early masters to
the modern; B
Miller, Warren
The cool era B
Mills, C. Wrigh

The sociological imagination; B
Mishima,

The temple . a“ coes
duction by N. W. Ross;
also letter, with reply by cae T
Kirstein, opposite 341
Mondrian. S, Hunter: B ....::caeeieanee
ee aga arts: fifteen books on. Re-
iced Kirstein

cna dee ES

a. From

3 article on

Connell JusspBews.s..:. ®
banning of

fr PAGE

345
446
345

156

448
402
447

134

450

403
35

176
472

386

446
56
55

448

La Gangréne in Paris
Myrivillis, Stratis
The mermaid madonna. Translated by A.

Rick 55, Th ATR cates... SMa 386
N
Nation, The, contributors; books by .............. 451
Neurotic distortion of the creative process.
Bie i RE ED sc aceccnvs tech on rs¥oeetocss Wet racit te 75
Dercolly Allard yces RR cicdecceuc tenes. Bes. 008v. ae 36

Nixon, Richard: A_ political and _ personal
portrait. E. Mazo; B
Notes of a novelist; article by J. Berry ........ 351
Notes of a soviet doctor. G. S. Pondoev; B 236
Novels; why read them?; article by D. Jacob-
son 342

Observations. Photographs by R. Avedon.
Comments by T. Capote; B 447
oe Donat; R

O’Hara, Frank

SEL MCMINYRI ASLAN VED | eet co oes cua sacs sivivscvesscouee 448
Our house. O. L. Wright; Roe cco etc 448
aS

Painter, George D.
Proust: The early years; B_ ...........c:ccsos 194

Paperbacks; reviewed by R. M.

NV CREEIDENM We. siniris Voresncartrier eee tndeaee 120, 405, 453
Passage to India, a. E. M. Forster; B 351
Pasternak, Boris; article on visit with

R. E. Matlack 134
Peyre, Henri; R . 15
Pickett’s charge: A

attack at Gettysburg. G. tthe B .... 382
Poets and publishers; ae by L. Zimpel

ants 178; see also letter, opposite 201
Pollock, Tee, We Otlarae 8) 4c ccdeee 448
Pondoev, G. S.

Notes of a soviet doctor; B oo... 236
Porter, Fairfield

Thomas Eidos; EE eee ne Acces tas ee 448
Potter, Stephen

Supermanship, or How to continue to stay

top without actually falling apart; B ...... 174
Presses, small (book publishers). See, Books

—Publishers
Prophet unarmed, the: Trotsky: 1921-1929.

ig PV SES CES MEY re eee ca canse essa 333
Proust: The early years. G. D. Painter; B.... 194
Publishers of books, and publishing

Art of publishing books. E. Capouya ........

254; see also letter, opposite 321
Jargon Press, and other small presses;
letter, by J. Williams, opposite 201; see
also 178
Pucctaar, Oreste ies: Re Fee0. 5 ecccsscdeec.--csesnseens 236
Pursuit of the prodigal, the. L. Auchincloss;
Sere tear Reon ice eR cia vieeven sarees 345
Q
Question of Hamlet, the. H. Levin; B ............ 36
R
RLS factor, the; article by R. S. Baker ...... 363
Ragon, Michel

TART ED. SaceveuvcsdcsesbecesUeni rots cbddivis-oosecvestbeoneeee 450
Real gardens for real toads; article by G. P.

USL State Sates tanec oe vnc ceca cto ptenwiorrssescen>-v-1d.cgaeeainn 345

Realistic fiction; article by G. P. Elliott ........ 345
Rededication to freedom. B. Ginzburg; B .... 14
Report from Palermo. D. Dolci; B 422
Return of Ansel Gibbs, the. F. Buechner; B 345
Rexroth, Kenneth; R .............. 156, 404, 442, 490
Richard Nixon: A spies and personal por-

RUE eet CEP NS soars cs semen chiuness novcsuacoovueteoueny 34
Roberts, George and Mary
Triumph on Paicsiounty Fiske Kimball and
the Philadelphia museum of art; B ...... 448
Robertson, Martin
Roreelc: aetitartyy s\008 sucscinevins dexstortevnsaoninssodoeaynss 445
Rochefort, eae
Warrior’s BEBE BS. vs ressanyarsaseestaitees sce bdmiseinrrees 216
ee family a. Se John D.
Nelson. By ea CREED: ss.cdpmosee 156
Rolph, Ee PAIS IRs este ne een eayPrthy tne a<coecepeet 383

Rome I love, the. Photographs P. Molin-
ard; B yd 44

PAGE

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; book, The Roose-
velt revolution, by M. Einaudi; B
Rosenberg, Harold

The tradition of the new; B .............ecu. 215
Rosenuuale Mir Les Roe eee ae: 154, 257
See also Snow, W., in Books Section of

the Index
Ross, Nancy Wilson; writer of introduction
to “The temple of ‘the golden pavilion,” by
YY. Mishima; Bi 72... 76; see also letter,
with reply by L. Kirstein, reviewer;
opposite page 341
Roth, Philip
Goodbye; \Colatathuss (Bi ot. island 345
Rovere, Richard H
Senator Joe McCarthy 0B) 0.7: 54; see

also letter, opposite 81

Jit pt BY LOE Fe Mt (GR S ainatedee, ene eueres a meas eS WO ey 16
Rowse, A. ue

The Elizabethans and America; B ............ 470
Ruggles, Eleanor

The west-going heart; B ..........c:ccsccsseeccreceeress 404

Ruml, Beardsley
Memo to a college trustee; A report on
financial and structural problems of the
liberal college; B ...........

he 176
Ryder, Albert P. By L. Goodrich; Bo

. 448

Salinger industry, the; article by G. Steiner
360; writing of article criticized. j.O

Conarroe; letter, opposite 409
Samuels, Ernest; [Red Aa eee eer ere tome 423
Sandler, I.
etssa we CSCulptor ier. ccbcccccsstessishtoisepptantnd ess 450

Saturday Review on Bruckberger’s Image of
America; editorial
Schulthess, Emil
Africa; B
Selected poems. R. Duncan; B
Senator Joe McCarthy, R. H. Rovere; B
54; see also letters, opposite 81
Shadows from India: An architectural album.
R. Cameron; B
Silver, George A.; R
Singleton-Gates, Peter, and M. Girodias
The black diaries of Roger Casement; B
eas 119; correction, 180
Snodgrass, W. D.
Heart’s needle; B
Snow, Wilbert
On “the dark side of Frost’; letter, oppo-
site 121; see also article by "M. Rosen-
thal in issue of June 20, 1959
Sociological imagination, the. Cc. Ww. Mills; B 55
Sprotter Wa) s) ekas ee een 1 eaieairhy saeeiietia ces 55
Steiner, George; article on “the Salinger in-
dustry” 360; writing of article
criticized in letter, ‘opposite 401
Steiner, George; R
Stern, Philip Van Doren
They were there: The Civil War in action

Be acenss cuseeeperaseanz <tsvetinacys teen uenmenentasiry 450
. 257

448
236

257

424

as seen by its combat artists; B : 450
Stevenson, Robert Louis factor; article by
Re yo Ro Air Seether ae soccer, caren pc 364

Stewart, George R.

Pickett’s charge: A microhistory of the
final attack at Gettysburg; B
Stones of Florence, the. M. McCarthy; B
Stuart Davis. By E. C. Goossen; B

Sulzberger, Cyrus L.
What’s wrong with U. S. foreign policy; B
Supermanship, or How to continues to stay
top without actually falling apart. S. Pot-

382
448

SEE iES: 5. cece tieett coe edadees aeeetaesetmee sinensis 174
Suzuki, Daisetz T.
Zen and Japanese culture; B ...........0000000000.. 76

Swarzenski, Hanns, and J. Kvet
Czechoslovakia. Romanesque and Gothic il-

luminated manuscripts; B 446

a.
Temple of the golden pavilion, the. Y. Mish-

LN) BS eivcayr 76; see also letter, opposite
341
Theatre of Bertolt Brecht, the. J. Willett; B 137
Theology of culture. P. Tillich; edited by
R. C. Kimball y, Bo s.csscisecconvcsossersnesespsontiviteveey 117
They were there: The Civil War in action
by — by its combat artists. P. Van D.
teers Bb so ieseveses ovaczivacstsvecpyceneenaseamnecntocasenesy 450
Tillich, Paul
Theology of culture. Edited by R. C. Kim-
BANDS BD secicsosceecsvcsesssesveasshvennvacouprevednavenrarvenvens 117
Tolstoi, ‘Count Leo
War and peace; B ....csssssssssncerereevencoesneseeees 343
Toman, Walter
A kindly contagion; B .........::ccccceee ee 235
Top leadership S. By A. F. Hunter; B_. 136
Tragedy ee
° rican dip’ y ‘
iliiams; Bi 6 SC CF. devstatite Dv beetecssaltcte 114

(Vol. 189) Index (July-December, 1959)

PAGE PAGE PAGE
uate “ ” Willett, John
Trilling, Lionel, on the ‘‘dark side” of R. WwW Heltiieatrelot ae Brecht: B 137
Frost; letter by W. Snow, opposite 121 Waite, Robert G. Lag R sscssssesssesssssscssesseresser i mee Taian oe Tea
Triumph on Fairmount: Fiske Kimball and Wake up, stupid. M. Harris; B .. 345 andwather suinlle cxetees? letter, neppoeiie
the Philadelphia museum of art. G. and M. Wakefield Wai hanrs Rc; cite scospetse-veacanosccteipestuavie scones 56 2iliesaeesalaowl aa z ¥
BRGE IS 8 sn-nesectivovansonestsuiis soonnnnnnnannonancunacees 448 Wallace, Robert M. Williams, William Appleman
Trotsky, Leon; “The great prince died,” by Reviews of paperbacks | ..120, 405, o The tragedy of American diplomacy; B .... 114
Bee Webs BB aise cup shennan ss chiccs aes vv ontwamerenees 345 War and peace. L. Tolstoi; B ..............0.-:00- Wilson, Edmund?! Ro ..s.:.cc0:-.:ccaneraceh aes 174
Trotsky: 1921-1929: “The prophet unarmed.” Warner, W. Lloyd Winslow Homer. L. Goodrich; B ................-..- 448
Te Doettnch se By cicccnstkcscan Soest oahedtere 333 The living and the dead; A study of the Wolfe, Bernard
Two gentle men: The lives of George ores symbolic life of Americans; B ................ 35 The great prince died; Bo ooeccccccsccccsecssssesseom 345
and Robert Herrick. By M. Chute; B ........ 470 Warren, Robert Penn Woodruff, George R.; letter on book, The
The Cave; Bo o.nc.ccccscrsscssrsssssssesscsesnecenssessessnsesase 138 meaning of death, containing an article
Warrior’s rest. C. Rochefort; Bo .......:c00 216 y C. Jung, opposite 477; see also 331;
U Watts, Alan W. fetter, opposite 429; letter, with comment
Beat Zen, square Zen, & Zen; B .......... oe 76 Cort, opposite 457
Upton, Lawrence West-going heart, the; biography of V. Lind- Wri oy Ea Lloyd. Our house, by O. L.
The holy barbarians; B .................c:008 ens Say. By E. Ruggles; B ....-:.-ssseesvecsesseenseeses 404 right; sagnaacsadatdbub thon a dectt glossy eh Raeeeo eee 448
What’s wrong with U. S. foreign policy. C. L. Wright, ionis Bie Retsciucsit eee 471
SilzbercensyB, irn-cerenarreremaenas Seen? 114 Wright? Olgivanna Lloyd
When prophecy fails. By L. Festinger and Our houses iB. 2x. sn ecco eee 448
iv associates; letter by P. E. Killinger, oppo-
; : site 429
Vahanian, Gabriel; Roo... eee tseeeente 117 Whitehead’s American essays in social philo- Z
Versailles I love, the. Photographs by R. sophy. Edited by A. H. John; B ...........00....- 384 Zen and Japanese culture. D. T. Suzuki; B 76
Descharnes; Boron ccs.ccesceticeesnnecsssenrecsecnestatenes 448 Wildeblood, Peter Zimpel, Lloyd; article on the publication of
Victoria R. A biography with illustrations. Against the law; B .................. stakes code apTes poetry ........ 178; see also letter, opposite
eran AG AGrernsbermr (Bits ts cc acc, saie 451 Willem de Kooning. T. B. Hess; page 201

THE NATION ASSOCIATES, Inc. E> 312 333 SIXTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 14

(CHE eC

' pt a 4
LP cea

WHY HOSPITALS EXPLOIT LABOR

by George Kirstein

kKAhhkkek KRaARKKAK

THE GLORIOUS FOURTH:

FOR SPACIOUS SKIES
A Short Story by Wilma Shore

‘REDEDICATION TO FREEDOM’
Reviewed by Fred J. Cook

LETTERS

Demerits of Merit Pay

Dear Sirs: It is astonishing that in his
article, “Merit Pay for Teachers,” in the
June 13 issue, Mr. W. L. Gragg omits
the significant fact that the merit-pay
system has been abandoned in hundreds
of communities which have tried it at
one time or another during the past forty
, years.

In the latter 1920s and early 1930s,
many communities adopted the system,
le so that by 1936, 25 per cent of all cities
of over 100,000 in the United States had
1h it in some form. However, by 1946 the
number had dropped to 6 per cent. Be-
| tween 1953 and 1958, thirty-six school
districts in New York State alone drop-

ped the merit system.
. Various combinations of the following
F reasons are the basis of the opposition

a of teachers:
ie 1. Merit ratings would open the way
li : for political, religious and other pres-

sures in favor of those who have special
“connections.”

2. Merit ratings would create un-
healthy rivalry among the teachers, to
the detriment of the unity and coopera-
tion which is indispensable for an effi-
cient faculty. A teacher who had devel-
oped successful teaching devices or
techniques might understandably be re-
luctant to share them with his colleagues
if an advance in salary depended on
demonstrations of “superiority.”

3. Merit ratings would also create
tension between supervisors and teachers.
al The power to control teachers’ salaries
is distasteful to fair and conscientious
supervisors, and dangerous in the hands
of domineering and dictatorial ones.

4. In the eyes of the general public,

there would be two classifications of
teachers: “superior” and “inferior.”
While technically a teacher who did not
receive the “superior” rating might ac-
tually be “average” rather than “in-
ferior,’ the public would draw a dif-
_ ferent conclusion.
_ 9. Parents would exert pressure to
a try to get their children placed in the
classes of the “superior” teachers.
— Children, too, would in many cases be
” aware of the failure of certain teachers
to achieve the “superior” classification,
with possible harmful effects on dis-
line and the general administration
of classes.

6. apacbers would tend to be overly

ing any views on professional or
; ‘matters which they believe might
fagonize their supervisors, who could

retaliate by keeping the teacher at a
low salary level.

7. Reasonably objective standards for
classifying teachers are difficult, if not
impossible, to establish. Who could
presume to grade a teacher’s success in
developing pupils’ character, ethical
standards, democratic -social attitudes,
intellectual curiosity and cultural values?

8. Once higher salaries are introduced
for meritorious service, the public gets
the impression that the maximum
“merit” salaries are the actual salaries
of all teachers, or at any rate, of those
worthy of their hire, and so public sup-
port for an adequate basic salary sched-
ule becomes more difficult to enlist.

9. The progress of a teacher toward
attainment of maximum salary should
be regarded, not as a reward for “supe-
rior” service, but rather as the normal
recompense for satisfactory service, im-
proved by experience.

10. A “superior” teacher transferring
to another school might find himself sud-
denly downgraded because of a dif-
ferent educational outlook on the part
of the principal.

Mr. Gragg dismisses these reasons for
the almost unanimous opposition of
teachers to “merit” pay as based on
theoretical assumptions. He is guilty of
the most flagrant example of this very
error in lightly brushing off the “as-
sumption” that a “merit” scale means
keeping other salaries low. This is not
an assumption but a fact, and if Ithaca
is an exception (which is doubtful, in
view of its basic maximum salary of
only $6,000), the few exceptions that
may perhaps be found are a long way
from disproving our contention.

Another disturbing note in Mr.
Gragg’s article was his recurrent posing
of the teachers against the taxpayer —
the latter not in quotation marks, either.
This sharp dichotomy is strange, since
we know of no tax from which teachers
are exempt.

The fundamental solution for the
problems of teacher personnel cannot
be by-passed. It still lies in raising the
salary scales of all teachers to a decent,
professional level.

ABRAHAM LEDERMAN
President, Teachers Union of N.Y.C.

New York City

AEC’s Own Data

Dear Sirs: 1 am pleased that you were
able to cite my paper on fallout ia
North Dakota in your editorial com-
ments for the issue of June 20. How-
ever, | should correct a serious error iit
your discussion. You state that I have
been measuring fallout intensities here,

: ; Wr.

but actually I simply obtained the raw
data as measured by the AEC and cor-
related these data with data from hie
government agencies. I am not a radio-
biologist, and have not made any meas-
urements of radioactivity myself.

I think the fact that the data I used
came from the AEC’s laboratory makes
the case for concern about fallout in
this area doubly convincing. My work

(Continued on page 13)

‘ (

In This Issue ,
EDITORIALS

1'e ie

nuc

ARTICLES ma

3 '® Why Hospitals Exploit Labor i

by GEORGE KIRSTEIN
Crime in a Changing Society:
Social Values and the Criminal
Act

by TERENCE MORRIS
For Spacious Skies (a Short
Story)

by WILMA SHORE
The Urban Vacuum

6 @

9'@

11 'e

by MICHAEL D. REAGAN
BOOKS AND THE ARTS
14 ‘@ A Nation of Tabby Cats :
‘by FRED J. COOK fo
15 '@ Impartial with Passion
by HENRI PRHYRE Ne
16 '@ Antic Beyond Kafka i
by EARL H. ROVIT
16 '@ Virtuous Pagan (poem) z
by ALEXANDER LAING
18 ‘@ Art
by FAIRFIELD PORTER
19 '@ Films

by ROBERT HATCH

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 20)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

George G. Kirstein, Publisher
Carey McWilliams, HBditor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing WPditor
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, European
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager

The Nation, July 4, 1959. Vol. 189, No. 1
The Nation, published weekly (except for omis- —
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i i, \ |, Same

Coa

EW YORK, SATURDAY, JULY 4, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 1

NATION

EDITORIALS

Deadlines to Remember

On July 1 and 2, and possibly on July 13, Senator
John O. Pastore, as chairman of a subcommittee of
the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was sched-
uled to hold hearings on the agreements under which
nuclear-weapons information and material would be
transferred to seven countries: West Germany, Greece,
Turkey, the Netherlands, France, Canada and Great
Britain. Under the agreements, West Germany, Greece,
urkey and the Netherlands (the British, French and
Canadian agreements contain variable provisions) will
receive information on the use of atomic weapons, de-
fense plans, development of delivery systems capable
of carrying atomic weapons, and evaluation of the
capability of potential enemies in the use of atomic
eapons; they will also receive non-nuclear parts of
atomic-weapons systems. The justification advanced
for the agreements is, of course, that the actual nuclear
arheads will still be retained by American forces. But
this reasoning 1s specious on two counts. In the first
place, the United States must continue to supply this
material and information until both parties voluntarily
terminate the agreements (the United States can end
the transfers unilaterally only when the NATO treaty
expires). In the second place, it is hard to imagine that,
say, West Germany will long be denied possession of
the actual warheads once the agreements go into effect

and Bonn’s military forces have been given the neces-
Sary tactical training.

It should be pointed out that the agreements go into
effect within sixty days unless both the Senate and
the House vote specifically to reject them within that
period. The deadlines are rapidly approaching; for
example, the deadline on the British and French agree-
ents is July 18; on the West German, Canadian,
urkish and Dutch agreements July 235 on the Glavek
agreement August 10.

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance
of the pending hearings, yet they have gotten so little
publicity that the average American might never know
that they had been scheduled, much less what is at
stake. If Congress fails to reject the agreements, the
effect will be to intensify existing tensions. Back in
oe George Kennan pointed out to the Senate

committee on Disarmament that while it is true

that we can in effect say to the Russians that the nu-
clear warheads are going to remain under our control
despite the agreements, the Kremlin will “sort of smile
when they hear us say that; they think it is a thing
which is easily evaded or changed at the last moment.
They feel that when the chips are down, the Germans
will have then little trouble getting these weapons. . . .”
And insofar as the West German agreement in particular

is concerned, this is the crux of the matter.

For Peace and Security

The Advisory Council of the. Democratic National
Committee has issued a manifesto subtitled “Foreign
and Military Policy for Peace and Security.” The gist
of the document is that the country stands naked before
its enemies and must spend an additional $7.5 billion
annually, raising the military budget from about $41
billion to $48.5, Continued over the next five years
(five times $48.5 equals $242 billion) this will give us
a fighting chance for survival. The manifesto is copi-
ously illustrated with cartoons showing budget-besotted
Republicans sabotaging the national defense, while the
Advisory. Council catalogs the mortal perils which. sur-
round us. It pictures Russian missiles raining down on
our aircraft and missile bases, crippling our capacity to
retaliate “much as a knight in armor was rendered
powerless when he was knocked off his horse and could
not get to his feet again.” It declares that as a result of
the Administration’s “jaundiced reassessment,” our
Army, Navy and Air Force are so under-strength
personnel and so hamstrung by obsolescent equipment
that the Russians can overwhelm us on land and sea, as
well as in the air, even without resorting to nuclear
weapons. There follow citations from Nathan (“Git
Thar Fustest”) Forrest, Stonewall Jackson, Guderian,
Hannibal and the Mongols. After much more of this
(the Advisory Council gives you a lot for your ten

To Nation Subscribers

During July and August, The Nation
will appear on alternate weeks only. The
next issue will be published July 18. The
normal weekly printing achathate will be
resumed with the first September issue.

a cents), remedies are proposed: enlargement of the Army
by 225,000 men; restoration of the Marine Corps to
200,000-man strength and “futurization” of its weapons;
doubling the number of Atlases and Titan ICBMs,
“hardening” strategic Air Command bases and—a novel
idea reminiscent of the knight on horseback—rehabili-
tating the abandoned unmanned aircraft, Snark and
Regulus II, as “gap-fillers.”

The manifesto might seem to foreshadow an electoral
contest in which the Democrats will vie with the Re-
Pi publicans in frightening the voters out. of their wits.
‘This may indeed become the pattern of the campaign:

the foreign peril is always the line of Jeast resistance.

But it does not look that way at the moment. Although

the Advisory Council has an impressive roster, in¢lud-

4 ing Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman, Dean Acheson,
Herbert H. Lehman and Averell Harriman, nobody in
Congress pays much attention to it. Its Congressional
members, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and Senator
Estes Kefauver, are engaged in activities which run
counter to the council’s trend; Senator Humphrey in
particular gives every evidence of realizing that Amer-
ica’s peril (and Russia’s) can be mitigated only by a
recognition of nuclear and missile realities and a gradual
lessening of tension by such measures as an agreement
to ban nuclear testing. As for the Republicans, Senator
Keating, scarcely an apostle of disarmament, said that
the council’s report practically makes one see the Rus-
sian troops marching up Pennsylvania Avenue, but he
didn’t go for the extra $7.5 billion at all, while Senator
Goldwater alluded to the “absurdity of the Democratic
armchair generals and admirals, sitting in some hotel in

_ downtown Washington . . . trying to tell the Republi-
cans how to prepare the nation’s defenses. . . .” While
a slight aroma of partisanship clings to these rejoinders,
for once the Messrs. Keating and Goldwater appear to
make sense.

a mam
PEAT a Oe

Armaments, Yes; Housing, No

Where armaments are concerned, the Democrats
press on the Administration money which it hasn’t
asked for and does not intend to use. But when it
comes to stemming the conversion of our cities into
residential and industrial slums, economy is the watch-
- _ word. Senator Joseph S. Clark (D.-Pa.) has pointed
*y out that the Senate version of the housing bill provided
RY for an expenditure of $2.1 billion for urban renewal over
OW a six-year period, while the House version authorized
$1.5 billion over three years. In the Senate-House con-
py ference held to reconcile differences, the program was
\ cut down to two years, with $500 million to be spent
nt 1 the first year and $400 million in the second. Senator
Cl: ark gave it as his opinion that the Democratic Party
ea Beret s strategy of cutting spending bills to make
Sig ‘yeto-proof” was the surest way of blurring the

Res RY

‘a 1 ih ie * feet 2 es

”

party’s identted ite onfusing mae voters and ng
1960 election. “I suggest,” he said, “that if the ‘peop
had wanted the Republican Preident™ to write 0

legislation, or set the bounds and limits within whieh
we must ee it, they would have elected a Conse
of this party.”

Open Season on Actors

A few weeks ago a British newspaperman asked
Fredric March whether, at his age, he still considered —
himself a promising actor. Later, when Anthony Quinn oh
appeared at London Airport to meet his wife and daugh= _
ter, some Fleet Street bad boy asked Mrs. Quinn what
she thought of a photograph showing her husband kiss- |
ing Kim Novak in Paris.

These questions are in imitation, obviously enough,
of the Mike Wallace technique, but like most British —
attempts to ape American customs, the imitation is a —
little damp. Fredric March has never pretended to be §
younger than he is (unlike, say, Laurence Olivier), and
no one is going to start back at the notion of Mr. Quinn |
kissing a pretty girl. We don’t understand why the —
British press should suddenly go gunning for American —
actors, but we wish they could think up questions for _
which a sufficient answer is not “Huh?” Teddy boys —
playing at Jimmy Dean, that’s what these Fleet Street —
rascals look like. i

en i ee

Dangerous Dealing

Despite the November, 1958, election returns and
strong Administration opposition, Rep. Howard Smith’s
states’-rights bill (H.R. 3) has managed once again to
pass the House. Last year it was approved by a vote 4
of 241 to 155, last week by a smaller margin, 225 to
192. The debate this year was marked by a curious —
circumstance. The Republican opposition was spear= ;
headed by Rep. John V. Lindsay of New York City, a
freshman member, while 114 Republicans, led b:
Minority Leader Charles A. Halleck, lined up with 11
Democrats in support of the bill. Patently the vote i vs
the House represents a deal; Minority Leader Halleck |
lined up 114 Republican votes for the Dixiecrats in ex- —
change for their support of various measures relating —
to the budget, principally housing. on ae

The effect of the vote in the House will be tworelal a
it will satisfy the Dixiecrats that “pressure” is being —
kept on a sharply divided Supreme Court, and it will |
also encourage the Court’s critics across the country i
to believe that Sanger 1 is mone hostile to it than int ae
this is a dangerous game. While it is a fairly naletl as- |
sumption that the bill will be sidetracked in the Senate,
this circumstance does not lessen the uneasiness thoug rht-
ful observers must feel when they witness a “des
this kind being made on a matter of such impor srtane

CFE ee
e Na

SS oe

Rep. Smith’s measure provides that the Supreme Court
may not interpret an act of Congress as pre-empting a
field of legislation from the states unless Congress
‘specifically expresses such an intention or “unless there
is a direct and positive conflict between such act and a
state law so that the two cannot be reconciled or con-
sistently stand together.” If the bill becomes law, it
would permit Southern states to harass the NAACP
with restrictive legislation; it could be used to stimulate
a vast amount of vexatious litigation on the desegrega-
tion issue; and, more important, it would confuse es-
tablished lines of state and federal authority in a most
mischievous manner.

A certain amount of “dealing” is part of the bargain-
ing process among pressure groups which today largely
determines the outcome of any particular session of
Congress. But when cynical deals are made on matters
as important as H.R. 3, for purely transient advantage,
there is reason to feel apprehensive about the future
of representative government.

The Thousand Arms of Kuan Yin

To back up his plea for urban representation in gov-
ernment (“A Voice for the Cities,” The Nation, March
7, 1959, p. 199), Senator Joseph S. Clark has introduced
S. 1431, which calls for the establishment of a Presiden-
tial Commission on Metropolitan Problems. Hearings
on the measure have been under way since June 9 be-
fore a subcommittee, chaired by Representative William
L. Dawson (D., Iil.), of the House Government Opera-
tions Committee, and will not be concluded for some
time. The proposed commission would consist of six
members from each House and six Presidential ap-
pointees. This is a somewhat watered-down version of
Senator Clark’s original proposal that a Department of

Urban Affairs should be established in the federal gov-
ernment; nevertheless, it deserves public support as a
sound first step in a generally right direction.

The final goal, as Michael Reagan’s article in this
issue (p. 11) makes clear, is representation of the urban
interest in the Cabinet. As always, it is there that the
key decisions are made—decisions on the budget, on
legislative priorities, on strategy and timing. Ours is an
urban civilization; 60 per cent of all Americans now
live in metropolitan areas and the proportion will be
still greater by the end of the 1960s. Yet the urban
areas lack a direct voice in government at the decision-
making level. At the same time, the federal government
is massively involved in metropolitan problems—trans-
portation, housing, airports, water shortages, smog and
air pollution, education, parks.and recreational facilities,
crime and juvenile delinquency—and the demands made

‘on it for help steadily become more numerous and in-

sistent. But the more the federal government attempts
to deal with urban problems on a hand-out, piecemeal
basis, the more Uncle Sam, in the words of Dr. Luther
Gulick, “looks like the Buddhist idol Kuan Yin, with
a thousand arms, But in our case the arms do not seem
to connect with the same backbone or with a single
brain!” The problems of New York, Chicago, Phila-
delphia and Los Angeles may be dissimilar in some re-
spects, but they are not so unlike that the study of
urban problems per se would not. yield far greater re-
turns than the attempt to make federal grants, without
adequate study, to city governments which, under exist-
ing federal-state-city relationships, often lack adminis-
trative power to cope with grants effectively. President
Eisenhower did not exaggerate when he said, in a speech
at Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1957, that “unless action
is prompt and effective, urban problems will soon almost
defy solution.”

Why Hospitals Exploit Labor . . by George Kirstein

ON THE surface, the issues in New

_ York’s 46-day hospital strike which

ended last week were simple. The
predominantly Puerto Rican and
Negro non-professional workers were
doing battle in the only way they
could to improve their admittedly
miserable standards of pay. Oppos-
ing them, in the public’s mind, were
the wealthy and socially prominent

GEORGE KIRSTEIN, publisher of
The Nation, was formerly Executive
Vice President of the Health Insur-
ance Plan (HIP).

“Sily 4, 1959

trustees who guided the policies of
the embattled institutions. The
strike was a skirmish in class war-
fare, the very poor arrayed against
the very rich. Citizens chose sides
in accordance with their own socio-
economic orientation; there was a
convenient hero and a clear villain,
and which was which depended upon
one’s point of view. No one, of
course, dreamed of suggesting that
the real “villains” were the helpless
patients, bedridden inside the hos-
pitals.. Yet in sober fact it is the
patient who has been exploiting —

albeit unwittingly and. by force of
circumstance — the hospital work-
ers and the hospital treasuries alike.

For the truth is that the hospitals
are not receiving sufficient fees for
the services they are giving. As a
result, they are operating at stag-
gering deficits; and the one control-
lable item of cost that can be kept
at minimal levels is wages. It was
not the trustees who profited from
the sweatshop conditions under
which the exploited workers toiled;
it was the patients — and the tax-
payers. Nearly every patient — semi-

private or ward — lying uncomfort-
ably on his sick bed was being
subsidized by the underpaid work-
ers, as well as by the philanthropies
(including the trustees”) which
maintained the hospital.

And the most curious paradox of
th this whole paradoxical situation was
that the semi-private patients who
were insured by Blue Cross against
hospital costs were virtuously con-
vinced that they were no burden to
anyone; indeed, many felt that if
Vig anybody had the right to complain,
ia it was they themselves — about the
ey high cost of Blue Cross.

TO SEE how this anomalous situa-
tion arose, we must look back in
time. Originally, the “voluntary”
hospitals were built for the poor by
ia men of great wealth. The rich were
kg taken care of at home; they had their
i babies, and recovered or died from
P their illnesses, in their own darkened
bedrooms. But the poor, almost as a
punishment, went to hospitals where,
because of inadequate care, the fatal-
ity rates were shocking. No one
who could afford to pay for doctors
and nurses would allow himself to
be incarcerated in the pest houses
that were the _ nineteenth-century
hospital. Most of the non-profession-
al work in those early institutions
was done by volunteers — Lady
- Bountifuls who devoted themselves
to easing the suffering of the poor.
As medical science advanced, the
hospitals became more efficient
centers where therapeutic equipment
was centralized and recovery rates
improved. The volunteer workers
gave way, in part, to the paid em-
ployee; and the municipality es-
_ tablished the practice of augmenting
‘private charity by compensating
hospitals for indigent ward patients.
( Today this compensation is not
early enough. New York City pays
20 per day for each ward patient;
e cost of ward care in one typical
spital is pennies under $30 per
. (In the city’s own hospitals,

of a patient is $28. ) And these
ntary-hospital costs, it should be
sized, are based on wage rates
-professional help which every-
admits are inadequate.
Moreover, doctors who supervise

i ee

as members of the “visiting staff,”
they contribute their valuable time.
And the interns and residents who
carry out the doctors’ orders in the
wards as part of their educational
program are paid so little that their
paychecks amount to little more
than a recurrent monthly insult. In
the average New York hospital, in-
terns receive a stipend of around
$50 per month in addition to room
and board, and residents receive
twice that amount. These men al-
ready have their M.D. degrees and
the great majority are married and
have children. Is it any wonder that,
upon hanging out their shingles after
their formal training is over, they
feel that society owes them a great
debt which they are tempted to re-
cover by demanding high fees?
Turning now from the indigent
patients whose care must be subsi-
dized by the municipality or charity,
let us consider the patients who can
afford to pay for their own care.
Historically, as hospitals improved
to the point where they had become

ward cases receive no compensation; cent
than merely pest houses, p

ers for tre ae the ae
ople who

could afford to pay, requested ac- —
commodations, They were given
curtained-off sections of the wards, ,
which were termed “semi- -public”
accommodations. These, of course, a
were the forerunners of the “semi-
private” rooms with which we are
familiar today, and to which all who
are insured under a Blue Cross plan |
are entitled. “a

Blue Cross was instituted in 1935
as a non-profit plan under which §
people could arrange for an insurance
company to pay their hospital bills.
It has always been Blue Cross’s ob-
jective to compensate the hospitals |
in full, and for the first ten years,
the objective was fulfilled. But in
recent years, costs in some instances
have advanced faster than Blue
Cross payments. Thus, in some New
York hospitals, even Blue Cross
patients have caused deficits which
philanthropy has had to meet. And
it must not be forgotten that Blue
Cross payments to hospitals, based Ae
as they are on actual costs, are pre-
dicated on sub-standard wages which ~
are “standard” for unskilled help in |
most voluntary hospitals. If all labor ay
exploitation were to cease, Blue Cross"
would have to pay at least double
its current rates to hospitals, which —
means premium payments would |

also be doubled.

x
oe rt
WI

a
a
a
a

WHAT FACTORS have forced hos-
pital expenses to such staggering |
levels as compared to a decade or ia
two ago, when the Blue Cross sys- —
font waked fairly well? Obviously, —
there is the purely hotel cost of run i
ning a hospital: bed, board and rec~
reational facilities. Even New York’s
Waldorf-Astoria charges only about a
$14 a day for a bed, and as
another $10 would cover fo
Why must the payment for a ward |
patient, who isn’t exactly occupyi +
a Waldorf room or eating Waldo
food, be nearly $30 a day? The prob- —
lem here is that modern science ha s
outpaced our socio-economic think “a
ing. Only a few years ago, a pati
with a certain heart ailment mi
be admitted to a hospital (if
disease were discovered in time) «
al within a few days, he wor
ai Not much could be done

bd y OD A Na PIC

ae 4
him except, perhaps, to ease his pain
—a relatively inexpensive procedure.
Today the same patient, after an
eight-hour operation involving the
use of an operating room, a recovery
room, X-ray and other diagnostic
devices, as well as a team of doctors
and nurses, will spend a month or
two in a hospital. He will not only
live; he will recover completely.
Similarly, a baby may have a tumor
removed from the brain which would
have been fatal a few years ago; he
may be months in the hospital, with
around-the-clock nursing, special
foods and all kinds of expensive care.

TRUE, other types of cases require
briefer hospitalization periods than
formerly, but even here the savings
are less than one would imagine. The
rule of thumb on hospital expenses
is that one-third goes for nurses’ sal-
aries, one-third for other labor, and
one-third for supplies (including
food). Nurses’ salaries have risen
sharply in the last few years as a
nursing shortage developed (their
pay is still too low, in my opinion, to
attract a sufficient number of re-
cruits to this indispensable profes-
sion). But the costs that have really
skyrocketed are supply costs, Sci-
ence discovers a new drug—penicil-
lin, for example. When first intro-
duced, it is extremely expensive for
many reasons; mass production has
not yet been established, for one.
Yet, if a doctor believes the drug
will cure a patient, he rightly orders
its use without regard to expense.
And new and effective drugs come

_ into use with unprecedented rapidity.

Another financial drain on a hos-
pital is the Outpatient Department.
In the cancer, heart and other clinics
which these hospitals offer to ambu-
latory cases, thousands of medical
services are performed annually. Pa-
tients who can afford to pay do so,
of course. But the patients are treat-
ed regardless of whether they can
_ pay or not, and neither Blue Cross
nor the city compensates the hos-
pitals for these vital services.

The table on this page gives at
a glance the financial picture of one
of New York’s great voluntary hos-

Income and Expenses: 650-Bed Voluntary Hospital

Costs
(Daily)

$32

Income
(Daily)

Type of
Bed

Patient
pays $40

Blue Cross
pays $30

Private

Sem-Pri.

Ward City pays

$20

Outpatients Department

Profit or
Loss per
Patient
(Daily)

£8 20

Annual
Profit
or Loss

$ 58,400

Number
of Beds
(Average)

—2 330 -240,900

300 ~1,095,000

~280,000*

Total Annual Deficit $1,557,500

*This hospital treats an average of 40,000 outpatients annually at a cost of $9
per visit. Average payment by the outpatient is $2 per visit, netting a $7 loss to

the hospital.

Let us turn now to the organi-
zational structure of the voluntary
hospital which bears the responsibil-
ity of coping with the institution’s
almost insoluble financial problems.

Historically, the committee of rich
men who financed the individual
hospital deficits became the institu-
tion’s governing body, or board of
trustees. But as deficits mounted to
their present level of approximately
$2,000 per bed per year, the burden
became too great for any small body
of men. Community fund-raising
along sectarian lines replaced or
augmented the trustees’ donations.

Although funds for the voluntary
hospitals are now raised in this man-
ner, the archaic trustee structure
persists. True, hospital trustees seek
no material gain for themselves; in-
deed, they contribute generously of
their own time and money. But gen-
erally speaking they bring a point
of view to bear on the economic
problems of health administration
which is limited in scope and _ pre-
conditioned by upper-class orienta-
tion. Moreover, they are self-select-
ing, self-perpetuating bodies which
represent no numerically significant
section of the community they are
serving. Trustees represent wealth
and power, not people. No labor
leaders, no representatives of the
municipality or other segment of the
community sit among them. Hos-

and retrogressive in the results they
achieve. Dramatic confirmation of
this can be found in the antedeluvian
position the trustees took vis-a-vis
the hospital workers’ demand for
union recognition during the recent

46-day New York strike.

THE foregoing analysis of the eco-
nomic problems which create the di-
lemma of -the voluntary hospitals
suggests at least some solutions.

1. The costs of patient care in hos-
pitals should be met by public mon-
ies—federal, state and municipal. To
those who object to government ex-
penditures in this field, it should be
pointed out that the federal govern-
ment already contributes heavily to
hospital costs through income-tax
deductions for charitable donations.
The present-day philanthropist de-
ducts his hospital donations from in-
come, and it is a rare donor who
gives more than the 30 per cent of
income permitted as a tax deduction.
State tax laws, too, encourage dona-
tions; and as for municipalities, they
have been in the hospital business
for years.

As has already been demonstrated,
hospital care should cost even more
than it does today. In order to give
each patient the utmost benefits of
modern science, while at the same
time terminating the current exploi-
tation of many segments of the hos-

pital boards are undemocratic in
principle, unrepresentative in prac-
tice, and are apt to be unimaginative

_ pitals. Not all hospitals have such
a pressing problem; some, however,
_are in an even more desperate plight.

pital staff, more money is needed.
A society that is unprepared to
spend money for the improvement ~

SS ——<—

Pe a

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et
:

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eae eee
a. wn, “A>
ie

Dash

BW) dea’

indolence brings. I believe that our
society would enthusiastically sup-
port a solution to its health prob-
lem—a far worthier objective than
the armament race, upon which we
are spending more and more billions
each year.

2. Philanthropy, which is reward-
ing both to the donor and the bene-
ficiary, need not and should not be
eliminated, although its purpose and
direction should be newly defined.
Philanthropic monies should no
longer be spent to offset ever-mount-
ing deficits; rather, they should be
devoted to the exploration of new
methods of hospital administration,
to research in the endless struggle
against disease, and to other activi-
ties which go beyond the day-to-day
administration of the hospital. The
philanthropist would still receive his
reward in the knowledge that he is
helping to improve the whole health
complex of society. Indeed, he would
be much better off; no longer would
he have to give more and more—not
to see his hospital grow, but merely
to save it from collapse. The endless
race to stay in the same place would
end, and the philanthropist could
resume his classic role of financing
the push on to new frontiers.

3. The governing bodies of the
voluntary hospitals should be recon-
stituted along broader lines in order
to cope with modern problems. The
new boards might well include some
of the present personnel who, by vir-

_ THAT CRIME is in the forefront
of the social ills of our time can
ects be denied. In England and

_ TERENCE MORRIS, Lecturer in
Sociology at the London School of
Economics, is the author of The
Criminal Area. Another aspect of
the “Crime in a Changing Society”
a will be dealt with soon im these col-
wns by Gresham M. Sykes of
if Morthwestern Umversity.

ae ae tee
- : ify . “4 4 i

of its own health deserves the foe

~ SE

‘
tue of Peete. ous or of
special qualifications, in the area of
medical economics, still have a great
contribution to make. But the boards
should also include chosen represent-
atives of organized labor as well as
trained sociologists, economists and
scholars in other disciplines bearing
on public-health administration. The
possession of wealth should cease
being the criterion for membership.
Representatives of the federal, state
and municipal governments should
also sit, but should not constitute
a majority. With such a governing
body to formulate policy, profes-
sional administrators would no long-
er need to devote their efforts to
shoring up an obsolete economic
structure, but could concentrate on
creating a new structure better suit-
ed to society’s needs.

4. Finally, by intelligent re-plan-
ning of hospital facilities, more ef-
ficiency could easily be introduced.
Hospitals which cost over $30,000
per bed to construct and $30 per
bed daily to cperate should not be
occupied by patients well on their
way to recovery, or by aged people
who are victims of chronic diseases.
Each voluntary hospital should have
attached to it a modern nursing
home for convalescents, for which
the medical supervision would be
furnished by the hospital staff. In
addition, each major hospital should
have a special unit for the care of
the aging sick and chronically ill,
whose needs—in terms of hospital fa-

CRIME IN A CHANGING SOCIETY

Wales over half a million crimes of
a fairly serious nature were com-
mitted in 1957, and the tide is still
rising. The criminality of adolescents
and young adults, as measured by
the proportions convicted each year,
becomes progressively more wide-
spread. Nobody has so far determin-
ed with accuracy the annual cost
of crime prevention, and detection,
the administration of justice, and
the treatment of the offender both

iS. ee

ai areay ill patient being prepared — °

bah;

fae th: an thos

for, or just recovering from, a major —
operation. Here again the hospital |
would furnish the necessary medical
supervision.

As part of the care for the aged,
there should be a home-care program
for bedridden patients who have no —
immediate need for expensive hoa ;
pital equipment. A visiting team of
doctor, nurse and social worker could
supervise the medical care of these
patients while their own relatives:
furnish the love and affection which
means so much as life nears its end.

IF hospitals were underwritten by
tax funds, there would be no further
need for the distinction between pub-
lic (municipally operated) hospitals
for indigents and voluntary hospitals
serving the same kind of patient, All
cases could be taken care of in the
modern hospital complex I have de- —
scribed. In such a medical center,
teaching and research would blos-
som, and doctors would be able to
teach their students every aspect of
medical science in one location. In-
deed, eventually the logical place
for medical schools would be approxi-
mate to these great medical centers.

That any such development will
not happen immediately is obvious.
But this is the direction in which we
must go if we are to solve the com- _
plex problems of patient care in the —
fast-changing world of ever-expand- =
ing scientific knowledge. *

in and out of institutions. In the —
United States, crime costs have been —
estimated at between $10 and $20_
billion a year, the annual cost of op-—
erating state and federal institutions
alone being some $225 million,

The problem of crime is scarcely
new; what is new is the realizatior
that in a society such as mod
Britain, with its “Welfare State,”
simple theory that crime stems f

poverty, economic neous :
Che Na’ TION
uf VNlg
«yi ,
~~ 5

‘socially defined

their associated evils is no longer

tenable. Crime, in fact, has progress-
ed hand in hand with social welfare
and social security. That this should
be so is a source of concern to the
advocates of the Welfare State in
whatever form. High crime rates and
high living standards are not limited
to Britain. In Scandinavia and West
Germany the picture is not dissim-
ilar, and the United States, which
enjoys the highest living standard
in the Western world, has its most
formidable crime problem; moreover
youthful crime, which forms the core
of the American problem, is not lim-
ited to the socially underprivileged,
but extends to serious offenses among
middle-class children.

THE British Government has issued
a White Paper, Penal Practice in a
Changing Society, which has im-
portant implications for the Ameri-
can as well as the British prison sys-
tem. The man behind it, R. A.
Butler, has acquired during his ten-
ure as Home Secretary a reputation
as a forward-looking administrator
with a keen interest in the penal
field. Under him, an unprecedentedly
large program of research into the
causes of crime and treatment of of-
fenders has been launched—partly
official and partly operated by uni-
versity departments with govern-
ment funds, It indicates “the prob-
lem with which crime confronts us
and the agencies which exist to deal
with it.” Its title, though challeng-
ing, is in some respects misleading.
In the first place, the paper is con-
cerned largely with prisons and re-
formatories, which although they
may form the core of the penal sys-
tem, by no means constitute the en-
tire field of penal practice. As far as
“the changing society” is concerned,
there is very little discussion indeed,
and no attempt is made to relate
recent social changes to the current

increase in crime. The introduction

States categorically that the paper
“does not seek to deal with those
deep-seated causes which, even were
they fully understood, would be
largely beyond the reach of Govern-
ment action.”

Crime is essentially a social act,
and sanctioned.
Crime must therefore in one sense
be appropriate to the society in

July 4, 1959

which it takes place, and if ours is a
society given over to the pursuit of
material prosperity and at the same
time one which places a not ‘infre-
quent emphasis on the use of violence
and force, it is not perhaps surpris-
ing that the motifs of contemporary
crime will bear some resemblance to
the dominant values of society. Such
a deterministic view of anti-social
behavior is in contrast with a basic
assumption which underlies current
criminal law and much penal treat-
ment both in Britain and in the
United States, i.e, the assumption
that normal men act rationally and
in their own self-interest.

The White Paper “looks forward
to the possibility of a fundamental
re-examination of penal philosophy
on the basis of knowledge to be gain-
ed [through research].” One can
only say that such a re-examination
is long overdue, for just as social re-
search has indicated the invalidity
of many of the explanations of crime
cherished in the nineteenth century
—that crime is due to poverty, bad
housing, low intelligence, physical in-
feriority and so forth—so psychology,
and especially psychoanalysis, have
exploded once and for all the myth
of the rationality of man. While it
may be true in one sense that men
consciously choose to commit crime,
in another the range of their choice
may be so limited by the dimen-
sions of personality that they may
be driven into conflict with society
by impulses they are ill-equipped to
resist. Punishment in the form of re-
pression is an anachronism in any
therapeutic climate. What some pe-
nologists forget, however, is that
some sections of the community still
demand vengeance, irrespective of
whether reform follows or not. And
it is of little use telling the mob to
stop howling for the blood of sex-
murderers and the like, and quietly
to go away. Some method must be
devised to channel their emotions in-
to socially harmless outlets.

This White Paper is in many ways
a strange document, with certain
chameleon-like qualities, containing
both forward-looking ideas as well
as the platitudinous clichés abound-
ing in so many official docu-
ments. Essentially it consists in a
review of present trends in penal
treatment and sets forth certain prac-

tical aims for the future, consistin
in the main of a new prison-building
program. Where the paper fails is in
the naiveté of its evaluation of cur-
rent penal methods and its refusal to
grasp the philosophical nettle and
decide what it is that we are trying
to do with criminals.

As long ago as 1895, a British in-
quiry group (the Gladstone Commit-
tee) argued that prisons should send
prisoners out “better men and
women, physically and morally, than
when they came in.” Although this
has been the manifest objective for
half a century, whether it has ever
been achieved is another story. As
many prison officials will openly
state, Rule 6 of Britain’s Prison
Rules, which exhorts the staff to
“establish in prisoners the will to
lead a good and useful life on dis-
charge and to fit them to do so” is
often a mere edifice of fine words.
The White Paper admits that penal

methods may have sab led seems
research as a basis for reappraisal;
but mm the last analysis this may
come to nothing. When it has been
scientilically | demonstrated. that
hanging and flogging have no de-
terrent value, they are still demand-
ed on the grounds of morality—‘the
child murderer has forfeited his right
to live,’ “the young hoodlum de-
Serves to sulfer pain’—and there is
little reason to suppose that the im-
plications of future research into the
value of other penal methods would
be accepted if they conflicted with
the emotions of powerful sections of
the community.

Throughout the paper, reference
is made to “training,” but nowhere
is this defined. It has various inter-
pretations — character building, the
imparting of industrial skills and so
forth. The aims of training need
clarification, but this would involve
not only the acceptance of therapy
as a prior objective over punishment,
but a dramatic reorganization of the
whole structure of today’s penal in-
u stitutions. At present their predomi-
val nant characteristics are deprivation
and coercion, and while improve-
ments in sanitation, pastel paint and
TV may lessen the physical rigors of
imprisonment, the deeper psycho-
logical pains remain. Although there
are “open” prisons, in Britain and in
other countries, the vast majority of
convicts spend their days in over-
crowded cells and workshops, hem-
med in by massive walls, innumer-
able doors and gates which are lock-
ed by keys often so large that their
size must relate to their symbolism
rather than their efficiency.

IN BRITAIN, plans are afoot for a
building program more ambitious
than any since the nineteenth cen-
tury. Much of it is projected into the
future, and there is no guarantee
that some financial crisis may not
cause delays of ten to fifteen years.
_ Dartmoor, the Alcatraz of British
prisons, is literally falling down after
_ more than a century, its damp, bead-
ed walls symbolizing the penology of
a bygone age; its successor is urgent-
ly overdue. All along the line new
structures are planned, but if they
_were all built tomorrow, there would
sti i _be nearly two thousand out of

th
i

tate s I
It“ has ier argued that ise only |

way to lessen overerowding—which
is no less acute in American institu-
tions—is to acquire more prisons. In
the White Paper, it is contended that
these should be “open” prisons con-
structed out of abandoned military
camps or large country houses which
impoverished upper-class families
can no longer afford. Such prisons
have only token security fences and
depend upon the “honor” system.
Unfortunately there is a limit to
their usefulness. Not every prisoner
is suitable for “open” conditions, nor
do some prisoners have long enough
sentences to warrant their transfer
from city prisons to these rural lo-
cations.

In the United States, there is a
clear line between the penitentiary,
or reformatory, and the county jail;
in Britain, the “local” prison, as it
is called, must accept everyone—the
seven-day drunk, the debtor, the
small-time thief, the man under
sentence of death. Men beginning a
sentence of two years and over must
normally spend the first eighteen
months in the local prison. In conse-
quence, the big city prison, like Lon-
don’s Pentonville or Liverpool’s Wal-
ton, is an unholy amalgam of every
criminal and delinquent condition.
The real answer to the problem 1s to
introduce some element of planning
into the sentencing policy of the
courts.

The endless succession of drunks
and vagrants that clutter up Brit-
ain’s local prisons—sometimes twen-
ty or thirty times in a year—could
and should go elsewhere. There is
needed, too, some flexibility in the
operation of long sentences. Under
English law, a man may normally
earn no more than one-third remis-
sion of a fixed sentence, so that if
he gets twelve years he must serve
eight. What is needed in Britain is
a parole system for long-term pris-
oners (whose numbers are increasing
along with the average length of
their sentences) which uses proven
techniques of statistical prediction to

guide parole decisions.

The standard of social welfare
work in British prisons remains, with
certain outstanding exceptions, de-
plorably low, and compared with the
American, scene sipechai the |

psyc st an d ‘th 1
rare figures indeed. n f

trained professional inebiberd in thes
fields is as great, if not greater, than
the need for new buildings. A good |
correctional institution is more than |
a gleaming edifice of concrete, steel
and glass; it is the workshop of ; ay
team of skilled people concerned to —
turn social failures into useful citi-

zens. a

BUT PERHAPS the most tragi
fact about prisons today in both
Britain and America is that literally |
thousands of men are being kept in
conditions of under-employment and —
idleness, In Britain, every prisoner z
is theoretically at ade and in the ~ Mf
reformatories for ailolescenme and the i‘
training prisons for men, the work- | ;
ing week approaches the norm of the © q
outside world. But the vast majority
of prisoners never get beyond the
local prison, where the working day | -
is seldom more than three hours |
long, and “work” consists of sewing —
mailbags, breaking up telecommuni-
cations equipment, or picking rags.
In the county jail in America, things _ .
are often far worse; in some there
is no work at all. This situation ex- |
tends to some American state pris- —
ons, too; in one the writer visited,
dee is a group actually known as_ Ff
the “idle men”—men who are phys-
ically incapable of doing what jobs —
are available, men who will not
work, and able-bodied men for whom
stieite, simply is no work. | a
In both the United States and |
Britain, prisoners are dependent ‘el 1
work upon state contracts, of which.
many other state institutions, such
as mental hospitals, claim a rightful
share. The cry has always been ra
that criminals should not take
bread out of honest men’s moutl
but this argument holds little wat
when offenders who are fined
placed on probation are allowed
continue to earn their living
anyone else. The mentally corrosi
effects of idleness are such that
should be imperative that offend
whose characters are often notori
ly weak, should have enough to
But quite apart from the anti
peutic effects of idleness, the pr
surely has a right to work, V
as essential to man’s social e
as food and light and air a

f a

_— Com

gee aoe, ee « iD

; body. It is illogical to satisfy one

«<

)

set of basic needs and deny another.
But granted this, the moment
prison labor competes on the open
market it becomes vulnerable to the
conditions of the market, and while
under full employment there is little
to fear, as the tide of unemployment
encroaches, many voices will be raised
against prisoners having work while
honest men are idle. The prisoner
cannot, however, be regarded in per-
petuity as an economic as well as a
social outcast. Even when he is out
of sight behind the prison wall he
is still costing the community money
(the community supporting not
only him, but often his family, too).
If prison-labor production were sub-
sidized, it could hardly cost more
than the present arrangement, and
at the same time the process of re-
habilitation would be aided.
Ultimately the question “What do

we want to do with our criminals?”
must come back to the community
as a whole. If we wish to punish, it
is reasonable to ask what punish-
ment achieves; certainly the evidence
of history is that severity of punish-
ment does not by itself deter. If it is
vengeance we want, what has become
of our charity in a society which calls
itself humanitarian? If we wish to
turn anti-social beings into useful
citizens, there are other avenues
which must be explored. In the past,
there were no techniques whereby
correctional programs could be eval-
uated; the social sciences, however,
can now begin to offer some modest
assistance here, and in both Britain
and America research programs are
under way to assess the effectiveness
of certain methods of treating the
offender. There have probably been
too many “scientific success storics”
in the past; current research needs

to be critical and objective, and at
the same time indicative of where
the weaknesses of the present meth-
ods actually lie.

“Society bears in its womb the
embryo of every crime that is to be
committed; it prepares for the crime
while the criminal is merely the
tool.” The Belgian social theorist
Adolphe Quételet wrote this nearly
a century ago, and his words have
a contemporary meaning. It has yet
to be demonstrated that any offend-
er is wholly free from some social
handicap, or physical or mental han-
dicap which has social significance.
He is at unease with the world and
has many needs, and althougn his
personal responsibility for his actions
may not have diminished to vanish-
ing point, his needs remain. And in
the long run, the needs of the offend-
er are the self-interest of the com-
munity as a whole.

FOR SPACIOUS SKIES . . asHorr srory by Wilma Shore

SOMETHING ... what? There was
something wrong. August Hammach-
er struggled up out of sleep, throw-
ing it off like the balloonist at the
County Fair throwing out his sand-
bags.

He was alone in bed. But it was
nothing, he thought; one of the chil-
dren must have had some little pain
or other; too much ice cream and
lemonade, maybe. That was part of
the Fourth, someone always woke
up with a bellyache.

He turned on his side, smoothing
down his nightshirt, and closed his
eyes. She would be back soon, the
night was cool and still, and he was
full of contentment. No two ways
about it, the Fourth was still the
best holiday of them all. You
couldn’t beat Thanksgiving and
Christmas morning, that rich, gen-
erous smell, onions and cinnamon
and burning wax; but once dinner

WILMA SHORE’S

short stories

have appeared in two anthologies:

Prize Stories 1958 (Doubleday) and
The Best Short Stories (Houghton
Mifflin).

July 4, 1959

was over there was nothing to look
forward to, nothing to do but sit
around all afternoon, half asleep
from too much food and not enough
air. It was like being under siege,
every house a little fortress, with
the family huddled inside and the
doors and windows closed tight
against the outdoors.

But on the Fourth, man and na-
ture seemed to celebrate together.
What a day it had been, a real hum-
dinger! The sky as clear as water,
and a good stiff breeze; all down
the block the flags were flapping
and snapping, the stripes writhing
and on top the gold balls glinting
in the sun. And the little girls, so
curled and starched; how they flew
across the back yard! Like a flock of
little birds, little chattering spar-
rows. And Johnny, wild as a colt,
you thought his eyes would pop right
out of his head; “Let me! Papa, let
me! One more firecracker!” Even
while he was eating, a drumstick in
one hand and an ear of corn in the
other, and the butter running down
his chin.

All at once, like Alice through the

looking glass, he had passed through
the wide eyes of his son back into
his own boyhood. When the Fourth
was a wondrous box that you opened
first thing in the morning and all
day long the miracles came pouring
out, from the bang! bang! bang! of
the firecrackers at sunrise right on
down to the best, the most magical
of all; the sharp bitter smell of gun-
powder filled his head, he felt the
awful pain of joy in his chest; there
was the spitting, hissing, fizz of the
sparklers and the rushing whooosh of
the rockets, and the brilliant burst-
ing lights arched across the black
sky, like everything beautiful and
extraordinary in the world come to-
gether, pink and green and metal
yellow, hanging for one proud in-
stant in the very air. . . . People’s
stars, not God’s. This was the day
that men put their own stars in the
sky. ... The way they put stars on
the flag... . Flowers in the air as God
put them in the fields . . . daisies,
buttercups. ... His big sister leaned
over and stuck her hand under his
chin; do you like butter? ...

The faint neat clop, clip, clop of

‘
%

ani deaeeaiiied

horseshoes woke him again; so” sad
and sweet, so lonely in the enormous
night. He lay and listened till. it
lingered only as an echo in his mind,
like a pulse. Some fellow on his way
home, he thought, must have had
a big night, and he smiled to him-
self; the smug smile of a man who
has passed beyond all that and finds
he does not regret it too much; no,
by God, he had rather be quiet in
his own bed with his own wife... .

She was gone a long time, per-
haps there was something really
wrong? But he would have heard a
child cry, or she would have come
and told him to get dressed and go
for the doctor. By God, he could
cover those ten blocks in five min-

utes, if he had to.

Maybe the carriage he had just
heard was someone going for the
doctor; diphtheria, appendicitis. He
was lucky to live right close in. Now-
adays so many. were getting the
telephone. Maybe I should, he
thought; but what was the use of
spending all that money when he
could be on the doctor’s doorstep in
five minutes? He had better ways to
spend his money, with three children
to raise, and Martha’s mother to
take care of, and prices going up all
the time. Nothing to worry about,
he was making a good living, God
be thanked, but there was no use to
throw money out the window. Even
Martha didn’t really want all those
extra electric wires right inside the
house, which was foolish, there was
no danger to it, but still and all,
why throw away money?

No, if it ever got so that Martha.

wanted it, well and good; but in
the meantime he was satisfied with

what he had. You bet he was! A fine ©

shingle house, a good practice, a
healthy family, a wonderful wife.

Pretty as the day he married her,

a to his way of thinking, although she

complained about her waistline. But

he always told her, “As long as I
can get my arm around it, that’s all
you need to worry about. »' And she
always laughed and felt, better. Be-
fore the children, he could ‘span her
waist with his two hands. That was.

vith her corsets laced tight, of
eee, and his hands were big, too
g for a dentist, really; but he had

brush

“against the wall of - Ge housed The

breeze had fallen at’ sundown but

after dark it had sprung up again;
‘it’ made a nice cool evening. How

fast the flares and the bright stars
had drifted over east! It was a nice
display, if he did say so himself, and
enough: nearly two dollars’ worth.
He couldn’t see why Johnny should
have cried at the last. Still, in his
heart he knew, he remembered; no

‘matter how many there were, the

last one meant the end of the magic

‘and the pride; all of a sudden there
‘was nothing left but a few scorched

places in the grass, and the red fire-
cracker papers that your mother
would make you pick up next day
from under the bushes. His father
would take a deep breath, rubbing
his big square hands together, and
say, “Well, dot’s all.” And suddenly
it was the regular world, where you
had oatmeal every day for breakfast
and had to bring in the wood be-
fore you went out and wear high,
laced shoes that kept coming un-

tied, and America was just the place

where you lived.

Ah, but on the Fourth it was
America the beautiful!
the gem of the ocean! Oh, beautiful,
for spacious skies! When the band
went past the music. pushed through
your veins, you could feel your

‘blood bubbling like sarsaparilla; the

little fife so high and shrill, and the

sharp, tight drumbeats rattling on

your brain. America! America! It
was like your birthday, it celebrated
you, an American; and yet it was so
much bigger and finer, everybody
was in it; the whole town, the whole
country.

NOW IT was different. When you
were a boy, America was the best
country the way your school was
the best school and your block was
the best block; because it was yours.
But when you were a man you

‘shivered at the music because you

had thought about America. Not if
you were third or fourth generation,
maybe; but if your father was a poor
farm boy from Austria, and you
knew you had just missed being a
poor farm boy yourself, then the flag
was not simply your flag; it stood

for the greatest victory against
tyranny ever; and Paul Revere was

you, so you could have a modern |

‘the steerage, with three gold guineas

Columbia,

‘him. She was worth two of him —
‘when the kids were sick, for all his

Some day they would get the vote. —

little Johnny.

oe pattiot who risked his life for ;

swivel chair downstairs in the office,
and a cabinet full of clean steel drills
and forceps, and be a vestryman, a
member of the school board, some-
body. Even though your father was
born on a little Austrian farm, and |
your mother came from Glasgow in |

knotted in a handkerchief. . . .
There were tears in his eyes; were
they for America, the beautiful, or
his mother, smooth-haired and
straight-backed at the head of the
table? Maggie Lauchlin; she was a
good woman, he thought, and sud-
denly his mouth remembered the ~
taste of the little silver watch she
wore pinned to her waist; at night
when she sang him to sleep his head
would slip forward, bobbing as they
rocked, till he could feel the hard
silver lozenge between his lips, and
pass the very tip of his tongue across
the crystal.

WHERE was Martha? He pushed
up on one elbow; should he go and
see what was. the matter? But she
would let him know if she wanted

degree and his years of practice. He
lay down again. What a wonderful
creature a woman was! They just
seemed to know things, without try-
ing, from out of the air; what todo _
for croup, how to can a bushel of
tomatoes or corn a cut of beef or
take out a stain on the tablecloth, ff

He thought they should, though he
would never have told anyone. Man
or woman, rr
He slid over to her side of the bed, -
to have it nice and warm when she ©
came back; if there was one thigg "
made her miserable it was a cold |
bed, even. in summer. Then he heard — ? |
a new sound. All night the house ~
spoke to itself, like an old woman —
telling over the day’s events; after
a while you stopped listening. But a
this was a door closing. It seemed |
to come from upstairs; that meant |

Panic stung him; perhaps the b bad |
Roman candle. . .? That was crazi
he had gotten it in time, snatch

fi
.

| Suily, 4, 1959

pane.

“ftom the tight little fist and doused

it in the rain barrel. If anybody had
been hurt it would have been him-
self. Might have gotten a bad burn,
if he had been a second later. Might
have lost a hand, he thought, and a
sudden terrible sickness hit his
stomach and ran all through him, out
to the tips of his fingers. He twitch-
ed them, involuntarily. Imagine, a
dentist with only one hand! Oh, [ll
tell that Rafe Gutweiler, he thought
with fury, selling me bad fireworks!
Next year I buy from Stapleton.
Remember! he thought.

Now he could make out the whis-
per of her feet on the stairs; he roll-
ed back to his own side. Wasn’t it
strange? This was the first time he
had ever thought of any danger to
himself. When he heard that funny
sputter he had just acted. That was
how it was to be a parent. He could
remember the time his father got his
arm broken, pushing him out of the
path of a horse when he was only
four or five. Even animals: the way
Mimsy, the cat, stood up to the Har-
risons’ Rex when he came sniffing
around her kittens. A big Labrador
retriever that could have eaten her
in one gulp. She was a good cat.
Later he had heard Johnny talking
to the kittens in his high little voice.
“Now you must be very obedience!
And do whatever your Mama says,
because she saved you from not be-
ing eaten all up.”

He was still smiling when Martha
came in. In the faint moonlight he

could see her turn and softly close
the door, holding it with both hands.

“T’m awake.”

She slipped off her kimono, “And
I tried to be so quiet!”

“T just woke up,” he said, watch-
ing her lay the kimono over the
back of the rocker. “What was the
matter?”

She sat on the edge of the bed
and with one brisk movement swung
down her shoulders and tucked her
legs under the sheet. “Why, it’s
warm!” She moved toward him and
kissed his cheek. “You made it warm
for me!”

“What was the matter?” he said
again. “Is he all right? Not—” But
he couldn’t say, burned, because
that was crazy.

“Tt was just a bad dream. I heard
him call out in his sleep. From all
the excitement; he was dreaming
about rockets.”. Well, he thought,
that proves there were enough fire-
works, anyhow. Nearly two dollars’
worth.

She had a special smell of sleep,
a warm furry smell. He rubbed his
nose against her hair. “I missed you.
I woke up and you were gone.”

She turned and flung up one arm.
“He was shivering all over, poor lit-
tle thing. I said, ‘Well, son, the
rockets are done now till next year.’
But he kept saying, ‘No, Mama,
these are different rockets, bad rock-
ets. Big as a house! Big as two
houses! After they get up in the sky
they come apart, and the pieces fall

down, and they hurt everybody?’
Crying! Oh, dear! ‘Big rockets,
Mama,’ he kept saying. ‘Big enough
to light up a whole state! Big enough
to light up the whole state of New
York State!’ ”

He wanted to laugh, but he could
tell she was still upset; he put his
arm over her shoulder. “Oh, Augie,
it was pitiful! I said, ‘Now, son, it
was just a dream.’ I said, ‘Why
would anybody do a crazy thing like
that? Send things up in the air that
would fall down and hurt people?
Why, the law would stop it. The law
would never let them do a thing
like that.’ Then he quieted down.”

She stretched, sighing. Then
everything was still; all except, the
old chestnut tree, stroking the side
of the house. For a moment he had
a feeling about the house, his house,
that he had made and maintained
by the work of his hands and his
mind, holding his family, that he and
she had created and nurtured to-
gether; he felt the house and the
family warm and quiet in sleep. And
now the special day was truly ended
and tomorrow would begin the regu-
lar world, the slow, sweet process of
growth and change. “Well, dot’s all,”
he said aloud.

She stirred. “What?”

But it was too much to explain.
He patted her shoulder to say he
loved her and knew she loved him
and that together they were all right,
everything was all right. And, smil-
ing, he fell asleep.

THE URBAN VACUUM .. . by Michael D. Reagan

A GAP of serious proportions has ap-

peared in our political system. Our

problems on the domestic side are
dominantly community problems—
delinquency, slums, housing, crime,
water supply, school construction,
educational program, rapid transit,
urban sprawl and (above all) racial
integration. National politics hasn’t
yet learned to handle such problems,
while local resources, both financial

MICHAEL D. REAGAN teaches

im the Department of Political Sci-

ence at Williams College.

Sa! ad

and political, appear to be inade-
quate to cope with them alone. The
result is an increasing deterioration
of the urban environment, of the
“livability” level of the cities; and,
politically, a lack of adequate con-
tact between local needs and nation-
al ability to meet them.

National politics in the thirties
was more successful in elevating
domestic problems to the level of
national issues. Indeed, the political
élan of the New Deal was due in
large part to the citizen’s feeling that
Washington and the political parties

were concerned with his vital day-
to-day needs. Today, the citizen does
not sense this concern; the wide gap
that separates his major interests
from those which most involve the
energies of the national political
leaders accounts at least in part for
the vacuity which characterizes the
current national political scene.
There is reason for this develop-
ment. Compared with today’s, the
domestic issues of the thirties were
more obviously national: labor’s —
right to organize, social insurance,
stock-market manipulation, the

weakness of agricultural markets,
| banking safety, hours-and-wages
| legislation. All these problems had
| this in common: if they were to be
handled at all, national action was
required. And national action could
be effective without complementary
iP state or community action: a nation-
t al wage minimum could be estab-
, _ lished by Congress; so could the
Be right to collective bargaining in in-
terstate commerce. Moreover, most
of these functional areas did not lie
traditionally within state and local
jurisdiction, and in any case all were
clearly outside the range of effective
local control. ©
_ Today’s problems are of quite a
different character. Education, de-
linquency and urban development
by tradition are problems of ex-
clusively local jurisdiction. No mat-
ter how poorly they are handled, or
a how wide their impact on the na-
tion, there remains an assumption
that they are “simply local.” There
is a sort of mental block that makes
it difficult to accept them as con-
ay stituting national issues. They are
a, beyond the reach of exclusively na-
he tional solution to the extent that
they require local action even to

zit carry out national programs. Fed-
oy. eral aid for public housing is not
_ self-executing; it requires use of
rs municipal, as well as national, Jead-

a _-ership and money. Unlike the prob-
lems of the thirties, there is little
_ the national government can do
alone to solve the crises of the cities.

THE GENERAL political problem
thus posed results from the fact that
our national political system is un-
accustomed to handling “local”
sues. Yet making our cities “fit to
live in, and do business in, is one of
the most challenging national mis-
sions of the coming decades,” as
_ Jeanne R. Lowe wrote recently in
Harper's magazine. But how does
_ one make a national mission out of
specifically community problems?
On desegregation (the most vital of
all, and increasingly a problem of
Northern residential patterns as
much as of Southern educational
_pragtices), the record of the national
ties is dismal. The 1956 Demo-
atic platform rejected “all propos-
for the use of force to interfere

shee se eedercioall ~The Republi-
can platform, with an equal lack of |

vigor, asserted the supremacy of the
Constitution and accepted the
Court’s’ desegregation decision.
Neither party proposed any concrete
program for implementation, of its
generalizations. The race issue is
clearly national in impact, yet the
individual communities in’ which
resolution must be effected are left
entirely to their own devices as far
as the national parties are concerned.

In aggregate, urban problems
form the bulk of our domestic prob-
lems; a politics that fails to make
them its focal points cannot attract
the imagination of the citizen. In this
sense, national politics has become
irrelevant, unreal. And if the prob-
lems aren’t given adequate national
attention and leadership, they won’t
be solved, for city finances are in-
sufficient to the needs. The property-
tax base has reached its apparent
maximum yield in many communi-
ties; debt limits have been reached;
the best supplementary tax bases
have been pre-empted by state and
federal governments. The states,
dominated by rural legislatures, have
shown little willingness to help solve
urban problems; they have not even
demonstrated awareness that the
problems exist.

Less obvious but of equal im-
portance in assessing the inability
of cities to pull themselves up by
their bootstraps is the lack of lead-
ership at the local level. Not every
city can hope to have a mayor with
the dynamism of Richard Lee in
New Haven. In any case, the tradi-
tion of local government is against
strong executive leadership. For
many. years the assumption.has pre-
vailed that the municipal executive
job was simply administrative — to
carry out the policies of the city
council; yet in case after case it has
been demonstrated that to leave
things to city legislatures is to leave
things undone. (See, for example, the
handling of Chicago’s housing needs
by the City Council, as related by
Meyerson and Banfield in Politics,
Planning and the Public Interest.)
We have learned this lesson at the
national level; even ate

are now calling for ie ean lead-

happen overnight,

Ne a q tok 7 ae
lear

eal level, |

vill not
and meanwhile _
the cities deteriorate. Vigorous na- |
tional leadership could stimulate, —
and even provide at least a partial —
substitute for, local leadership.
While isolated urban-renewal pro-
grams have been widely publicized,
there are ten communities in need
of drastic overhaul for each one that
is doing anything substantial. We
cannot afford to wait while our cities
rot.

too. But. this”

WE NEED a new politics for a new
“federalism,” a cooperative federal-_
ism of the national government and
the cities. We need a politics that
can raise these “local” problems to
the level of national issues. The
obstacles are formidable.
The tradition of local responsibil-
ity is almost as strong as the tradi-
tion of individual responsibility —
and equally outmoded. The single
community can no more solve the
complex dislocations and dilemmas —
of industrial urbanization unaided
than can the individual worker solve
the national problem of unemploy- —
ment. Slogans about the virtues of
traditional federalism and local self- —
help are signs either of social blind-
ness or of deliberate “ostrichism.”

As Galbraith has so strikingly i-4
lustrated, the “conventional wis-—
dom” of America is an anti pabhe al a
action ideology. Problems are sup- |
posed to solve themselves — though | if
just how private enterprise is to ff
solve problems of education, slum a
clearance, urban transportation, etc.,
goes Unspecmuet This ideology is
strongest at state and local political —
levels, which is one important reason |
why its adherents very shrewdly in- |
sist on avoidance of federal “inter-
ference in local concerns.” ‘Those —
who fear the enlargement of a
ernmental functions are the ones
who also fear increased public ex-—
penditure generally, And rebuilding |
our cities will be an extremely _ ex=
pensive job — a job made necessary
by the absence of planning in their
original development.

The factor of social class, which
Vance Packard [The Status Seek-
ers, David McKay Co.] is now mak-
ing a respectable topic for polit ical
The Nar LTC

ree

ie
iF

conversation, also enters the picture.
As the upper and upper-middle class-
es move out to the suburbs, the
cities become increasingly lower-
middle and working class in compo-
sition. Most in need of political
help, these are the groups that lack
the bases of influence in wealth and
education which are needed for ef-
fective self-representation. As the
potential middle-class leaders move
out and sink into suburban com-
placency, the cities may lose what
little leadership they now have.

THE NEW POLITICS must rest on
a coalition — centralized, well or-
ganized, well financed — of urban
mayors, public-housing associations,
unions, ACTION, the Urban League
and NAACP, social workers’ associ-
ations and other groups with stakes
in the rebuilding of the cities. Since
one of the chief jobs of the alliance
would be to lobby Washington, it
would have to be a cross-party al-
liance; for while the greater receptiv-
ity to national programs can be ex-
pected from the Democratic Party,
the looseness of the party system in
Washington makes the bipartisan ap-
proach advisable.

The Lobby For Our Cities, as it
might call itself, should become a
clearing house for ideas and coordi-
nated research into urban needs, as
well as for direct legislative pressure.
As the editors of Fortune have point-
ed out in The Exploding Metropolis,
even the best of the new mayors
are not doing much /Jong-range plan-
ning. The effectiveness of research
into urban problems can be magni-
fied by pooling community resources.

A tightening of the party system,
designed to give greater weight to
Presidential majorities, would en-
hance the opportunities of effective
action in these areas, as in others.
The urban population becomes a
continually larger majority of the
population, but this majority is not
yet reflected at its full weight in
national politics. The nature of the
Presidential electoral process is such
as to emphasize the votes of the
most populous states, while the

_ Senate represents land areas and the

House suffers from rural gerryman-
dering. Thus the President is the ob-
vious candidate for leadership in at-

July 4, 1959

Beas”,

a. y » =

tacking the national evils of unplan-
ned urbanization. Yet, unless better
party discipline can be established,
Presidential leadership at its best
may be no match for a Congress
ruled by rural Southerners.

We also need a reversal of the tra-
dition, well entrenched in some areas,
that national party lines have no
place in local politics. As local prob-
lems come to require national lead-
ership and financial aid, an alliance
of city political leaders with national
parties becomes essential. The sub-
stitution at local level of “blue” and
“white” parties for the two major
national parties is an anomaly which
might work only in a simpler age.
Bipartisan “deals” by local Demo-
crats and Republicans are no better.
Local party leaders with strong ties
to the national level are needed ef-
fectively to impress the national
leaders with the electoral potential
of urban issues; nothing would more
surely produce action. At the same
time local politics, thus linked to
national issues and national person-
alities, might well itself be enlivened
and draw greater electoral interest.

All this, of course, presupposes the
development of discernible national
party positions on urban develop-
ment which would. give voters a
genuine choice. The piecemeal ap-
proach of current proposals in Con-
gress fails in this respect. Sometimes
it is hard to tell whether Lyndon
Johnson wants to run as a Democrat
or a Republican.

With national parties abstaining
from local politics, local interests
tend to determine policy by com-
promises marked by a lowest-com-
mon-denominator quality. This is
the road to ruin. As national pro-
grams to meet urban needs become
more necessary and more clearly
developed, there is at least a chance
that some discipline and a real sense
of community interest may be graft-
ed onto a process that usually oper-
ates on a log-rolling basis. This would
be clear gain.

The price to be paid for effective
handling of urban problems is the
surrender of a local autonomy that
is no longer viable in any case.
Urbanization is, after all, a universal
phenomenon of industrialization. The

problems of New York and Phila-

delphia are in large measure also
the problems of Chicago, St. Louis,
Detroit, Kansas City and San Fran-
cisco, The desegregation decision
and its decentralized implementation
offer us a lesson in handling other
“local” problems, too. It is the local
school that has to be desegregated,
and the speed of action will vary
with the local situation. But the
pace of change would have been im-
measurably slower had it not been
for the national decision and the na-
tional leadership of the Warren
Court. The President’s failure to
follow through on the Faubus insur-
rection is a negative illustration of
the same point: without continued
national leadership by the Executive,
obstructionism may prevail for a
long time. Mr. Eisenhower’s hand-
ling of housing, unemployment com-
pensation and school construction
has not been notably better. Result:
inaction or inadequate action.

The challenge is clear: federalism
must not become a mere excuse for
inaction; it must be resuscitated and
transformed into a modern alliance
of national government and metro-
politan areas to provide the sense of
purpose and the vigor which most
urban communities are unable to
develop alone.

(Continued from inside cover)

involved only getting raw data, and
correlating them. I do not think that
this has yet been done by any govern-
ment agency.
E. W. PFEIFFER
University of North Dakota
Grand Forks, N.D.

Ticket of Leave

Dear Sirs: After reading Robb Burlage’s
excellent discussion of “The Silent Fac-
ulty” in your May 16 issue, it saddens
me to recall that Mr. Burlage himself
is a victim of the very bureaucracy
which he criticizes so ably.

Mr. Burlage was removed from his
elective position as editor of The Daily
Texan a short time ago. The reason
for his removal offers a fine example of
the pettiness of some campus adminis-
trators.

His crime: too many parking tickets.

SMILEY ANDERS

Editor, The Daily Reveille

Louisiana State University

Baton Rouge, La.

BOOKS and the AWTS

A Nation of Tabby Cats

REDEDICATION TO FREEDOM.
By Benjamin Ginzburg. Simon &
Schuster. 177 pp. $3.50.

Fred J. Cook
BENJAMIN GINZBURG has written

in Rededication to Freedom an eloquent,
vital book which probes deeply into the
intellectual miasma of witch hunt and
suspicion that has robbed American de-
mocracy of its most precious heritage
from the Founding Fathers—the guar-
antee of individual freedom of thought
and speech and conscience. It is a com-
pact, hard-hitting plea that America be
true to itself and return to the ideals of
personal liberty it was the first to give
to the world. Ginzburg’s book is in ef-
fect a long essay, solidly rooted in fact,
lofty in its dedication to basic American
ideals and eloquent in its language.
Quotable on almost every page, it has
an intellectual kinship to John Stuart
Mill’s famous “Essay on Liberty.” For
our times, Ginzburg is as vital as Mill.

Mill’s basic theme was that “a State,
which dwarfs its men, in order that
they may be more docile instruments
in its hands even for beneficial purposes,
will find that with small men no great
thing can really be accomplished. .. .”
Ginzburg’s treatise is, in a way, the
proof of Mill’s theorem; for, as Ginz-
burg shows, the era of small men is with
us, spawned by the oppressive atmos-
phere of an age in which we have turned
our backs on the principles of liberty
that nurtured the great.

The central theme of Rededication to
Freedom is simply this: You cannot
tamper with the Bill of Rights, you
cannot water it down and weaken it to
hunt Communists without damaging
jiberty irreparably for everyone. Ginz-
burg, for two years research director for
the Senate Subcommittee on Constitu-
tional Rights, says in the foreword that
he discovered “the American people had
been cajoled into giving up an essential
part of its birthright in exchange for
a mess of pottage—and a_ poisonous
mess of pottage at that.”

He points out that we have aban-

FRED J, COOK, New York newspaper
reporter, wrote the special Nation issue,
“The FBI,’ which won the New York
Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award for
the best magazine feature writing of

1958.
14

doned “the basic principle behind the
Bill of Rights” that calls for the State
“to keep its hands. off the expression
and propagation of ideas and opinions—
even of erroneous: ideas: and opinions——
and to confine itself to the regulation
and control, under strict rules of due
process, of physical acts that interfere
with peace and order.” Ginzburg em-
phasizes that the repressive measures
we have embraced have not been used
primarily to hunt Communists, but to
persecute non-Communists and _ to
crush, as far as possible, all liberal
thought. He amply documents this po-
sition. He traces the witch hunt back
to its creator, Martin Dies, the Con-
gressman from Texas, who spearheaded
the conservative attempt to besmirch
Franklin Roosevelt with the suspicion
of a Moscow-inspired radicalism. He
points out that Dies, in his first sum-
mary of his achievements, gave priority
to the claim that he had paralyzed “the
influence of the left-wing element in
the Roosevelt Administration” and dis-
credited “John L. Lewis and the Con-
gress of Industrial Organizations.” Dies
relegated to third place on his com-
mittee’s scroll of honor its activities in
ferreting out Communists and Nazis.
This same theme of anti-liberalism
runs throughout the years-long cultiva-
tion of the myth of an overwhelming
Communist domestic menace. Ginzburg
thrusts a sharp lance through the heart
of the loyalty-security program so dear
to the policemen of the FBI and their
collaborators, the witch-hunters on Con-
gressional committees. He quotes the
National Industrial Conference Board
Study on Industrial Security published
in 1952 as offering this pearl of advice
to the nation’s leading industrialists:

Even if you don’t have a trained
saboteur in hire, industrial security
can pay off in peacetime. It can help
you rid your plant of agitators who
create labor unrest, who promote ex-
cessive grievances, slowdowns and
strikes, and encourage worker an-
tipathy toward management. These
actions cost your company money.

Could there be a more brazen con-
fession of the devious purposes that
have led so. many powerful forces in
America to embrace so enthusiastically
the Communist witch hunt?

Ginzburg points out that the loyalty

screening program, adopted by the Tru-
man administration after it had taken
a beating from the Republicans in the
Congressional elections of 1946, has
spread to cities, counties, states, and to
private groups like large industrial cor-
porations, the television and motion pic-
ture industries and the universities.
Everybody is screening everybody to see
whether he harbors an idea that looks
as if it might be dangerous, or poten-
tially dangerous, or possibly dangerous.
Ginzburg writes:

If we add to all these loyalty-
security programs the free-lance op-
erations of Federal and state “un-
American activities” committees,
which take pot shots at citizens at
random, the total picture is that of
a system of thought control which di-
rectly or indirectly reaches out at
everybody. The oppressive weight of
the system is not to be measured by
the number of persons actually pun-
ished (by loss of jobs or benefits) as
security risks, but by the reluctance
of people to join organizations or to
speak out on any subject that might
get them or their children into se-
curity trouble.

There, in that pungent paragraph that
holds up a mirror to our age, you have
the disgraceful essence of present-day
America. A nation that was born in
revolution, that was founded on ideals
of personal liberty and freedom, has
been turned by the insidious virus of
the never-ending intellectual witch hunt
into a nation of tabby cats fearful of the
shadows of their own possibly irreverent
thoughts.

SOME persons will probably bridle at
Ginzburg’s sweeping denunciation of the
Communist menace as a myth created
out of whole cloth. Conservatives cer-
tainly will, and even liberals will be
divided upon the point. Reinhold Nie-
buhr, who endorses the book in a fore-
word, expresses some careful reserva-
tions; so did Norman Thomas in re-
viewing the work for the Herald Tribune
Book Review. Both seem concerned
about Ginzburg’s strictures regarding
the Alger Hiss and the Julius-Ethel
Rosenberg spy cases. It seems to this
reviewer that Ginzburg has brought
astute common sense to the evaluation
of the so-called Communist menace,
and that he has not given undue weight
to either the Hiss or the Rosenberg
case, both of which belong in any dis-

The Nation

ee ee

;
t
»
k
iL
‘

cussion that deals with the fundamentals
of American freedom—and justice.

Certainly, there were Communists in
America, and certainly some of them
plotted and connived and attempted at
least to engage in espionage. But even
in the harshest years of the great de-
pression the number of Communists in
America remained amazingly low, and
the tribe has since dwindled almost to
the vanishing point. Yet we still have
the alarms, we are still subjected to
fevered indoctrination to get us to ac-
cept the reality of the menace. Ginzburg
believes—and in view of the indisputable
facts who can dispute him?—that noth-
ing could show more clearly the phoni-
ness of the entire deal.

It is a phoniness that has great
pertinency when one has to evaluate a
case as complex and as shocking in its
implications as the Hiss case. I can well
understand the dilemma of the liberals,
having had myself to fight my way
through the maze of prejudice with
which the issue was clouded. The very
name Hiss had become a dirty word
and the symbol of liberal disgrace and
betrayal; and the only alternative to
Hiss’s guilt was that he had been
framed on manufactured evidence—a
monstrous crime against the principles
of justice at which the mind rebels. Only
when one has forced oneself to con-
sider the possibility and to weigh the
evidence as evidence rather than as
prejudice can one begin to appreciate
the significance of the Hiss case. And
when one does, one is shocked—at least
this writer was—by the realization that
the prosecution’s case creaked in so

many places; the fraud was really so
obvious it is almost impossible to be-
lieve it has been accepted as truth by
rational minds. It could not have been,
at least in this writer’s estimation, ex-
cept for the blackout of the mind cre-
ated by the calculated campaign of dis-
tortion and propaganda. And that is
precisely what Ginzburg is writing about.

His book closes on a note of despair
—and of challenge. He obseryes that al-
ways in the past, when the forces of re-
pression tried to tamper with the Bill
of Rights, there were Americans of
courage and of stature who dared to
defy the demagogues and to give the
American people the kind of leadership
that painted the issues clearly. In the
radical witch hunt that followed World
War I, there were men like Senator
Thomas J. Walsh. of Montana and
Charles Evans Hughes and Harlan F.
Stone. The main difference between that
era and this, Ginzburg finds, lies “in
the weakening of the public conscience”
—in the almost complete absence of
men with the courage to speak out. He
closes his book by calling for renewed
dedication to the ideals of liberty that
animated our forefathers. He ends on
this high note:

We who are the heirs of all the
values of Western civilization do not
need to cringe in fear before the
Communist barbarism of Russia and
her satellites. All we need to do is
to re-establish contact with the
spiritual well-springs of our heritage,
and then we shall face the present
and the future with confident faith
and without fear.

Impartial with Passion

FRANCE: A MODERN HISTORY. By
Albert Guérard. University of Michi-
gan Press. 563 pp. $8.75.

Henri Peyre

THE University of Michigan Press has
launched one of the most enterprising
projects of American scholarship and
publishing, and thus far one of the most
uniformly successful: a History of the
Modern World in some fifteen volumes,
six of which have already appeared. The
volume on France, from the Gauls to
the Fifth Republic, required: an un-
common talent for selection and com-
pression, hence the sure mastery of an

HENRI PEYRE is chairman of the
French department, Yale University.

His latest book is The Contemporary
French Novel.

July 4,: 1959

immense material, constantly re-evalu-
ated. by French historians who have
never ceased fighting over the past of
their country. Since it was destined for
an English-speaking audience, the book
had to be relatively impartial; but it
is impartial with passion and not de-
humanized by too much adroit fence
straddling. Finally, it had to be written
with liveliness and with art. The French
have traditionally insisted, more than
the Germans or recent American _his-
torians, that history remain a_ branch
of literature. They would not smile at
Macaulay’s ambition, that history may
replace the latest novel on the lady’s
dressing. table. Albert Guérard has
literary grace. He also has the gift of
coining felicitous phrases and that of
clarity. The sentences of German his-
torians have been compared to those

amphibious animals which dive into a
turbid river and, after stirring up many
eddies, emerge on the other shore with
the verb in their mouths. The sentences —
in this volume are brief and concise;
the style carries the reader along in its
alert sweep. Yet nothing is unduly
simplified. Of all the French-born writers
who adopted American as their working
language, Albert Guérard is, by a long
shot, the most brilliant.

He came to this work, which is the
epitome and the testament of a long
life of thinking and writing, after a
patient preparation. He had long ago
interpreted French civilization, weighed
the impact of the Napoleonic legend
upon French history and _ devoted
volumes to the classical age, to the
relations of literature and society, and
especially to Napoleon III. A historian
of France, like French kings, has his
favorites: Napoleon III, a dreamer and
a romanticist who understood the spirit
of his own times and who encouraged
the only vigorous industrial revolution
the French effected before their present
one, is Guérard’s favorite. He under-
estimates the dismal failures of the
Franco-Prussian War, for which Napo-
leon bears a share of responsibility. But
he is right in rehabilitating the Second
Empire, one of the most fertile intellec-
tual and artistic periods in French his-
tory, on which Guérard, as early as
1913, had written a remarkable book
bearing the title, French Prophets of
Yesterday.

THE = general organization of the
volume is satisfying: prehistory receives
a few pages, the Middle Ages are treated
with sympathy and without the attempt
of neo-Scholastic historians to reduce
its conflicts and its disorder to a har-
monious orthodoxy. Michelet is, to any
historian of France, the model for the
chapters on the Renaissance, and Gué-
rard grants his due to the greatest as
well as the least scientific of French
historians. The age of Louis XIV is
treated with fairness and wisdom. Gué-
rard keeps shy of the preposterous re-
evaluation of Louis XV as the most
admirable of kings, proposed by the
academician Pierre Gaxotte and other
rightists in France. It has been a

AUTHORS WANTED
BY N.Y. PUBLISHER

New York, N. Y¥.—One of the nation’s largest
hook publishers ts seeking manuscripts of
all types—fiction, non-fiction, puetry. Spect-
al attention to new writers. If your work 1s
ready for publication, send for booklet No.
103—It’s free. Vantage Press, Inc., 120 West
Sist Street, New York 1, New York.

calainiey for the country that the weight
of forceful political thinking and (after
Michelet, Louis Blanc and Lamartine)
a great deal of the historical interpreta-
tion of the French past have been
accomplished by men who were anti-
democratic.

The chapters on the Third Republic
are scrupulously fair and shift the em-
phasis from political events and from
parliamentary life to intellectual history
and to the people rather than to their
ephemeral rulers. In the truly remark-
able chapters devoted to the events of
World War II and its aftermath, in-
cluding illuminating pages on France
overseas and on de Gaulle’s_ recent
policy, Guérard again displays lucid
impartiality.

IMPECCABLE historian that he is in
fulfilling Ranke’s precept to relate the
past as it happened and, as V. H.
Galbraith adds, “so far as we know it,”
Guérard is no historicist. He does not
agree that the history of a nation is a
sufficient explanation thereof and that
a country is fully comprehended in its
own development. He is no Hegelian,
unwilling to make room for the irration-
al, for the unconscious surges in the
life of a nation, for myths and re-
currences of collective and destructive
violence in the most civilized of peoples.

His introductory chapter expounds,
modestly, his philosophy of history. He
repudiates determinism as Michelet had
done eloquently, nationalism, or the sad
belief of pessimists like Schopenhauer
that history is a meaningless recurrence
of forces and events to which the human
mind strives to attach significance. He
knows that we are bound to interpret
facts from their consequences and that
the present therefore serves as a code
which each generation projects upon the
past so as to elicit a new interpretation
of its secrets. His pilgrimage through
ten or fifteen centuries of French history
is a pious one but also the fervent
voyage of a staunch believer in freedom
and in progress.

Specialists may regret that social
sciences, and especially the fashionable

cultural anthropology, have been rela-

tively neglected in their contribution to
ustorical thought. Economic history, to
vhich Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre

_ resorted with originality to explain the

ed
=

Your Book

Published!

r famous plan has launched 700 authors. We
t, publish, advertise, distribute. Send manu-
pt for free report or write for Brochure n7

aguas PRESS, 101 5th AVE., NEW YORK 3

: i ,

foal Se

AB!
history of science and ‘technology.

France, the struggles between the cities |

and the country, then the ascent of

the bourgeoisie, the present rise of a —

new class of jewnes patrons and of a
technological and “Americanized” labor
group averse to ideological feuds, might
well have been stressed more firmly.
The tone of Albert Guérard is urbane,
cordial, perhaps a trifle old-fashioned
and secretly nostalgic for the past cen-

Antic Beyond Kafka

THE EMPIRE CITY. By Paul Good-
man. Bobbs-Merrill. 621 pp. $6.95.

Earl H. Rovit

SATIRE has traditionally concerned it-
self with possible reforms. It has char-
acteristically aimed at some specific mal-
functioning of society, dramatized in the
grotesque thought and behavior of a
selected group of characters. In order to
achieve purgation by ridicule, it has
preferred to mount its attacks where it
could fight with a possible chance of
success; that is, where its criticisms
could bring clarity and health — if only
for a brief aesthetic moment — to a
diseased portion of reality.

EARL H. ROVIT is a member of the
English department of the University of
Lowisville.

Virtuous Pagan
A Last View of Professor Emeritus J. M. M. 1871-1956
in the Stacks of the College Library

Huge, from this ruinous Platonic cave,
His pagan shadow haunts the river fog— a
And there! Reed-pierced Sebastian, hung by the heels, i.
His Christian, lower image under stands. if F

Flame gnaws its last of wick. The great head stares,
Cave-caught. The mist is lifting. These are books—

Or trees?—and this tiled alley, a trout stream.

A cave of books—book-world, so like a cave.

The delicate spines of dryads everywhere:

Angels? The sweet girls, beautiful as trout,

Drift down the tiers of books. Reach! Reach! The mist again.

This mind, once pickerel-swift and. pickerel-still,
Hung on its mucous film in the fluid cave
Waiting an opening in murky thought ©

To dart the spoon-snout ruthlessness of “Why??—
Tearing away the soft assumption-weed.

Clear wars of conscience! Stack lights like planets turning
Ring the corona of this puzzled head.
All the great causes, shut in covers, swirl
Until, across our pale, fluorescent days,
Light beyond light of his vast shadow falls
To measure us, who pause, speintt one a

Aye
‘al % n a ay ue i 4
a he bis
a & *
i

Bue re is no. sign of “crabbed age”
in this history of France. It is the swan
song of a gifted and indefatigable writer;
it will strike long echoes in the minds —
of several generations of readers and of ©
students to come. The work is one of —
reference, of daily usefulness, and also
one which will provide joy and incite
many minds to further fruitful reflection. a

But the twentieth century has seen a
frantic dislocation of values. Unable to § *
anticipate an automatic acceptance of
his “goods” and “bads,” the humorist
cannot be sure that the reader will rec- _
ognize a grotesque as a grotesque and
make the appropriate purgative re- 5
sponse. He cannot even be sure that —
rational intelligence (traditionally the %
prime weapon in the humorist’s armory) os
has any longer a commanding place in — 5
the scheme of things. Accordingly, ever
since Kafka turned a man into a cock- |
roach, satire has been forced to grapple § 9
with broader impossibilities and posture
in increasingly antic attitudes. We may a
even have reached a point where, as in
Lolita or Catcher in the Rye, the mage? a
successful satirical effect can be achieved — s ,
in what Mr. Goodman might call “the —
presence of the absence of humor.”

ohana

aa ad

4 . Te fe

of sich were published previously, i is a
i? ve-part picaresque fantasy, centered
3" 2a distinctive group of spiritual
Bohemians, living in what is frequently
New York City, from the late 1930s to
the present. Although various members
of the group dominate the action spas-
modically — Eliphaz, a modern Old
Testament prophet and millionaire; his
son and daughter, Arthur and Emily; the
Alger children, Horatio, Lothario and
~ Laura; and a Dutch friend and intimate
of all the others, Mynheer Duyck Duy-
vendak — it is clear that the group it-
self is meant to have the unity of a
main character, reacting and changing
as one composite personality under the
“successive pressures of our time, even
while the segments of that personality
act out their own individual roles,

IF THERE is a single protagonist in the
novel, it is Horatio, whose life is traced
from his early truant years on the
streets of New York (he has canceled
himself from society by destroying all
documentary evidence of his existence),
_ through his symbolic adoption by Eli-
_ phaz, his Wagnerian love affair with

Rosalind, his discovery that he can
— “fly,” to ‘his quasi-acceptance of at least
are token reconciliation with the burdens
of twentieth-century mores. Around this
structural thread the other characters

gyrate in their own eccentric orbits —
_ some terminating in one or another kind
of violent death, others achieving varied
successful adjustments between their

_ own needs and the demands of the world.
q The story-line, one hastens to say, is
the least significant aspect of the novel;
_ like the fantastic, rationally incoherent
“plot” of a dream, it merely provides a
_ frame on which allegorical fragments and
ymbolic tableaux can be hung. And as

ail - from ribald anecdotes and nities
ee prose poems and outright lectures.
ee eeuent form and potpourri of

te purposefully defy category. Be-
use he is attempting to discover a
workable system of values in our im-
Pp robable society, Goodman is loath to
adopt the traditional devices of fiction:

olve an unwilling acceptance of the

tmoded values of the pie Hence the

co desires to see man achieve a
eal aumiy. of human eae

a Third In Serton , ear)

Pe bh a eee ee OY Al epee, et
ee a ; das a ee
> 4 * "| ay ‘

e City, aha ‘first two parts

pics Fourth of July Qizsssrrrarernrnrnencnanens

about EF: REED OM

T In what great country are three journalists now being
threatened with imprisonment or death for their dissenting

opinions?
ANS. ( ) Russia. (

) Poland.

( ) England. ( ) USA.

2 How long has their government kept them under the shedow
and harassment of this prosecution?

ANS. ( ) 6 months.

) A year. ( ) Since 1956.

3 What is the oft-proclaimed policy of the nation where this

is happening?

ANS. (_ ) Thought control.

( ) Freedom of thought, free-

dom of speech, freedom of press.

Facts Relevant to the Answers:

In San Francisco, more than three years ago, the editors of an

American-owned magazine, ‘
for “sedition”

‘China Monthly Review,”
because of what they thought, wrote ‘and published.

were indicted

When “sedition” brought a mistrial last January, a new charge of “trea-

son” was clapped on.

Then silence fell . .
endlessly. .

. delay follows delay ...

the shadow hovers

The bem press has denounced this continuing prosecution. The
American Civil Liberties Union of Northern Caltorna called the sedi-
tion indictment “a serious threat to fundamental liberties.” The national

ACLU has agreed.

— AND ONE MORE QUESTION

How much longer can a nation calling itself Leader of the
Free World continue on such a course?

What You Can Do

In this season of the celebration of American democracy’s birth,
we ask all lovers of freedom to write their Senators, their Representa-

tives, and Attorney General
William P. Rogers in Washing-
ton, asking that the prosecu-
tion of American journalists
John W. Powell, Sylvia Powell
and Julian Schuman be with-
drawn.

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C1 I have written to Washington
requesting withdrawal of the
prosecution.

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nature for Goodman, to become a
mechanical unit, denatured for com-
munal efficiency, conditioned into an
automaton whose repressed energies are
intermittently released in the socially ap-
proved channels of war, economic ex-
ploitation, petty brutalities and endless,
unproductive “busy work.” On the other
hand, and despite his exaltation of free
glandular expression, Goodman cannot
conceive of meaningful human existence
without such un-animal commodities as
great literature, music and highly eru-
dite theoretical chatter. How to achieve
the Golden Age in which culture is mar-
ried to nature is the major impossibility
with which the author has struggled,
groped and compromised over the
twenty-year period in which he has been
writing this book.

THE first part of the novel, The
Grand Piano, was published in 1942. It
is dominated by the Marxist solution.
Society based on a corrupting exchange-
value economy must be destroyed. Only

out of its ashes can a healthy com-

munity, unhampered by an inhuman
tyranny of monetary valuation, emerge.
Here, since the issues are relatively
simplified, Goodman comes closest to
writing traditional satire, vaguely rem-
iniscent of Nathanael West’s A Cool
Million. In the next section, The State
of Nature (1946), the optimism of
Marxism — an optimism based on a
fundamental faith in man — becomes
clouded. This section culminates, not as
in the first part with a purposive ex-
plosion of a bomb in a piano, but rather
with a perverse riot of incendiarism.

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The final three sections F shite from the
possibilities of social revolution to a
Freudian concern with personal adjust-
ment. Goodman seems to be working
for gradual evolution within the frame
of what-is, changing his. emphasis from
the evils of society which make man
detestable, to facing the weaknesses in
man which allow society to become
corrupting. Such is the progressive theo-
retical arc of the book, but the general-
ization must be qualified by a recogni-
tion of the quixotic dance of Goodman’s
intelligence; it cascades opinions at. any
or no provocation, and over a range of
areas from politics and psychology to
aesthetics and community planning.

Empire City can be read for transient
amusement; it can be read for its social
criticism; it can be read tor edification.
Although it has some “traditionally”
humorous episodes, its value will ulti-
mately be judged by whether Goodman,
an avant-garde humorist, succeeds in
evoking both the laughter and the hor-
ror which our culture presents, “in the
presence of the absence of humor,” as
the sole aesthetic solution to an impos-
sible dilemma. It is certain, at any rate,
that he has engaged the dilemma with
consistent integrity and delight, and the
book stands well. as the personal docu-
ment of one man attempting to be: free.

ART

Fairfield Porter

THE Metropolitan Museum is now ex-
hibiting downstairs, along with its other
El Grecos, its newly acquired Vision of
St. John the Evangelist, painted at the
end of the artist’s life for the hospital
of St. John the Baptist in Toledo, The
painting has just. been restored, which
was presumably necessary, although
Mr. Rousseau, curator. of paintings,
says that the original paint surface was
in good condition. “During its long
life, its genuine glazes had not been
eroded or damaged, though it had been
cleaned at various times. It- had, how-
ever, been previously restored, and con-
siderable repainting had been done in
the process” which showed in a_ dis-
coloration in the repainted areas that
no longer matched the original paint.
Every age has its own ideas of the value
of the past, and sees the past differ-
ently. It is probably not out of the way

MAURICE GROSSER is at present in
North Africa, During his absence we

shall. publish occasional guest coluanns.

This is the second contributed by L ATR-
FIELD PORTER, — and eritic.

=. y " pot’? ™ ey ‘ ae
to say that the present restorers of this ™
painting understand El Greco in terms

of twentieth-century Expressionism.

Mr. Rousseau illustrates his article in
the June Bulletin of the Metropolitan
Museum with a photograph of the
painting before restoration and with a
color version of the present state. Be-
fore the most recent restoration the
values had both more unity and more
variety, and the effect of these photo-
graphs is that the “before” version was
masterly, and the “after” version is an
interpretation by a talented pupil. For
instance, in the picture as now shown,
the face of St. John is modeled from a
light tone to a dark tone that makes
the dark half separate from the head;
the same is true of the darks and lights

“in his sleeves and ‘draperies, which be-

come a series of lights and darks that
do not connect with the figure as a
single entity. ‘This’ criticism holds also
for the red drapery at his feet; for the
ground, in which substance is lost,
making the foremost part a hole, where
it seems ‘not to have been so_ before.
The movement of the sky; which for-
merly had a rhythm and a flow, is now
jerky and abrupt. There is a_ similar
change ‘in the lights and darks in the
row of seven nudes: the one nearest St.
John and ‘the second from the right
have'lost Opacity and that diminishes
their physical’ presence in the rhythm
of the composition. The darks are now.
all more like one another and the lights
are too, which reduces the resonance
of the composition. There is a coarsen-
ing and an emphasis’ of the obvious.

When one criticizes restoration, one is
answered in scientific terms; or, as fol-
lows: “Would you want arms put on
the Venus de Milo?” Restoration today
leans on science and disparages. intui-
tion. This has its drawbacks, as well
as its good points. It seems to imply
that everything is understandable in
the way that a proposition in high
school physics is. Or if not, then it is
suspect. And there is a strong tendency
to estimate the value of paintings in
terms. of what is familiar, to judge the
past by present fashions, like the re-
mark of an English critic in praise of
the cleaning of the Titians in the Lon-
don National Gallery, that one can now
see that Titian is another Renoir. So
this El Greco is shown to be like an
Expressionist painting, with the impli-
cation that that is one of its significant

merits. The flatness, the black outlines, a

the paint put on for its own sake are
qualities that do exist in El Greeo, and
are like Expressionism. But I doubt that
for El Greco the end was included with- —
in the means of painting — rather th

| | Fh hath 10}
[ A

means of painting contributed towards
a whole that was not first of all aesthetic.
And if for a modern painter the means
are the ends, it is not at all necessary
to use El Greco’s means rather than,
say, Raphael’ s, as an example. I base
my opinion on what El Greco was from
his paintings in the Escorial outside
Madrid, which like all the paintings
there have retained a freshness unseen
anywhere else in Europe. This is a place
free from industrial smoke, with a dry
climate favorable to paintings. I doubt
that they have been restored.

My criticism of much restoration is
that, for all its science, it is not artistic
enough. Aesthetically the present restor-
ation is less than one could wish for.
The eccentricity of El Grecd’s style ac-
tually expressed mére vividly than his
contemporaries the baroque that it
seemed to deviate from. The restorers
see the vividness as if separated from its
ambience, and their over-emphasis di-
minishes this vividness. They make him
into a mannerist. A principle of Baroque
composition that E] Greco exploited is
the question-and-answer motion of
curved forms against and in continua-
tion of each other. This restoration tries
to separate him from the Baroque and
place him among the Expressionists.

FILMS
Robert Hatch

SOME early viewers have alleged that
Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries is
symbolically enigmatic or otherwise
obscure. They must be uncommonly
serene people, for no one who has ever
looked into himself with astonished
disgust or rueful acknowledgment of the
lateness of the hour can go seriously
astray at this picture. Bergman (his
more difficult The Seventh Seal was
shown here several months ago) has
learned everything the French and Ger-
man experimenters had to teach of
film magic, and uses symbolism and
association with the fluent ease of mas-
tery. But his evocations are never for
sensation and they are never vague—
he is a surgeon-poet.

A reviewer must exercise some tact
in discussing this picture. It is a work
of such high and subtle art that the
temptation is to run in with a smother
of adjectives and a display of analytical
explanation. The picture will not stand
the heaviness — it is not in the heroic
or didactic mold. The appropriate re-
action is gratitude, not ostentatious ap-
preciation,

July 4, 1959

Wild Strawberries recounts 2 day’s
experience in a shaken and desperately
repining old man. The day has begun
badly in a nightmare baleful with the
furniture of estrangement, confusion
and death. The old man travels by car
all that day to attend an academic
conference that will honor him for a
half-century of distinguished contribu-
tion to science. The route carries him
through the neighborhood of his youth
and his hours are filled by half-dreamed
memories and half-remembered fanta-
sies. Old injuries inflicted by the cruel-
ty of self-absorption or the inadequacies
of sympathy and imagination torment
him — death is his concern, but death
of the heart more than death of the
body. He accuses himself; worse still,
he accuses those who meant most to
him: the nostalgia of wild strawberries
now recalls a coldness of ultimate hell.
And yet.

With him, in the persons of his
daughter-in-law and three hitchhiking
rovers, ride life and love and _ the
warmth of passionate concern. The
travelers meet hatred on the road (a
couple made mad by the existence of
each other) and they put it from them.
They fight and tumble, laugh, tell
thrusting truths and force wild flowers
and their terrors into the old man’s
hands. Wonderfully enough, he does not
seem dead to them. They would not
believe his dreams and by evening he
finds that he no longer needs to re-
count them. At the end, one vision
comes to him—from very early in his
childhood—that has escaped the ice.

I cannot begin to detail the apt and
lovely devices by which Bergman con-
veys this excursion into a man’s spirit.
Its evocations are never pretentious,
never sentimental —though often ten-
der and usually painful. It is a ruth-
less lyricism that does not despair.
Wild Strawberries is the testament, I
suspect quite directly personal, of a
man who thoroughly understands how
terrible it is to be’a human being, and
who is glad to accept the consequences.
The screen has never been used with
greater art or for more humane ends.

SAMUEL GOLDWYN’S production of
Porgy and Bess, directed by Otto Pre-
minger, strikes me as a little coarse-
grained. But I could be wrong. If you
showed me a reproduction of the “Pri-
mavera” enlarged to the size of the
Green Mountains, and asked me for an
opinion of it while hitting me over the
head with a tin can filled with dried
peas, I might offer the bizarre judgment

that Botticelli is coarse. The projection
process known as Todd-AO is plain

misery — too large, too loud, with close-
ups used as blunt instruments and voices
(rarely synchronized to mouths) blaring
“stereophonically” from implausible
nooks-and-corners. I sat right in the
center of the Warner Theatre, presum-
ably a good seat, and I emerged from
the place after two and a half hours
feeling that I had come through a rigor-
ous test of nerve stamina with no worse
after-effects than a sharp headache.

So it is difficult to speak with assur-
ance about the performance as separate
from the presentation. I got the impres-
sion that its quality is less that of folk
opera than of a comic strip set to music.
Its details are very “real”—the violence,
the sex, the superstition, the ugly ar-
rogance of white authority; it 1s sweaty
work. As a result of this factual tone,
when Porgy at the end gets into his
goat cart and takes off for New York
in pursuit of Bess, the gesture seems gro-
tesquely ignorant and not at all poetic.

Sidney Poitier is a splendidly strong,
open-faced Porgy; Dorothy Dandridge
a darling, defenseless Bess. Sammy
Davis, Jr. has the style for Sportin’ Life
and leads the company through a bril-
liantly orgiastic rendition of “It Ain’t
Necessarily So.” The fact that he sug-
gests too strongly a sophisticated enter-
tainer aping a small-town rascal may be
less a matter of his own limitations than
of the over-all failure to catch the love
in the Gershwin-Heyward classic.

In places the score has been vulgar-
ized for easy emotional effect, but there
are some fine voices in the cast — both
principals and chorus. I was never sure
whether the people I saw were endowed

with the voices I heard (certainly they
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camera was on them),
that that is not very important in this
great machine product. The cast had the
talent for Porgy and Bess, but Mr.
Goldwyn and Mr. Preminger have made
them little more than supernumeraries
to sensation.

TOWARD the end of The Nun’s Story,
Sister Luke, the heroine, looks up to
God and cries: “I can obey no longer.
What I do from now on is between You
and me alone.” That. is the great, ter-
rible, emancipating cry of Protestant-
ism, and I doubt that anyone heir to
the Protestant tradition. could easily
suppress a cheer. Catholic acceptance
of The Nun’s. Story. puzzled me when I
read the book; it puzzles me still more
when I see this scrupulous and exciting
film, adaptation. The. moral seems to
me unmistakable: Let those who can
seek .peace in abasement before. God;
only the great spirits will find that they
must meet Him face to face. Sister Luke
is incomparably the greatest spirit in
the story and at the end she renounces
her vows and returns to the world. It is
a very lonely,. very painful moment, but
I cannot interpret it as anything but a
victory for the freedom .of conscience
without which, religion has no meaning.
Catholics, I. realize, must. understand the
story differently.

Religious perplexities aside, the ‘pic-
ture, directed by Fred Zinnemann and
with. Audrey Hepburn in the title role
(wonderfully supported by Dame Edith
Evans, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Mildred
Dunnock and Peter Finch, among
others), is an eventful and intelligent
rendering of Kathryn Hulme’s very in-
telligent book. Robert Anderson pre-
pared the screenplay. The picture is a
work of physical beauty — it occurred
to me, as I enjoyed the chaste, rich
elegance of the ecclesiastical interiors
and the infinitely sophisticated style of
the religious garments, that the sin of
aesthetic gratification must be a com-
mon temptation in the monastic life.

Miss Hepburn plays with fire, humor
and a good deal of convincing inner
agony. Her scenes as a surgical nurse in
the African mission hospital, with Mr.
Finch as the brilliant, godless Dr. Fort-
unati, have the clash and joy of a well-
matched love affair —and that, in all
but fact, is what the relationship really
is. I cannot pretend that Miss Hepburn
brings much suspense to her dilemma —
her Sister Luke is no more capable of
humility than she is of growing a beard
— but there was never much suspense
in the story as originally told. The
tragedy of the story — and the quality
that gives the picture its memorable

Bt Bile! fel ie Sie cai he lel Me

Bec ie baie’ a pirl shea pend ee
youth attempting by powerful will to
subdue a spirit that nothing short of
death could overwhelm.

A SMALL independent film company
consisting of Terry Sanders, producer,
and Denis Sanders, director, and with
the assistance of Walter Newman on
the script, has carried out a striking
experiment in Crime and Punishment,
USA, Is it “successful”? Probably not
entirely, but it is engrossing to watch
and worth thinking about.

The story runs somewhat jerkily, as
though on ill-laid tracks. Those tracks
are Dostoevski’s narrative, which the
picture treats respectfully but in neces-
sarily telescoped form. I believe, with-
out making a check, that the main
events of the story and the main char-
acters are covered, but the film strains
as it makes each famous rendezvous.

Then, these one-for-one equivalents
do not work as well in fact as they
promise in theory. Crime and. Punish-
ment is a “universal” story, but that
doesn’t quite mean that you -can_ re-
stage it intact anywhere and in any time
you please. Mr. Newman has written
a convincing new dialogue for the per-
formers, but the emotional content and
the relationships have been left very
much as Dostoevski conceived them.
Thus the great scenes between the boy
and the policeman, though well played
by George Hamilton and Frank Silvera,
feel awkward. The basic psychology may
be sound, but the surface behavior. is
jarring to the. point where you can ac-
cept it only by reminding yourself that
these two antagonists are re-enacting a
famous duel. The whole picture, in fact,
takes.on the false glitter of ingenuity:
it becomes amusing to see that the near-
est equivalent to Sonia’s bedroom is a
motel cubicle.

On the other hand, the picture carries
out its scheme with style and _ serious
intent. This is a “poor” picture, shot at
some California “muscle beach,” made
in real locations and with natural light
wherever possible. It. has an honest
look. The American Raskolnikov, a kind
of scrupulous Leopold, lives in a strange
poured-concrete apartment house which
very probably exists but which looks
hauntingly appropriate as a_ breeding
place of neurotic glory.

The cast is beautifully chosen, all of
them new faces to me except for Silvera.
George Hamilton is quiet, appealing, ap-
palling, poisonously sweet and hypnotic,
He makes the superman delusion quite
persuasive — the only trouble is that
the youth he plays would have read —
Crime ana Punishment,

\ Eo f oe
The ? N NAT TION

— f i mn

18
19
21
22

23
24

1
2

_ but on time. (9)

i
ee Pe

fi a
fee
es
eet tT | ee
eo

aarossword Puzzle No. 827

By FRANK W. LEWIS

ee a bl

ee acon

ss Jannnne

et te een
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ACROSS:

and 20 down Drug heat at Bucking-
ham? (8, 2, 3, 5)

Drive back, but not well back. (5)
Made a light medium change? (9)
Cursed on the stage, especially in
the South. (7)

Concerning the agreement,
hang on! (7)

Comes close to inter-polar receiving
apparatus. (5)

i). not in the case of Sangfroid!
9

To weep about masculine haziness
may be a study in itself. (9)
ne the end of 14 across in trials.
5

ee a conclusion with capital.
7)

In Mitty, somewhat out of char-
acter. (4, 3)

Tackle taking a lateral change of
position sometimes automatic. (9)
Nine, when it comes to advance. (5)
ao agents make instincts deaf.

)

don’t

DOWN:
Holding the powder on your account,
perhaps? (8, 6)
Attachment of a very soft finish,

8 Lave with these in the bank? (They
floaty)? Ci)! =.

4 Set according to the middle of the
group? (5)

5 Make a gift—and a conservative one
—at time of gift-giving. (9)

6 Crept upon the ground. (7)

7 One of the film crowd? (5)

8 Evident masters of the Madison
Avenue approach. (14)

14 A little force required to give cot-
ton to a wild animal! (9)

15 Internal combusion? (9)

17 Takes a stand with its sins, pos-
sibly. (7)

18 Such a type might be a telephone.
(7)

20 See 1 across

21 It is up to the part given in 5, per-
haps. (5)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 826
ACROSS: 1, 6 and 10 The Flight of the
Bumblebee; 9 Piper; 11 Concourse; 12
Gregg; 18 Edict; 15 Imputable; 18 Can-
noneer; 19 Scion; 20 Slush; 22 Stam-
pedes; 26 Short; 27 Evens; 28 Descend-
ed. DOWN: 1 Topic; 2 and 25 Expan-
sion bracelets; 3 Largo; 4 Gabardine;
5 Tempe; 6 Obligates; 7 Table; 8 Ever-
green; 18 Exeusable; 14 Toothless; 16
Parnassus; 17 Blindfold; 21 Usage; 22
Stead; 23 Paste; 24 Sated.

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ARTS in, the SUN

There’s no off-season for the creative artist: writers write, musicians play, painters
paint, actors act—and reviewers review. The Nation’s “BOOKS and the ARTS” section
promises much for the indolent vacationer who limits his exercise to lively reading. From
Italy, William Weaver will cover the Spoleto music and theatre festival; from Paris, Elliott
Stein will send a Letter dealing with French newspaper censorship. Leonard Feldman, who
writes for The Jazz Review, is due for a review of European jazz (dateline: Paris or Berlin,
we're not yet certain). Painters and seulptors will pass under the discerning eyes of Fairfield
Porter, artist and critic, and Leslie Katz, publisher of Arts. Books? You will be kept abreast
of the best: Gerald Holton, editor of Daedalus, reviewing Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers,
for instance; Marc Blitzstein reviewing The World of Bertolt Brecht; and James M. Burns
and George Dangerfield reviewing, respectively, Earl Mazo’s Richard Nixon and Richard

Rovere’s Senator Joe McCarthy.

This summer, too, the “BOOKS and the ARTS” section introduces a new architectural
column by Walter McQuade. And, of course, there will be Harold Clurman on the theatre
(if Broadway will be in the doldrums, Stratford, Conn., won’t), and Robert Hatch will re-
mind you of what you are missing in pleasant, air-cooled movie houses,

If you rely on getting The Nation from the newsstand , now is a good time to subscribe.
Not many rural newsstands carry The Nation.

THE NATION, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York 14_
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( Oo i Ay (leu

ee oe ———

. | fe wit
+ .

i
“or tw * bo +44
’ ¢

ahha ; Py * ¥

_ “LA GANGRENE’
_ The Hitler Heritage in Paris

Roland N. Murdock

HORE CECOCOSOOOEEESE OOOEO

INVASION BY ROWBOAT
New Ploy in the Caribbean

Carleton Beals

SOURCE of NIXON’S STRENGTH
A Review of ‘Richard Nixon’

LETTERS

School Solvency

Dear Sirs: Regarding Superintendent
Gragg’s plan for “Merit Pay for Teach-
ers” (The Nation, June 13), one must
keep in mind, first, that the school
superintendent’s primary function has
become the maintenance of the fiscal
solvency of his district. While always
listed first among his duties is the im-
provement of instruction, in practice a
superintendent is rarely dismissed for
alleged faults that do not stem almost
entirely from money matters. This can
be reasonably assumed considering that
school-board members are generally busi-
nessmen who judge the work of the
superintendent in the single area of
schools with which they are familiar.
It follows, then, that perpetuating a
financially sound school system depends
on the employment of teachers at the
lowest possible cost. The various state
tenure laws for teachers evolved as
necessary regulations over abuses in the
employment of teachers by superin-
tendents eager to effect savings. The
most flagrant abuse is the discharging
of a teacher without cause after a few
years’ service, replacing him with a be-
ginner who accepts a much reduced
salary. Is there evidence of any school
board dismissing a superintendent for
conduct of this nature?

Secondly, it should be realized that...
when a conflict of interest between the
school board and the teachers ensues,
as it often does over salary, the super-
intendent, as a condition of his employ-
ment, must eventually decide in favor
of the school board. To believe, as
Superintendent Gragg does, that school
boards would not use merit pay as a
lever to reduce teachers’ salaries, if con-
ditions were favorable, is simply not to
admit to harsh realities.

Thirdly, under existing budgetary
Iimitations of most school systems, a
merit-pay plan will eventually adjust
itself to a provision for a fixed percentage
of teachers to receive increases. Because
of lack of money, it would not be
possible to pay all deserving teachers
increases. To know that one deserves an
increase, but is denied it because of a
shortage of funds, seriously impairs
morale.

Lastly, the essential condition for the
ultimate success of merit pay, which in
itself can be a valuable idea, rests on
the control of the employment of teach-
ers and their administrators by the
teaching profession itself. If teachers
would labor for the control of their pro-

fession, the problem of the mediocre or
lazy teacher could be solved without the
risks inherent in the merit-pay plan

described by Superintendent Gragg.
Patrick GROFF
Assistant Professor of Education
San Diego State College

San Diego, Calif.

SOS from the Phoenix

Dear Sirs: Since November 15, when you
ran the article, “The Forbidden Voyage,”
written by my husband, Earle E.
Reynolds, about his trip on the Phoenix
into the Pacific bomb-test area last
summer, we have had many letters of
support from your readers. As you may
know, the U. S. Court of Appeals has
reversed my husband’s conviction in the
case, and a retrial has been ordered.

So, in effect, the Reynolds family
must start all over again. But we need
financial help. For this purpose, the
Phoenix Defense Fund has been set up;
the address is P. O. Box 5199, Honolulu,
Hawaii.

We hope that your readers will
contribute.

(Mrs.) BArBara LEONARD REYNOLDS
Honolulu, Hawau

Any Joiners?

Dear Sirs: 1 am a veteran and am ex-
ploring the advisability of forming an-
other veterans’ organization, to be
known as the VUW (Veterans of Useless
Wars). We always find out too late that
we should have stayed out of the last
war we were in....

Would like to hear from any veterans
interested.

C. SHaw

P.O. Bow 1552

Savannah, Ga.

Bull’s Eye

Dear Sirs: This letter is, primarily, to
congratulate you for David Cort’s article,
“Arms and the Man,” in the May 23,
1959 issue.

Having written many articles about
guns myself, I am well aware that gun
addicts are an opinionated lot. You won’t
be surprised, therefore, if I add, mildly,
that I was sorry to see the statement in
your article that “the hand gun couldn’t
hit a horse at twenty-five feet, except
by accident.” I can personally demon-
strate that those guns were perfectly
capable of very workmanlike perform-
ance indeed at ranges out to and even
beyond a hundred yards. One of Bill
Hickok’s killings was accomplished with
cap and ball revolver, at a range (meas-
urable today) of eighty-seven yards.

Wyatt Earp said, in his own book, that |
he could use his revolvers effectively at |
100 yards, and I see no reason to doubt |
him. I can, and I suspect that Mr. Earp |
was better with the “6’s” than I am.

E. B. Mann |
Editor, Guns
Skokie, Til. 4

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
21 '@

ARTICLES

23 @ “La Gangrene”: The Hitler
Heritage in Paris
by ROLAND N. MURDOCK
27 '@ Invasion by Rowboat
by CARLETON BEALS
29 '@ “Toonder” on the Right
by ROGER KAHN
31 '@ Crime in a Changing Society:
The Luxury of Punishment
by GRESHAM M. SYKES

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

34 '@ The Source of Nixon’s Strength
by JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS
34 '@ From the Gradual Grass (poem)
by WILLIAM STAFFORD
35 '@ Last View of Yankee City
by W. G. McLOUGHLIN
36 ‘@ Hamlet Off Stage
by ALLARDYCE NICOLL
37 '@ Obituary for a Building
by LESLIN KATZ
38 '@ Records
by LESTER TRIMBLE
39 '@ Films
by ROBERT HATCH
Crossword Puzzle (opp. 40)
by FRANK W. LEWIS ;
HL

George G. Kirstein, Publisher
Carey McWilliams, Hditor .
Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Hditor (|
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts |

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art

M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, Buropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, July 18, 1959, Vol. 189, No. 2

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Meat
eee

ch.

we *

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JULY 18, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 2

NATION

EDITORIALS

The Contagion of Sanity

When, in the realm of politics, a truly egregious er-
ror has been made, it takes time for its inherent lunacy
to reach full-blown proportions. It takes time, again,
to reverse the process and return to normal levels of
political folly. In the matter of nuclear policy, the
agonizing reappraisal has scarcely begun in the United
States, but in Britain it is well advanced and gaining
momentum. At first no one objected to national suicide
except a few left-wing Laborites, but now the con-
tagion of sanity has spread so far that the third largest
union in Britain, the General and Municipal Workers,
has come out for unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Other big unions are contemplating the same step. This
transfixes Hugh Gaitskell on the horns of a dilemma.
It is repugnant to Mr. Gaitskell to admit that Britain
is not really a nuclear power in the sense that the United
States and the Soviet Union are. Britain’s do-it-your-
self stockpile is meager and the only means of deliver-
ing it is a small and obsolescent bomber fleet. The other
horn of the dilemma is that a leader cannot afford to
lag too far behind his constituents.

The problem is, then, to avoid the humiliation of a
forthright change in policy. The suggested maneuver
is for Britain to come forward as the chief founding
member of a “non-nuclear club,” whose other members
would be the nations which, as of now, lack nuclear
capability. These countries will generously renounce
what they do not have, pledging themselves not to test,
manufacture or possess nuclear weapons; Britain, even
more generously, will then make the same renunciation,
all of course subject to various conditions.

But then, what about France, which has claims to
charter membership second only to those of Britain?
Hell or high water, General de Gaulle is bent on ex-
ploding an atomic bomb this year in the Sahara. He
wants to be a member of a nuclear club, not a non-
nuclear club. True, one bomb won’t make him a mem-
ber of anything, but it will be a step toward the gran-
deur for which he yearns (question: the grandeur de-
scribed by Mr. Murdock on page 23 of this issue? ).
Why should the other nucleonically impotent powers
reconcile themselves to their distressing condition, any
more than France? To make the situation more com-

plicated, France is forcing General Norstad to pull

his NATO fighter-bombers out of France, because de
Gaulle cannot bear the thought of bombs which, though
on French soil for the defense of France, are under
NATO (American) control. And on the other side of
the world Red China, imbued with the Chinese version
of la gloire, may soon be testing a nuclear device.

Nobody seems to want to belong to the proposed
club on the proposed terms. The reception might be
better if Britain renounced unilaterally; at least that
would set a striking example. Such a course is of course
almost unthinkable, but if you have made a big mistake,
it takes a big action to rectify it.

The Nucleus of Resistance

In the United States we are not so fortunate as to
have a major political party debating whether nuclear
armaments are not a greater menace to the possessing
nation than to its adversary. The citizenry has been
brainwashed into insensibility. But among the legislators
there are misgivings. Even while Representative Strat-
ton (D., New York) was calling for troop reinforce-
ments to Europe “to show Khrushchev the United States
means business in Berlin,’ seven Representatives were
going on record in opposition to the agreements to trans-
fer nuclear information and materials to West Ger-
many and other NATO countries. The seven are Wil-
liam H. Meyer (D. Vermont), Henry S. Reuss (D.,
Wisconsin), Clem Miller (D., California), George S.
McGovern (D., South Dakota), Mrs. Edith Green (D.,
Oregon), Byron L. Johnson (D., Colorado), Roy W.
Wier (D., Minnesota) and Leonard G. Wolf (D., Iowa).
Their names are worth noting, for it took a certain
amount of courage to oppose the Administration in a
matter which the public evidently considers of little
consequence, but which is fraught with every variety
of mischief and danger.

Some take comfort in the thought that the nuclear

To Nation Subscribers

During July and August, The Nation
will appear on alternate weeks only. The

next issue will be published Aug. 1, The
normal weekly printing schedule will be
resunied with the first September issue.

a reassurance is illusory. When a country has everything
but the nuclear warheads, those with the capability will
manufacture the warheads and have it all. West Ger-
many, in particular, will soon have the capability. The
United States is obligingly furnishing it with a 58-
megawatt power reactor which, according to Dr, Wil-
liam C. Davidon of the Federation of American Sci-
entists, will be capable of making enough plutonium
Be for a Hiroshima-size atomic bomb in less than a year.
a “Tt is,” said Dr. Davidon, “as though you trained your
son to drive a car, promised him that once he practiced
with his own jalopy you would help buy a new car,
and then to wonder whether or not he will start look-
ing for ways to acquire a jalopy.” Seven Congressmen
Mf shared this insight. Seven isn’t much, but events are
— _—silikely to multiply their numbers rather rapidly.

Political Mother Hubbards
Reviewing Father R. L. Bruckberger’s Image of

America for the Saturday Review, Granville Hicks
quotes as follows from the author’s summation:
a Now America, your task is to extend the Declaration of

’ Independence to the whole world, to all nations and races.
cs If you are to remain worthy of your heritage, you must
. now help solve the social problems between proletariat
and capitalist nations, and the racial problem between
white and colored peoples.

Mr. Hicks goes on to wonder whether America is capable
of doing the job, but he does not ask the obvious ques-
tion: who hired America to do it?

Father Bruckberger’s enthusiasm for the Declaration
of Independence is gratifying, but his suggestion that
we have a duty to thrust it, and our theories of society,
on other peoples is quite simply wrong: it is not Amer-

—ica’s job to force political Mother Hubbards on the
heathen. Indeed, a large part of our diplomatic misery
stems from the fact that we are already overzealous
missionaries.
Our job is so to conduct ourselves at home and
abroad that other nations will respect us and perhaps
oe emulate us to the degree that imitation is useful. Every
: - nation must write its own Declaration of Independence
in its own words, and any attempt to peddle overseas
2 the version with John Hancock’s signature affixed can
0 nly win us hard looks and the applause of our enemies.
3

: Life and Love in Your Own Shelter

At impromptu hearings staged by Representative
Chet Holifield (D., California), evidence was adduced
to » show that if the enemy chivalrously limited his nu-
ar dropping on seventy-one American cities to 1,453
ea only 40. million deaths would result. » he Air

materials will remain under American control. But this —

SF tt

an 1 eis. Hee these Beit tists
agree! ) Apparently the purpose of the heamnee was to
bolster the sagging civil-defense effort, which nobody
takes seriously except the chinouvniks of the Federal —
Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. The citizens
troop obediently into the so-called shelters when the
sirens wail, but hard-headed businessmen and money-
lenders continue to erect skyscrapers which an atomic —
war would flatten in a matter of minutes, showing how
much stock they take in a future atomic war. Never-
theless, Governor Rockefeller of New York seized the
occasion to release a committee report advocating com-
pulsory building of fallout shelters. If you have a base-
ment and are handy with mortar and cement blocks,
you can do the job yourself for $150. The newspapers
simultaneously came out with stories of shelter-to-
getherness in a 7x7 cubicle, holding a family of four
with their Conelrad radio, Geiger counter, survival kit
and, presumably, two-weeks’ accumulation of excre-
ment. A firm of industrial designers specializing in such
matters suggested the addition of a library of tapes
simulating the normal sounds of the house — the refrig-
erator going on and off, motor traffic and the sighing
of the wind in the trees, The feature writers made it
sound rather pleasant, and the only dissenting voice
was that of the builders, who were worried that the
added cost might discourage buyers of new homes.

attack on 50 Ame

A Green Light for Civil Rights

If the harassed Democratic leadership in Congress
really wants an attractive legislative item that avoids
the “spending” taboo and is veto-proof, civil rights
would seem to be just what the doctor ordered. But
the doctor — Senator Johnson — is stalling. Since
January 20, his compromise civil-rights measure has
been bottled up, along with two dozen other bills on
the subject, in the Senate Constitutional Rights Sub-
committee. The subcommittee situation is as follows: |
Ervin, Johnston and McClellan, diehard Dixiecrats, are _
balanced by Hennings, Carroll and Langer, consistent
civil-rights supporters. Senator O’Mahoney is ill. This |
puts the two Republicans, Hruska and Wiley, in the —
“swing” positions. Senator Hennings contends that it
has been difficult to assemble a quorum, due to the
more or less chronic absenteeism of Messrs. Hruska and
Wiley. But Senator Johnson could make the subcom-
mittee dance if he cracked the whip, and surely the
President and Attorney General Rogers should have |
some influence on the Republican absentees. The im-—
mediate problem is to discharge a bill — almost any om
bill — so that the Senate may begin debate; civil- N
rights legislation, it is generally agreed, will be written ,
on the floor of the Senate, not in committee. On he”
floor, the Prospects are good,

se time is Hennes the calendar, not a

) 2 ee
[ buster

ga M tli a Ti Ait ant The Nat

SO ear laa

may kill civil-rights legislation unless prompt action is
taken. Congress may be kept in session as late as the
middle of September, but there is the usual last-minute
log jam and the pressures for adjournment are already
mounting. The Civil Rights Commission is supposed to
report on September 9; two months later the commission
will expire unless new legislation is enacted. Schools will
be opening in September with six Southefn states still
in open defiance of the desegregation decision. Accord-
ing to the Southern Regional Council, some 530 acts
of racial violence or reprisal have been reported in the
South since the decision was handed down in 1954. The
same organization points out that it will take 203 years
to register the approximately 13,000 unregistered Ne-
groes of voting age in Macon County, Alabama, at the
rate they have been registered to date. All these good
citizens will be dead long before then — and some of
them will want to vote next year by way of celebrat-
ing the centennial of the Civil War.

This New-Fangled Jurisprudence

Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the
government’s Industrial Security Program affecting
some 3,000,000 defense-plant workers, the question
arises: Should the program be reconstituted or scrapped?
In the Greene case, eight members of the Court agreed
that the program was invalid, since neither the Presi-
dent nor Congress had ever sanctioned it. Five Justices
(Warren, Black, Douglas, Brennan and Stewart) went
further and questioned the constitutionality of any
screening program that would deny the right of con-
frontation and cross-examination of accusers. This, how-
ever, was not the point on which the decision turned,
and presumably the Industrial Security Program could

be refashioned to meet the Court’s objections. Various
proposals to save it have already been advanced,

But the basic objection runs not to the program’s
procedures, but to its effect. In the words of Chief
Justice Walter L. Pope of the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals, such measures substitute “a new style of
jurisprudence” for the traditional American variety.
Under other systems of law, it is only the citizen, the
subject, to whom the law’s commands are directed;
with us the Bill of Rights commands the sovereign, the
government itself. The new-fangled jurisprudence rep-
resented by the Industrial Security Program pivots on
a number of nifty verbal tricks. For “treason,” sub-
stitute “subversion,” undefined. We don’t imprison a
person for “subversion”; we just make it impossible for
him to secure employment. Since the suspect is not
charged with the commission of a criminal offense, he
can be tried in a special tribunal, not a court of law.
Nor is he entitled to the protection of the Bill. of Rights.
And so it goes.

Quite apart from the fact that at least five members
of the Supreme Court have grave doubts as to the con-
stitutionality of this new jurisprudence, the necessity
for it has never been demonstrated. Sound administra-
tive practice would dispose of most security-risk prob-
lems;. for example, a good administrator would not as-
sign a “blabbermouth” to a sensitive position, nor would
he employ a Communist as plant manager. The In-
dustrial Security Program should be permitted to lapse
and with it, in due course, the loyalty-security program
as well; there is no need for either. A free country nec-
essarily incurs certain risks; the risks are the measure
of its freedom. Loyalty-security programs, and the new
system of jurisprudence they represent, undermine the
foundations of a free society.

THE HITLER HERITAGE IN PARIS

‘LA GANGRENE’ e « by Roland N. Murdock

| July 18, 1959

THOUSANDS of people in France
are talking of a book that the de
Gaulle regime will permit no book-
store to sell. On June 16 a 100-page
volume called La Gangréne was
brought out in Paris by Les Edi-
tions de Minuit, a press which
started clandestinely in 1942 as part
of the Resistance movement and has

ROLAND N. MURDOCK, an
American journalist and translator,
recently spent some time in Europe.

since become one of France’s lead-
ing publishing houses: it has pub-
lished Samuel Beckett, Georges
Bataille, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel
Butor, Marguerite Duras, Getrnaine
Tillion and Henri Alleg (The Ques-
tion). In La Gangréne, seven Al-
gerian intellectuals tell of the tor-
tures they claim to have undergone
at the hands of the French police,
in Paris, in recent months. The book

“was confiscated June 20, by order
of the Minister of the Interior.

Three days later, acting without a
watrant, police seized the matrixes
for a new edition of the book from
the monthly publication Testimony
and Documents, which was prepat-
ing to reprint it as a supplement to
the July issue. (For more than a
year, Testimony and Documents
has been reprinting seized and cén-
sored newspaper articles concerning
the Algerian war; nine of its four-
teen issues to date have been con-
fiscated.) The same morning, police-

men hacked to pieces the type
blocks. Testimony and Documents
is filing suit for theft and declares
it will continue to reprint the book,
e whatever the consequences.

a Reaction to the book’s confiscation
Was immediate, in France and
abroad. Le Monde, and every other
paper to the Left of it, ran front-
page stories in denunciation. The
governmental press kept silent un-
hes! til a few days later, when it de-

Mt clared, with M. Debré, that La

oe s : :

a Gangréne was a “tissue of lies, and
an Communist propaganda.”

a. But by then everyone was ask-

ee: ing questions. That of Francoise
or Giroud, co-editor of L’Express was
ae (June 25): “These are madmen, sick
eae men, trembling with their obscene

pleasure when their victims cry out
with pain. Is it true that they are
i free to enjoy this pleasure in Paris,
se 300 feet from the Elysée?” (The Al-
gerians were “interrogated” at the
DST offices — the French FBI —
directly across the street from the
Elysée Palace, the residence of the
President of the Republic. It is
worth noting that the DST facade
bears a memorial tablet commemo-
rating the French patriots tortured
in that same building by the Gestapo
during the occupation.) Jacques
Fauvet noted in Le Monde (June
19): “These students seem to have
been tortured with special merciless-
ness, precisely because they were
intellectuals. Nothing was done to
prevent these acts of torture —
everything on the contrary was done
to facilitate them — the indifference

itself.” The October 8, 1958, ordin-
ance, part of the de Gaulle Govern-
ment’s “special powers in Algeria
and France,” permits the detention
of a prisoner for an indeterminate
length of time on the premises of his
Interrogation. A simple suspect may
_be kept for days or even weeks ina
police station without the possibil-
ity of seeing a lawyer or doctor (two
of the students were indicted, days
after their arrest, while they were
recovering in the hospital from their
“questioning” ).
_ When Debré issued a short com-
uniqué merely stating that the
ook had been seized because it was
intrue and defamatory,” Le Monde

of public opinion, and French law’

replied une 26): a
ment’s statement 1s a little brief. The
book contains names, dates and
places which call for other refuta-
tions than that of the simple state-
ment ‘untrue and defamatory.’ It
remains to be proven whether it is
untrue or not.” The Canard En-
chainé, the satirical weekly which, in
spite ore its generally humorous sees
is one of the best-informed of Pa-
risian papers, was in no joking mood
on June 24: “We can’t speak of La
Gangréne; the censors will not allow
it. We can’t give details of the book’s
contents. But we can at least say
this—whoever reads this book will
not be able to sleep any more. So we
won’t speak of gangrene—we’re in
good health. Such good health that
we’re probably going to die of it.”

THE AUTHORS of the book are
members of the UGEMA (Union
Générale des Etudiants Musulmans
Algériens); the government had or-
dered the dissolution of this Algerian
students’ organization because of its
support of Algerian nationalism, and
the defendants are accused of illegal-
ly reconstituting the association. Im-
prisoned last December, their trial
has been set for July 24. Their de-
fense attorney, Ould Audia, was
shot to death last month at the door
of his office in Paris. This young
jurist, a Berber and a Catholic, was
one of the small group of lawyers
who, despite repeated threats, con-
tinued to defend Algerians in French
courts. He is believed to have been
assassinated by the Red Hand, a
French terrorist gang responsible for
the murders of several West German
businessmen who were selling sup-
plies to the FLN (Algerian National
Liberation Front). Herr Wolf, the
Frankfort public prosecutor investi-
gating the murders in Germany,
maintains that the Red Hand has
been working on orders from the
French secret service.

Although the Paris prefect of po-
lice forbade the exposure of Audia’s
body for the visit of family and
friends, 4,000 people crowded into
the Montparnasse cemetery for his
funeral. Seven of the murdered la
yer’s colleagues at the bar ied
threatening letters reading:
aussi” BS st puckae wy

oe
‘The govern=

tion, March 15, 1958]. It is to be re-

| Cimber od on: sake scene te
ed death list is Audia’s associate,
Jacques Vergés, who defended Dja-
mila Bouhred [see “An Algerian
*J’accuse,’” by Nora Beloff, The Na-

called in this connection that last
year, when André Malraux stated
that “No act of torture has occurred
since the arrival of General de Gaulle
at Algiers,” and suggested that Fran-
cois Mauriac and Albert Camus be
sent to Algeria to investigate (Mau-
riac refused, saying he would have no
way of controlling what he was
shown), Audia and Vergés suggested
to Malraux that the world-famous
writers simply be sent “to the Ver-
sailles prison or the police station
at Argenteuil.” Malraux forwarded
the letter to the government’s Hu-
man Rights Commission, but its _
president did not even deign to
answer.

In a tribute to Audia, Jean-Marie

hh Be hd

Domenach, editor of the influential
liberal Catholic monthly, sprit,
stated:

Will we ever know his killer? Per-
haps not, but I don’t hesitate to say
that there is a collective responsibil-
ity which we must denounce tonight
— the responsibility of those politi-
cians, those journalists, who have
been lying to us for years, the re-
sponsibility of those magistrates who
have never ordered an investigation —_|
of the torturers’ activities. We have
some very simple questions to ask
Malraux, and the others who are us-
ing their consciences as shields: Why
don’t you put a stop to these things?
Are you accomplices to these crimes? ij
No? Then you are powerless. .. .

WHAT IS revealed in this book by §

the assassinated lawyer’s clients, this

ara nat

i, 2

a
=

tiny volume whose publication has
aroused such a furor? In the first
chapter, Béchir Boumaza tells of his

arrest by members of the DST. He §
was informed that if he cooperated |
and gave names, he’d be supplied
with a “left-wing” lawyer, but if he ~
didn’t, and had to be “too torn up,” |
he’d be thrown into the Seine with
a note reading, “traitor to the FL
pinned to him. He alleges that he
was stripped naked, urinated on,
forced to drink ubine and ane
to torture by an electric-shock |
paratus nicknamed “Gégine,” a
was Heplied to. his entire bod and

pi , “The

, ; - ei & La
pa yvehemence—to his
2 wal t als. \
_ Mustapha Francis, a twenty-nine-
_ year-old dental student, and brother
of Ahmed Francis, Finance Minister
of the rebel Algerian government,
was also kept at the DST head-
quarters, located across the street
from the French “White House” and
within a stone’s throw of the Rue St.
Honoré, Paris’ most fashionable shop-
ping street. During his interrogation,
he was visited by Roger Wybot, then
head of the DST, who told the po-
lice: “Don’t be gentle with the Min-
ister’s brother.” Apparently they
weren’t, for a few days later, Francis
was removed to the Hotel Dieu, the
Paris municipal hospital, where his
groin wounds necessitated surgery.
In the third chapter, Benaissa
Souami, twenty-seven, a student at
the Paris Ecole de Sciences Politi-
ques, states that he answered a knock
at his door last December 4 at three
in the morning, to face six inspectors
armed with machine guns. When they
entered, grabbed him and started
searching his room, he asked if they
had a search warrant. He was answer-
ed with blows and handcuffs, and
hauled off to DST headquarters:

They tied my hands to my feet and
put a bar about two meters long
through the arm and knee articula-
tions. They put the bar on two pieces
of wood, placed at the end of two
tables. I was “on the spit,” head
hanging down, feet in the air... .
One of them started turning the
handles of the machine and the bald
man put the electrodes on my penis.
I lost consciousness after a few

minutes. They put some drops in my
nose and started again,...I fainted
several times.

Later, he was blindfolded and
transported to another “office” by
_ car. During a subsequent session, he
- was attached to a bench, his hands
_ tied behind his back:

_ They rocked the bench so that my
head plunged in and out of a tub of
_ water in front of me. It lasted a long

time. I vomited into the tub and had
_ to swallow the repugnant water again.

the spit” again, until morning. . . .
In the morning, they had found a
new method: it was to hit me on the
_ penis with a wooden ruler... , An
‘ inspector urinated in the tub, The
canny w .

) 18, 1959

Finally I was detached, and put “on ;

electrodes were placed on my gums.
I thought that my head would ex-
plode. Later, at another session with
the tub, I tried to drown myself, but
I only succeeded in swallowing the
filthy water.

Moussa Khebaili, twenty-six, a
student at the Paris School of Public
Works, was arrested December 5,
1958. As he was receiving the electric
torture, one of the inspectors whis-
pered to him: “I got to know about
torture with the Nazis—now it’s me
who’s giving it out.” Khebaili con-
tinues:

I had to get down on my knees,
and as my head was leaning back,
one of the policemen gave me a kick
which made me fall back, my mouth
open. A policeman thrust the wet
end of his shoe to my lips. He said:
“T’ve just come from the toilet. I’m
going to make you taste French
shit.”

That night, he was transported
in a car which crossed the Seine at
the Place de la Concorde:

The Chamber of Deputies was lit
up; I saw people going in and com-
ing out. The “Tunisian” [Khebaili

_ claims that some of the police were
Frenchmen from Tunisia, recogniz-
able by their accents when they spoke
to him in Arabic] had the driver
stop the car and said to me:

a¢ af

GA Rah ai ia a ve

“Look over there — we’ve stopped
here to let you see how things have
changed. Now there’s some order in-
side there.”

I made no reply. He turned to his
colleagues:

“That’s where the trouble was: the
priests, the lawyers, the Jews, the
Commies inside there. For them,
France was always in the wrong.
Now, France will always be in the
right.”

Then, turning to me:

“You may not like it, but that’s
the way it is. You belong to a race
I hate, like the Negroes. Now you’re
going to see what France really is,
you bunch of slaves... . I know, ’m
only a cop, and you’re an intellectual,
but things have changed. Now it’s
me who’s giving the orders. It’s the
cops’ turn to reign now.”
In the last chapter, Ali Hadj, a

newspaperman, writes:

One morning in December, 1958,
I saw M. Khebaili in the DST build-
ing, Rue des Saussaies, as I was being
brought for questioning. ... As I
was going up the stairway, M. Khe-
baili was coming down, and he walked
so slowly that I had time to look at
him carefully — and see the shape,
or rather the shapelessness of his
face: it was like a monstrous wound
and only the eyes — haggard, star-
ing eyes — indicated that it was the
face of a human being. Where his
lips had been, M. Khebaili had two
voluminous and grotesque pieces of
red cracked flesh; his nose was a huge
frightful caricature, swollen in spots,
crushed in others. His swollen face
which looked as if it would burst, was
like a nightmare. ...

THE ABOVE is but a part of this
horrifying book. Future historians
and psychologists studying life under
the Fifth Republic will in all likeli-
hood be struck by two currents un-
derlying the police’s ferocity in this
case, which may easily turn out to
be L’Affaire Dreyfus of de Gaulle’s —
regime. First, the “special merciless-

ness” with which, as Le Monde noted,
“they seem to have been tortured,
precisely because they were intellec-
tuals.” For the first time in modern
France, perhaps indeed in France
tout court, in spite of official pro
nouncements and the facade present-
ed by Malraux as “Culture Minister,” |
the regime is openly anti-intellectual,
and a discernible propagandistic at-
tempt is in course to constrain th

public to assimilate “intellectual”
with “defeatist,” defeatist with Com-
munist, Communist with FLN, FLN
with traitor—simply because the
great mass of }rench intellectuals
is outspokenly adverse to the con-
tinuation of the war in Algeria. The
Chambre will be voring next month
on a law proposed by the rabble-
rousing Fascist UNR deputy, Jean-
Baptiste Biaggi, which would exact
prison terms of hard labor in penal
colonies for journalists writing arti-
cles “injurious to the army’s morale,
the army’s hierarchy, or who raise
doubts as to the legitimacy of the
cause the army serves.” Deputy Biag-

(photographs of whom have ap-
peared, exercising his “commando”
followers with machine guns in the
Bois de Boulogne) recently wrote to
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, L’Ex-
press’ courageous co-editor, to in-
form him that “\’m afraid you have
a sickness that can only be cured
with lead. But those who execute
you at dawn won’t be killers, they’ll
be carrying out court-martial orders.”
On June 27, Servan-Schreiber (au-
thor of the famous book, Lieutenant
m Algeria), addressing the Federa-
tion of Veterans of Algeria in Lyons,
was severely beaten up by rightist
hoodlums who broke into the hall.
Biaggi’s law has not been voted on
yet, but his word is already law
for all too many French Fascist
thugs.

The reader is also struck by an-
other grisly undertone running all
through La Gangréne—the police’s
fierce concentration on the Algerian
prisoners’ genitalia, revelatory of the
psychotic sexual jealousy that very
often accompanies certain forms of
racism,

LAWYERS for three of the book’s

_ co-authors have appealed by telegram
to the International Red Cross, de-

claring that they have been illegally
_ prevented from visiting their clients

_ since June 18. The chree are among

the 1,500 Algerian prisoners who
went on a hunger : strike recently
asa protest against acts of brutality
Oy the prison guards and the govern-
ment’s refusal to treat them as politi-
“cal prisoners, rather than common-
aw criminals.

A mass meeting in Paris sponsored

was addressed by three front-line
witnesses of that gangrene which was
born in Algeria and now seems to
have spread to metropolitan France:
Mme. Henri Alleg, wife of the author
of The Question (confiscated under
the Fourth Republic); Mme. Gil-
berte Audin, whose husband, a Com-
munist professor of mathematics at
Algiers University, “disappeared”
two years ago after his arrest by
French paratroopers (substantial evi-
dence exists that he died while under-
going torture at the hands of his
questioners—see L’ Affaire Audin by
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Editions de
Minuit); and Father Boudouresque,
a priest who visited the authors of
La Gangréne at Fresnes prison soon
after their interrogation. Jean-Paul
Sartre sent a message which demand-
ed “an end to the tortures,” and
Daniel Mayer, dissident Socialist and
president of the league, declared:
“Fourteen months ago, four men
signed a protest addressed to the
President of the Republic, condemn-
ing the seizure of The Question and
asking the government to disavow
publicly the use of torture. Today
Gangréne is confiscated. We ask M.
Malraux, who signed that petition,
what he thinks of this new affair,
and I do not hesitate to say that
if he does not accept an investiga-
tion, I shall henceforth consider the
André Malraux whom I knew a dead

man.”

THE following day, June 26, Gas-
ton Deferre, the Socialist Mayor of
Marseilles, challenged Prime Minister
Debré in the French Senate: “The
Algerian war is undermining and

destroying our _ institutions—even
those of the Fifth Republic. The
government must condemn these

tortures, or be frank enough to admit
that it finds itself obliged to resort
to them.” M. Debré replied: “The
book that has just been seized is a
forgery, made up out of whole cloth
by two members of the Communist
Party. This infamous, lying book
doesn’t contain a grain of truth.”
Debré’s declaration was reported
in all of the newspapers. A few papers
carried the reply which M. Lindon
made on behalf of Les Editions de
Minuit; “I had the manuseript in

fee onic: "hanna jt was only u
published after a thorough: investi-
gation. ... I’m certainly in a position
to know that the book is not a
forgery written by Communists, . . .
I don’t publish forgeries. Can M.
Debré explain how a_ magistrate
could go to the Hotel Diew to indict
these students without noticing the
reasons that had put them there?”
And the London Times’ Paris cor-
respondent noted (June 28) that
even “. . . people who earnestly de-
sire to cling to the official side are
asking how two of the Algerians in-
volved in the Gangréne affair came
to be in-patients under guard at a
Paris hospital when they were visited
by the examining magistrate and
charged with jeopardizing State
security.”

Christian Testimony, the Catholic
weekly, commented on the affair in
these terms: “As long as France’s
answer to the expressed will of a
people to live is torture, it is France
which will be menaced by death. . .
Torture will not be vanquished as
long as the war lasts. La Gangréne
is an important book because it
makes one ask these questions: if
these men were tortured, can the
government prevent the recurrence
of such acts? And if it cannot, does
it know why it is unable to act?”

AND Claude Roy, in the June 25
France Observateur, devoted a full
page to a description of how the sick-
ness has spread from Algeria to
France:

These are not soldiers in Algeria,
lost in a war-torn country, who hys-
terically use such [torture] methods,
thinking the information gained may
save the lives of some of their fellow
troops. These are French civil-ser-
vants, who perform acts of torture
in their own offices, when they are
not sitting at a typewriter or filing
reports, and their work finished, they
go home to their families, to cafés or
to neighborhood movies. If these
Algerians have lied, let the govern-
ment prove it.

A singular twitter of relative opti-
mism flowed from the pen of well-
meaning, aged Francois Mauriac, the
sole staunch Gaullist voice ever to
appear in the opposition press. (His

column in L’Ewpress has eekly J

faith in the General for
wel ra year, W ite the rest of
the paper weekly devotes much of
its space to excoriating de Gaulle.)
Mauriac writes: “I still have confi-
dence that our ‘Don Quixote’ is
struggling to root out the cause of
torture in this pre-Fascist period of
our history.”

The last word of this distressing
report might well be left to two im-
partial voices from across the Channel
which can speak with all the more

. INVASION BY ROWBOAT - « by Carleton Beals

THE RUINS of Panama Viejo, left
by pirate Henry Morgan centuries
ago, are the chief tourist attraction
of the Isthmus of Panama. In April,
Panama’s Ambassador in Washing-
ton dramatically implored the Or-
ganization of American States
(O.A.S.) to prevent Panama City
from being turned into a future
tourist attraction by “modern pi-
rates” — the eighty-nine invaders,
mostly Cubans, who had landed in
the jungles at Playa Colorado. Un-
ilaterally, the United States had al-
ready rushed military aid to Pana-
ma’s President De la Guardia.
The hysteria displayed by the
Ambassador, the Pentagon and the
_ American press over a band of raga-
muffins hardly large enough to make
up a comic-opera chorus on Broad-
_ Way, suggests that great leaders are
f eseey souls in a jittery age. Even
if Fidel Castro’s shadow looms large,
it seems strange that the antics of
filibusterers and pirates can arouse
such emotion in this atomic era, when
_ the masters of the loaves and fishes
ee lay a whole continent waste.
Do these picturesque but deadly
i cfcit represent anything meaning-
~ ful for national independence and
_ freedom? Or are they ingeniously
_ contrived by international behind-
_ scenes intrigue? Who are the plot-
_ ters? Fidel and Raul Castro? The

ARLETON BEALS, veteran jour-
ist, is the author of © many books

a fhariey for bei ing out. of the pele:

The Observer (L den) commented
on June 28: “Only a few days ago
M. Debré, the French Premier, was
appealing to his Western allies to
understand and support French
policy in Algeria. If he is asking us to
support a policy which requires the
use of torture to enforce it, can he
really be surprised when we refuse?”
And the Manchester Guardian edi-
torialized on June 24:

The confiscation of the book can

various dictators themselves? The
U.S. military missions, which go
around decorating the wrong peo-
ple? The Allen Dulles secret organ-
ization which helped overthrow a
Guatemalan government and set up
puppet Castillo Armas? There are
some very distorted gnomes to be
seen through the dark glass.

The stakes are not small: billions
in investments and United States
security in a troubled world, where
sympathy for this country is stead-
ily narrowing. Latin America is a
handy dumping ground for war
materiel which, even if outmoded by
atomic-war requirements, is never-
theless up to World War II stand-
ards, and has provided dictators
and governments in that area with
more power than they have ever
enjoyed before against their own
oppressed peoples.

So the 1959 invasions are not
child’s play, whatever sinister, or
hopeful, forces are at work. Cuban
Dictator Gerardo Machado had one
funny little tank that used to rattle
through Havana’s streets. Dictator
Fulgencio Batista had a great fleet
of tanks, relatively worthless for
modern war, but deadly for the peo-
ple he tortured so cruelly. He had
United States jet planes and naph-
thalm bombs with which to burn
whole villages and their families to
ashes. A few years. ago, Dictator Ana-
stasio Somoza of Nicaragua had only
a few old scout planes; today, each of
three regiments has fifteen jet fight-
ers, a thousand trucks, a battalion

Sat tan the meg iaarls it con-
tained. The “French Government has
only itself to blame if these things
are believed abroad. It is acting as
though they were true, and what is
more discreditable still, as though it
wished to hush them up. Probably
some members of the French Goy-
ernment are conscious of . . . the
beastly practices alleged in La Gan-
gréene. . . . But they are going the
wrong way about it. They shouldn’t
be confiscating La Gangréne; they
should be cutting it out.

of tanks, light and heavy mobile oe
artillery, and technical specialists ae
trained by a large United States —
military mission. Batista’s Cuba suf-
fered a dozen Guernicas; had it been
Hungary, we would have heard of
them. Yet not even a United States
Senator, as Ernest Gruening of
Alaska discovered, is permitted to ae
know how much all this cruelty costs
the American taxpayer.

YET much of the heavy equipment,
even planes, is of little use in wild
country. Though the tiny invading
forces face tremendous odds, at least
they are equipped with weapons for
rough terrain — there is plenty of
loose military hardware floating
around Europe, the United States,
Latin America. As Sandino learned
in Nicaragua, where he resisted the
U.S. Army successfully for six years
— and as Castro found in Cuba —
arms supplies are gradually built up
by successful raids. The revolution-
ists, or invaders, can always buy ad-
ditional U.S. materiel, moreover,
from the regular forces of the Op- |
position (in "Cuba, Batista’s soldiers
were selling Castro’s men a
at 15 cents each, U.S. grenades for
$10, bazookas fou $20, machine gur S
for $350 to $500; on one occasion
Castro purchased a whole milit
train).

The real secret, however, is
military might, but. ideas.
more terrifying to dictators
machine guns, undermine the lo

of echdier and civilian. A leade

cause, a faith — these are more
potent weapons than an electronic
death-ray. So the example of Gari-
baldi (seven men and a mule), of
Sandino, of Castro, has spread. In
spite of the grandiose military aid
given them, all the dictators in the
area will soon perish.
The invaders, whatever their aims
— and some seem no better than
those they seek to overthrow — are
riding the tide of historical change;
they are part of the unfolding drama
of Europe, Africa and Asia. Of course,
[ in Latin America there are special
forces at work; there, revolt is trig-
gered by long-smoldering resent-
ments over past invasions, Dollar
Diplomacy, absentee ownership of
national resources. After World War
II, students roared through the
streets of Brazil and Peru and Pana-
ma to foree the United States to re-
linquish wartime bases, as promised.
When Nasser seized the Suez Canal,
it brought Panama students into
the streets again, making demands
for equal rights, equal pay, equal
profits, joint administration of the
Canal Zone ( a Jim Crow realm).
Last year, students blocked Presi-
dent De la Guardia from giving
away more of Panama’s territory —
at a cost of fourteen dead.

THE CURTAIN-RAISER for this
year’s events, according to Bohemia
of Cuba, was the super-secret ses-
sion in the International Hotel of
San Salvador, April 9, of all the
American ambassadors of the Carib-
bean, with Under Secretary Loy W.
Henderson and Inter-American Af-
fairs Secretary Roy R. Rubottom in
attendance. Afterwards, there was a
prolonged news session for Ameri-
can correspondents and a very brief
one for Latin American correspond-
ents,

This “Operation San Salvador,”
the Salvador press related, “is not
concerned with justice or freedom.”
Reportedly, the diplomats arrived at
the following conclusions: The
Cuban revolution must be “con-
fined” and pressured into conserva-
. channels, At all odds, any at-
k against the Somoza dynasty
1 Nicaragua must be prevented.
ndirect but “decisive” support must
given to Trujillo, Duvalier and

ies ‘

any other “frie
States. Cuba should be accused of
aggression to assist in_ stabilizing
menaced tyrannies. However, any
preventive action should be taken
within the framework of the O.A.S.
to avoid any semblance of treaty
violation.

Bohemia called the ambassadorial
reunion “sinister.” Another publica-
tion asked: “Would the United States
permit all the Latin American am-
bassadors to meet in Chicago to dis-
cuss what to do about Little Rock
and Ike’s projects for the rest of the
continent?” In San Salvador, 15,000
people gathered to hear the National
Students Federation denounce the
meeting. “This is an act of inter-
vention,” the federation charged.
“This is a conspiracy against Cuba.

. . We condemn every machination
against the Cuban revolution and
all repressive action against the
liberation movement. .. .”

The Panama invasion has a curi-
ous smell. It was master-minded by
wealthy Roberto “Tito” Arias, of
one of Panama’s reigning families,
and lawyer Rubén Mird, his cousin,
recently acquitted after three years’
imprisonment for the assassination
of former President José Antonio
“Chichi” Remon (1955) and, pre-
vious to that, involved with Jacob
Arbenz in the Guatemala fight
against Castillo-Armas. The expedi-
tion, recruited in Cuba by Miré, was

Bohemian (Tavana)

fy rujillo: “There's revolution
even in my “soup!”

; ‘Siete United led ue MPataue Moriies ©

- "A » i £ 7 rs ; 5
Bird, son
of the Vice President of Panama’s
Supreme Court. Thus events hark
back to a dynastic struggle among
Panama’s twenty leading families
and to an official assassination, in
which a gang murder over narcotics
was also involved.

When the eighty-nine-man Cuban
expedition overshot the prepared
rendezvous with Arias and landed
at Playa Colorado in the jungles,
Morales Bird and two others were
drowned. Leadership was assumed
by the Cuban, César Vega, a Castro
supporter and romantic rebel.

President De la Guardia de- i
nounced the impending Cuban ex-
pedition as early as April 16, nine
days before it landed on Panama
soil. Castro, then in the United
States, swore that Cuba _ would
never be used as a base for the in-
vasion of any country. He repeated
this on April 24 to the Overseas
Press Club in New York. Yet the
expedition had already set out from
Cuba on April 19 and landed in
Panama April 25. Both Panama and
the United States were primed. The
day the news broke, the United
States rushed arms to De la Guardia.
Two days later, a five-man O.A.S
commission flew south from Wash-
ington, empowered to use member
nation forces. De la Guardia and the
American press and radio branded
the expedition as “Communist”
though not one Communist has ever
been identified among the invaders.
The rebels surrendered tamely, and
two months later were released with
the declaration that they had broken
no Panamanian law.

Much of the Latin American press
has called the whole business a put-
up job, a maneuver to discourage
further invasions, a try-out for
quickly handling expected invasions
against the dictators of Nicaragua
and the Dominican Republic. The
press predicted, in many instances,
that the invaders would never be
punished — as indeed they were not.

ee Feo

ee a i

TROUBLE struck in Nicaragua late
in May — a general strike of Man- —
agua businessmen which sealed up_
every activity. Dictator-President
Luis Somoza clamped on the most —
severe martial law in the count od

history, arresting thirty-four Con-
servative oppositionists and one
Communist. Three planeloads of in-
vaders swept in from Costa Rica,
and Somoza clamored for O.A.S. aid
against “the Communists.”

The airborne expedition was mas-
terminded from San José, Costa Rica,
by Enrique Lacayo Faifan and was
led by Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a
conservative newspaper editor who
had been tried in 1956 with a score
of others for the assassination of
Anastasio Somoza. Sentenced to
fifteen years’ imprisonment, he es-
caped to Costa Rica. The other
rebels were all offshoots of the Cham-
orro dynasty which had ruled Nic-
aragua for thirty years with U.S.
Marine support, until General Henry
Simpson turned the country over to
the Liberal puppet-dynasty of Mon-
cada-Sacas-Somoza, which was to
rule Nicaragua even more ruthlessly
for thirty-odd years. Even Somoza
could not continue to call this air-
borne raid “a Communist” invasion;
the real “Red invasion,” he declared,
fostered by Venezuela and Cuba,
was still poised on the frontier in
Honduras, and was coming by sea.

TWO other rulers were perturbed:
Conservative Ydigoras of Guatema-
la, and Trujillo. But during the
Panama and Nicaragua invasions,
Ydigoras saw Cuban invasion craft
on very wave. One turned out to be
loaded with coconuts. The Cuban

AMONG THE ISSUES at stake on
that warm wet evening when Inge-
mar Johansson and Floyd Patterson
stepped into a blaze of light at
Yankee Stadium, the heavyweight
_ championship of the world ranked no
better than third.

As the startlingly low attendance
underscored even before the fight
began, the first question was whether

ROGER KAHN, who has covered
Sports for many years for the New
York press, is now sports editor of
Newsweek.

ly 18, 1939

"TOONDER’ ON THE RIGHT.

*. =

-
press described his blasts as a joint
plot with the United Fruit Company
to discredit Cuba’s land _ reform,
which Castillo-Armas and Ydigoras
had destroyed in Guatemala.

Trujillo simply could not endure
not having his own “Red” invasion.
On April 30, Dominican pilot Cap-
tain Juan de Dids Venturo Simé
landed in Puerto Rico and asked for
asylum. On May 4, he took off for
Venezuela, headquarters of all Do-
minicans in exile, and wormed himself
into the confidence of the leaders.
Long-nurtured plans for invasion
were speeded up. Sim6 flew in sixty
or so rebels on June 14, led by
Dominican exile Enrique Jiménez
Moya, the chief ramrod of efforts to
depose the dictator. He, too, along
with Cézar Vega, had been a Castro
supporter and had entered Havana
in triumph by Castro’s side only
last January. Now, he walked into
a baited trap.

Simé, in touch by radio with the
Dominican authorities, guided his
planeload of rebels into the east cen-
tral Constanza airport. No govern-
ment jets buzzed it. No officials were
on hand for the customary inspec-
tions. Another pilot was allowed to
fly the plane away unmolested. Then
the invaders were surrounded on all
sides by a ring of steel. Simé slipped
away in the dark to be “captured.”
Most of the others were mowed down.
Twenty escaped into the hills.

Trujillo, who had set the invasion

boxing could survive in its old man-
ner as a popular carnival of blood.
Despite months of competent pro-
motion, there was a turn-out of few-
er than 20,000 customers on a night
when television coverage was blacked
out within a seventy-five-mile radius
of New York City. The night of a
heavyweight championship fight
traditionally has been the time to
see Jim Farley and Tom Dewey and
a few eager actresses pushing their
way through crowds on the way to
ringside. I remember staring up at
the silent rows of empty seats and

in motion through his stooge, Simé,
crowed a bit too soon. From June
14 to June 24, some 300 men came
in by sea and plane, mostly from
Cuba. On June 20, two hundred
were brought to Maimon and Sosta
near Puerto Plata. These men meant
business. According to Trujillo,
their two vessels were escorted to
within seventy miles by the Cuban
gunboats, José Marti, Antonio Ma-
and Médximo Gomez. Castro
said he was too busy even to deny
such nonsense, but relations between
the two countries were soon broken
off. Trujillo announced that the two
ships had been wiped out by air
and sea bombardment, that the few
rebels who had managed to swim
ashore had been killed by peasants
armed with machetes. The opposi-
tion has denied this and insists that
fighting is going on in three separate
areas. As in Batista’s Cuba, it is
claimed, the American-supplied
Dominican jet air force is ruthlessly
bombing and burning whole villages
of civilians. But Batista and Perén
are said to be hastily packing bags.

As for the treacherous stool-pigeon
Simé, on June 19 he was raised from
Captain to Lieutenant Colonel in the
Dominican Army at a regal Palace
reception, where the newsmen pho-
tographed him in a posed picture,
shaking hands with U.S. Ambassador
Joseph Farland, who has so long
praised the good works of Dictator
Trujillo.

céo

e by Roger Kahn

wondering if a big fight could ever
again become an event at which it
was fashionable to be seen.

The second issue, which the news-
papers have been making complex,
comes down to a struggle for the
control of big-time boxing. Patter-
son is a proud, sensitive, intelligent,
young fighter, but he entrusts all
affairs of business to his busy man-
ager, Constantine (Cus) D’Amato.
Grouped against D’Amato, who in
certain poses bears a resemblance to
Napoleon, are Johansson, independ~
ent and wise in the ways of the

dollar, and Bill Rosensohn, a Wil-
liams College graduate, who pro-
moted the Johansson-Patterson fight
and would like to promote all Johans-
son’s future fights.

Until recently, control of boxing
was no more in question than the
control of telephone lines. The busi-
ness functioned as a monopoly and
the daily press agreed that this was
the only practical way. The sponsor-
ing corporation tied up the best
arenas in the country so that fight-
ers who wanted bouts had to agree
to terms set down by the corpora-
tion or go back to driving trucks.
The specific title of the corporation
has changed each generation, but
there is a direct, lineal chain from
president Tex Rickard, who pro-
moted fights in the days of Dempsey,
to president Mike Jacobs, who pro-
moted fights in the days of Louis,
to president Jim Norris, who pro-
moted fights after World War II.

Last year the Supreme Court
snapped the chain by ruling, in ef-
fect, that promoting fights and con-
trolling arenas constituted a viola-
tion of anti-trust laws. The Interna-
tional Boxing Club, Norris’ corpora-
tion, deflated with a gurgling rush
of air and an entirely new situation
was created.

Since Yankee Stadium or Madison
Square Garden or the Los Angeles
Coliseum was now required to open
its doors to anyone with rent money,
the promoter could no longer rule
the fighter. By running key stadiums,
Mike Jacobs finally came to run
Joe Louis. Now the most. skillful
promoter can only develop a “pack-
age” for a fighter and hope that no
one else develops a larger one.

What this means, in a practical
sense, is that the heavyweight cham-
pion and his manager can call their
own shots. After the Supreme Court
decision, D’Amato could freely book
Patterson anywhere, or merely sit
back and choose among numerous
offers. Even while the decision was
pending, D’Amato played a hunch
and refused to do business with Nor-
ris’ powerful I.B.C. Instead he
matched Patterson, who is Negro,

against a white amateur pushed all

the way into a Seattle ring by a
group of Southern segregationists.
Then he matched him against a

Tt ew yee eee Sy 1
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-_.
harailbes : a professional
Texas.
getting the best possible opposition
for his charge.

D’Amato had been a poor man
and there is some suspicion that
with the I.B.C. collapsing, he saw in
his young champion not just a good
ten years, but a rich lifetime. By
building a whole stable of champions,
starting with the heavyweight, he
could inflict fierce terms on pro-
moters. Some might go broke, but
as D’Amato once read, there’s one
born every minute.

To D’Amato’s surprise, Rosen-
sohn, who still looks boyish at
thirty-nine, decided -to gamble
against him. After a firm contract
for the Johansson-Patterson fight
was signed, D’Amato pressed for
more money, but Rosensohn balked
and won a dangerous victory. The
minor setback enraged D’Amato,
who then hinted broadly that Rosen-
sohn would promote no further Pat-
terson fights. Rosensohn knew that
the only certain way to expand the
fortune he had inherited was to pro-
mote not one fight, but a series of
major fights. He looked miserable,
but he stood his ground. Johansson
appeared to like Rosensohn and as
advance sales lagged Rosensohn
rooted quietly and desperately for
the challenger.

ALL THIS is pretty heady stuff to
consider at ringside and I don’t
suppose anyone considered it as the
sky stopped dripping and the two
heavyweights stepped into the ring.
Immediately, there was a champion-
ship to be decided. We knew Patter-
son, fast of foot and hand and reflex
but without great punching power.
We had seen him wear down op-
ponents, confident in command, with
just a faint tendency to be careless
and leave himself open for a right
hand.

Johansson was utterly unknown.
He brought most of his family and a
pretty brunette friend from Sweden
when he set up his Norse camp out-
side of Grossinger’s Hotel. There is
an old rule that fighters should live
monastically while training, and sex,
old boxing hands insist, is the quin-

tessence of evil. Their reasoning holds

Both fights were dull, als 7
though D’Amato insisted he was

that a man deprived of sex tends

toward surliness and that a good,

surly fighter will beat a good cheerful
fighter any time. While old hands
everywhere
danced frequently with his brunette
friend in the grand ballroom at

Grossinger’s and while he did draw

the line at gefiilte fish, he savored

most of the other pleasures at the.

resort.

He did not throw one right hand.
punch in front of newspapermen

during his seven weeks of training.

“Toonder,” he would say, holding:

the hand high. “There is toonder

here.” But no one heard the thunder:

and few believed that it existed.
The fight began with Patterson

following a characteristically cau-.
tious opening. He moved quickly and

lightly, holding his gloves together

in front of his chin, and studying:

Johansson, Normally Patterson fights
several cautious rounds, plotting
most of his moves before he makes
them.

Once Johansson threw a_ right
hand, but it merely grazed Patter-
son’s head as he sparred in his con-
servative way. There was booing
after the second round. Nothing had
happened.

With twenty seconds gone in the
third round, Patterson moved to-
ward Johansson. The challenger

poked his left hand at Patterson’s —
right shoulder and the champion
parted his raised gloves to block the _
blow. Then, through an opening be-

tween the ginal scarcely bigger than —
a fist, Toonder rumbled. Johansson’s —
right caught Patterson squarely on

the nose and mouth and the cheng
The Nation — N

shuddered, Johansson

.;
hy

\
i *

- Ger

These are s

fell over ba chward Is. Paaiienty,

this p1 De intelligent, young man

had no idea where he was or who
he was fighting or what had hap-
pened.

He sat up at the count of six and
got to his feet at the count of nine,
holding one hand to his nose like a
little boy who has been hurt and
doesn’t want to fight any more. Now
Johansson struck out. with a left
and a right to the head and Patter-
son went down again. There were
seven knockdowns before the referee
stopped the fight and made Johans-
son heavyweight champion. As he
did, Rosensohn raised his own hands

in celebration of a personal triumph.

Two moments linger in the mind

_ from Johansson’s frightening demon-
_ stration of controlled savagery. Once,
after the fourth or fifth knockdown,
as Patterson lifted himself on the
ring ropes, the champion’s whole
frame shook with a sigh. Then his
mouth tightened and he turned, a
proud professional, moving forward
with all hope of victory fled, to face
the blows of a stronger man. Then,
_ at about the same time, Sandra Pat-
terson, Floyd’s wife, rushed toward
the ring crying, “No, no, no.” Each
time Johansson drove a punch into
her husband, Sandra Patterson made
| whimpering sound.

“a

ot ites one

yo
soon Hiahvers, but, quite coldly, Floyd
Patterson warrants no special pity.
He has chosen to be a prize fighter
voluntarily. Prize fighting has made

him wealthy. Statistically, he is
safer in the ring than he would be
if he played sandlot football. Box-
ing’s harshest critics ignore these
points and they choose to ignore as
well the fact that a great fight crams
courage and strength, fear and weak-
ness, into a tiny cockpit. That fight
at Yankee Stadium might have giv-
en even Aristotle catharsis.
Patterson was beaten because
Toonder is the best right-hand punch
since the great days of Joe Louis, but
he lost, too, because he was a victim
of the struggle for power within box-
ing. An experienced fighter, stumb-
ling to his feet after a knockdown,
knows only one thing: hold on. He
grabs his opponent and if he grabs
hard enough, thirty seconds may
pass before the opponent can set
him up for another hard punch. In
thirty seconds a man’s mind can
clear and a fight can turn around.
But Patterson was a pawn in
D’Amato’s challenge of the I.B.C.,
however honorable that challenge
may have been, and as such he
fought only the handful of heavy-
weights outside of I.B.C. control.

_ CRIME IN A CHANGING SOCIETY

RECENT events suggest a resur-
gence of the urge to get tough, to
_ crack down on delinquency and
‘crime. In Delaware, the only state
in which public flogging is permis-
si le as a penalty for crime, the

| GRESHAM M. SYKES, author of
1e Society of Captives (Princeton
WUntversity. Press) and other books
on criminology, teaches sociology at
Northwestern University. This ar-
ticle concludes a two-part discussion
f “Crime in a Changing Society”
(see “Social Values and ae Enya!

THE LUXURY OF PUNISHMENT... ty crestan at. ste

legislature has tried to pass a bill
making it not only permissible but
mandatory. J. Edgar Hoover has just
warned us that we must stop pamper-
ing juvenile delinquents; a number
of officials have declared that kill-
ing the dope peddler is the only: safe
course; the U.S. Attorney General
has expressed his desire for another
Alcatraz. The “give ’em hell” school
of penology, in short, seems due
once again for a burst of popularity.

This recurrent cry for a crack-
down is, of course, not confined to
our handling of the criminal. There
are periodic attacks on the fright-

ful extravagance of government

a oe hh
i ) ig

tele * VE
“e as

Against weak opposition, he al-
ways won without trouble; so, when
trouble finally came, he simply did
not know what to do. Instead of al-
most instinctively holding on, he
waddled about like a duck for
Johansson’s marksmanship. I am not
suggesting that Patterson could have
come back quickly; only that he
might have lasted through the third
round. After that it would have been
interesting to see if Toonder could
strike twice.

Currently, Bill Rosensohn, armed
with Johansson’s confidence, is pre- a
paring to promote a re-match for we
the championship, this time driv-
ing a hard bargain with D’Amato.
Rosensohn says he lost $40,000 in
the first promotion but now he be-
lieves he is moving toward huge
profit. ‘yan

Aside from supplementary televi-
sion contracts, is huge profit still Sao
possible in boxing? Toonder will, I <i.
suspect, lure Farley and Dewey and oi
the actresses to ringside for the re- fp
match. The crowd should run close
to 60,000, with gate receipts of al-

;

+
S53

most $1 million. The business of
boxing is changing, but the sport of
boxing can still generate the single
most electric instant anywhere in
American sports when a great right
fist crashes home.

id ch EES erg OR

bureaucrats, the shocking rise in the
divorce rate, the bad manners of
modern youth — and, perhaps most —
notably, the alleged failure of our
educational system. The solution for |
our social problems, we are told, is
to find the individual villains in the
piece and force them to return to”
the proven verities. in
Why do these demands for a crack-.
down come and go? It may be that at
something really is rotten and since
a consistently high level of indig
tion is hard to maintain, we ge
in cycles. And it may be that the
campaign for a crackdown is a pret-
ty safe bandwagon; nobody is tie 1;

\y eo
of
;

to get into trouble asking why John-
ny can’t read or lambasting the sins
of bureaucracy. But in the case of
crime and delinquency something
more seems to be at work. There is
a harshly punitive attitude toward
the offender which has never van-
ished from our thinking and which
periodically flares out under the
stimulus of a particularly savage
crime, a dramatic violation of parole,
or a rebellion of prisoners. It is this
readiness to respond with an emo-
tional outburst which led Professor
Robert Park to say a number of
years ago, “We are always passing
laws in America. We might as well
get up and dance. The laws are
largely to relieve emotions, and the
legislatures are quite aware of that
fact.”

The trouble with these cyclical
get-tough campaigns is that they
represent a denial of experience, an
escape from rationality — like kick-
ing the cat in a moment of anger.
Pe However emotionally _ satisfying
1 they may be, they obscure the real
problem, namely the reduction of
crime and delinquency; and the pub-
lic is blinded to the advances we
have made in techniques for hand-
ling the criminal.

We have come a long way from
the early tradition of extreme harsh-
r ness toward the offender — from,
let us say, 1584, when it was de-
creed that the murderer of William
of Orange should have his “right
hand ... burned off with a red-hot
iron, that the flesh be torn from the
bones in six different places with
pincers, that he be quartered and
disemboweled alive,” and finally, “

a gesture of infinite mercy,” he was
to be killed. Mutilation, beating,
branding, boiling, beheading — all
have slowly been abandoned. If for
nothing else, I suppose, we must ad-
mire our predecessors for their in-
_ genuity in devising ways to inflict
_ pain on their fellow men. But in
any event, by the end of the seven-
- teenth century the more sadistic and
brutal forms of punishment had been

lanaely replaced by imprisonment.

a ae SS

VERAL factors have been sug-
ested to account for this change in
nal philosophy. The spread of per-
sonal liberty which made it possible

wah rs?

a, vl -

to view its
rent to crime, the growth of human-
itarianism, the impact of the En-
lightenment which pictured man as
carefully weighing the pleasure of
crime against the pain of years in
captivity, the demand for produc-
tive labor of prisoners in an era of
industrialization — all may have
been at work. The important point,
however, is that simple retaliation
was no longer thought to be suffi-
cient as a way of dealing with the
criminal; deterrence and _ reforma-
tion emerged as major goals. This
may not have been as great a change
as it appears, since punishment was
still thought to be the best way of
frightening the offender into con-
formity or creating a moral distaste
for wrongdoing; but at least punish-

Palladino

ment was no longer regarded as an
end in itself.

Unfortunately, a large part of the
nineteenth century was taken up
with what now seems to have been
a dusty, pointless quarrel. Penolo-
gists split into two hostile factions
arguing the relative merits of con-
stant solitary confinement versus
association during the day and isola-
tion at night — an inane matter of
Tweedledum versus Tweedledee.
The only good result of the quarrel
was Democracy in America, which
came as a by-product of de Tocque-
ville’s commission from the French
government to study American penal
systems. The conflict was more or
less forgotten in the emergence of
the reformatory movement, based
on the Declaration of Principles
adopted by the Cincinnati Prison
Congress in 1870. Some eighty years
later we are still trying to put those
principles into practice. The classifi-
cation of prisoners for greater pre-

dy i

a ‘serious deter: ci on of fr eat

offender when he is ready for re-

a ee Pgh ae

nent, th 1e re

lease rather than serving a fixed
and arbitrary sentence, voca-—
tional training and training for the
demands of life as a member of so-
ciety — all have long been recognized
as essential for a program of rehabili-
tation, But as one noted crimi-
nologist has said:

The most enlightened penal prac-
tice of our day has not even yet
fully caught up with the theory ex-
pounded by the more progressive of
the veteran penologists of eighty
years ago. This fact is both a chal-
lenge to current practices and an ef-
fective answer to those who con-
tend that enlightened penologists are
now “running wild” with novel and
untried vagaries.

Today, to be sure, we have large-
ly eliminated the systematic degra-
dation and neglect which character-
ized imprisonment for so long, even
if movement in the direction of the
offender’s reformation is little more
than a gesture in many of our in-
stitutions. We no longer chain the
prisoner to the floor, force him to
wear a mask, or impose the more
refined torture of perpetual solitude.
Yet imprisonment is still punishment
— and to a far greater extent than
is commonly recognized.

The loss of liberty, the monotony
and the boredom are only the begin-
ning. The inmate is faced with a
peculiar psychological attack which
is in many ways as painful — if not
more painful — than the physical
maltreatment we are so proud of
having given up. The prisoner, re-
member, lives in poverty as a mat-
ter of public policy, an unwilling
monk of the twentieth century, and
he must suffer the stigma of material
want in a society where material
well-being is a major symbol of
personal worth. He is in effect cas-
trated by his involuntary seclusion
and must learn to live with the many
problems — including homosexuality
— of a world without women. He is
reduced to the helpless state of
childhood, for the detailed regula-
tions of the custodians strip him of
much of his autonomy.

However irrational it may seem, —
we have decided to reform cristal
by locking them up with handed j

The Naric

Rt Ns ‘al

— ee Ne ee ee

=- ss

rs eae

ree Be
sands of 4 he cr Fatinils: and
he prisoner must eat, work and sleep
ow company of murderers, thieves
and rapists. Finally, we Eve de-
fined the inmate, by a variety of
symbols, as a man outside the bound-
aries of humanity, as a man so
dangerous and inherently evil that
he must never be trusted. This
punishing psychological onslaught,
then, should be recognized as a
major feature of the modern prison,
rather than the atmosphere of a
country club which the critics of
modern penology are so fond of con-
juring up.

Ol 5 thou 1s
a)

DESPITE THE fact that our main
method of handling the criminal and
the delinquent still is punishment,
we can see here and there the first
vague outline of an attempt to catch
up with the penologists of the last
century. At the Highfields Project
in New Jersey, for example, under
the leadership of Drs. F. Lovell
Bixby, Lloyd McCorkle and Albert
Elias, juvenile delinquents live in
a unique institution where the no-
tion of punishing the offender for
his past sins has been virtually
abandoned. Group therapy, mean-
ingful work and a climate of sup-
port rather than repression are the
weapons of rehabilitation. Fritz
Redl’s work with delinquent boys
at the Pioneer House in Detroit had
paved the way and his account of
that experience — in Children Who
Hate — is still one of the most en-
lightening studies of the youthful
offender that has been made. Mr.
Red] has shown that giving up pun-
ishment does not mean falling into
the | Opposite extreme — a naive
belief that love alone will reform the
lls of the world.

In Puerto Rico, the Director of
Corrections, Potfitio. Diaz Santana,
maintains a work camp for adult
criminals which involves a degree of
fre edom seldom found elsewhere. The
minimum-security prison at Seagovil-
le, Texas, a part of the federal penal
system, under Director Bennett, has
broken with much of the older pu-
nitive philosophy and has been de-
bed ok one petclonies as ti

members with juvenile gangs, as in
New York after the murder of fif-
teen-year-old Michael Farmer, rep-
resents a remarkable innovation in
the old vicious circle of delinquency,
arrest, punishment and more delin-
quency. And, of course, there is the
slow and painful growth of rehabili-
tative programs in some of our
regular institutions,

FROM THESE and similar experi-
ences, a new idea is beginning to
emerge. There are many people who
now believe that only under very
limited conditions is punishment ef-
fective as a means of preventing
crime. First, punishment must be
commensurate with the crime, for
otherwise it breeds a sense of martyr-
dom and resentment which encour-
ages new illegal acts. Second, punish-
ment must be both quick and certain,
if it is to serve as a realistic deter-
rent, Third, punishment must stand
as a symbol of the ethical condem-
nation of society and not as a per-
sonal gesture of retaliation. Fourth,
punishment imposed by the legal
system must be in accord with the
values of society at large. And fifth,
the psychology of the criminal act
must be such that the threat of
punishment has an opportunity to
enter the individual’s motivational
structure.

We know, in reality, that these
conditions are seldom met. Arbitrary
sentencing procedures break down
any neat equation between crime and
punishment. Both the deliberate
and unintentional inefficiencies of
our legal system create a situation
in which punishment is neither quick
nor certain; it has been estimated
that for every one hundred major
crimes committed in the United
States each year, less than five per-
sons are sent to prison. Public dis-
paragement and suspicion of law-en-
forcement agencies undermines much
of the ethical quality of punishment.
Legal morality and popular morality
are frequently in conflict. And the
impulsive or unconscious motivation
of much criminal behavior frequent-
ly renders punishment irrelevant.

Even if the necessary conditions
for punishment’ s effectiveness were
oe it is still doubtful if punishment
is t

é best 1 way to duce crime and days = Bedlamw

- ie

delinquency. Punishment, under ideal
conditions, may deter some po-
tential offenders. But we have come
to realize that a society in which men
conform to the law through fear is
hardly preferable to a society in
which the only answer to the deviant
is revenge. The best objective — for i
practical reasons if for no other —
is rehabilitation, the transforma-
tion of the offender to a point where
he willingly follows the dictates of iw
the law. Punishment, in short, may oy
be a luxury that we can ill afford,
for you seldom inculcate a love of
virtue by hitting a man in the face.
It is true, of course, that punish-
ment will have a role in any social
order. We know, for example, that f
hitting a dog or spanking a child or wD
fining a motorist is precisely how we
do secure conforming behavior in
special instances. But most criminals
are not dogs, children or delinquent
drivers, and we must be skeptical of
analogies. It is also true that for }
some criminals there is no alterna- ¥
tive to punishment; some men are
so dangerous that they must be kept
locked up. But at least we can ad-
mit that our real aim is to keep such
men out of circulation and not make
a pretense that their captivity will ‘a
somehow lead to their reform.
The public is not likely to take
this idea — that punishment is in
many cases a fallacy — to its heart
at the present time. This is under-
standable. The idea runs counter to
our deepest feelings about the hard,
necessary nexus of sin, guilt and ret-
ribution. But the present clamor
for a crackdown on crime and de-
linquency, for harsher treatment of
the offender, is inexcusable. It is not
simply a failure to progress but a
retrogression to a policy of demon-

strated inefficiency. Perhaps, as
Morris Cohen has suggested, it f
is not necessary to prove that —

punishment always prevents crime.
in order to justify its use, any more
that it is necessary to show that
medicine always prevents death or
cures ills. But we cannot escape the
task of searching for better ways to
prevent crime; and to deliber: rately
ignore the. ad¢vanees which have
made and the new avenues |

are opening up is to return»

oom

fn er ee Tee Eee fA ae

BOOKS an

iPthe

The Source of Nixon’s Strength

RICHARD NIXON: A Political and
Personal Portrait. By Earl Mazo.
Harper & Bros. 309 pp. $3.95.

James MacGregor Burns

AMONG liberals there are two pre-
vailing theories about Vice President
Nixon — the amorality theory and the
immorality theory. The latter, which is
based mainly on his campaign methods,
holds that the man is downright dis-
honest, unethical, even vicious. The
amorality hypothesis, which takes into
account the so-called “new Nixon,” holds
that Nixon simply shifts like a barom-
eter needle to every change in the
moral atmosphere.

This book gives powerful support to
the amorality theory. Nixon emerges
as a man utterly lacking in any fixed
conviction as to either the means or
ends of politics. He does not really be-
lieve in unfair campaigning. What he
believes is that the test of unfairness lies
in what the current traffic will bear,
in what the candidate can get away
with, rather than in traditional and
long-prescribed rules of the game, or in
“cricket morality,” as Arthur Koestler
has called it. Most politicians are caught
at least a bit between an inner moral
code, however amorphous or elastic, and
the expediencies of vote getting. Nixon
has been spared all this; Jacking inner
guides, he simply looks for the thumbs
up or the thumbs down of the crowd.
And if the crowd is in a lynching mood,
as so often recently, down comes the ax.

Mr. Mazo’s fascinating volume
abounds with examples of Nixon’s
amorality. On the second page he tells
us that the Vice President “is a practic-
ing Quaker, at home with precepts of
kindness to one’s fellow man; yet, in
fighting for votes, he has resorted to
malignant innuendo. .. .” His Quaker
upbringing excluded gambling as a sin,
but Nixon gambled at cards shrewdly,
persistently and successfully all through
the war. Nixon came out of college
something of a liberal, turned reaction-
ary during the late 1940s as the country

JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS, pro-

a fessor of political science at Williams

College, was a member of the Massa-
chusetts delegation to the Democratic
National Convention in 1952 and in
(1956. His most recent book is Roosevelt:

: The Lion and the Fox.

changed, and now is a “modern Repub-
lican.” He was against McCarthyism,
not because it was bad in itself, but be-
cause it was bad for the unity and ef-
fectiveness of the Republican Party. His
notorious campaign against Helen
Gahagan Douglas was marked, not
simply by his wild charges, but, Mr.
Mazo emphasizes, by the “adroitness and
calmness” with which Nixon and_ his
people did the job — “like a team of
experienced surgeons performing master-
ful operations for the benefit of human-
ity.” The author’s chief defense of Nix-
on’s tactics against Mrs. Douglas, inci-
dentally, is that her Democratic op-
ponents in the primary had made some-
what similar charges against her. Again
the emphasis is on the prevailing public
attitudes toward the rules.

Amorality undoubtedly has its polit-
ical uses. Untroubled by moral dilem-
mas, a politician can see his self-interest
with instant clarity. The events of the
“Nixon fund,” which Mr. Mazo de-
scribes superbly and in detail, suggest
that when a man is caught in a fix over
a matter of ethics, all he needs is a
strong man around to solve the problem.
The situation just before the famous
broadcast was a dramatic one. Eisen-
hower was hemming and hawing, inde-
cisive as usual, but evidently hoping
that his running mate would pull out
of the race on his own. The mail was
going heavily against Nixon. Stassen
had urged him to quit, and a few
minutes before the broadcast was to
begin, Dewey phoned to say that most

From the Gradual Grass

Imagine a voice calling,
“There is a voice now calling,”
or maybe a blasting cry:
“Walls are falling!”

as it makes walls be falling.

Then from the gradual grass,

too serious to be just noise —
whatever it is grass makes,
making words, a voice:
“Destruction is ending; this voice

Is promising quiet: sound,

by lasting, not trying, grows to sound
endlessly from the world’s end
promising quiet.”

Imagine. That votce is calling.

WILLIAM STAFFORD

ARTS "9

of the General’s campaign advisers felt
that Nixon should resign. For a while
Nixon debated with himself. Was he
justified in putting his own judgment
over theirs, with so much at stake? None
other than his campaign adviser, Murray
Chotiner, saved the day. If Nixon was
kicked off the ticket, Chotiner said, he
would hold a press conference, tell the
whole story, and “break every rule in

the book.”

“Would you really do that?” Nixon
asked.

“Sure,” said Chotiner. . . . “Hell, we’d
be through with politics anyway. It
wouldn’t make any difference.”

“Some way Chotiner’s cold, realistic
logic [sic] broke the tension,” Nixon
later told Mazo, and by the time he
got to the studio he had decided not to
resign.

As an amoralist Nixon has the great
advantage that he can approach any
problem with a variety of instantly
available alternatives. Consider his be-
havior in the face of mobs on his turbu-
lent South American trip. In Lima “I
had several alternative plans in mind,”
he told Mazo. “I always leave myself
a chance to change plans when dealing
with Communists. . . .” In Caracas,
“the minute I stepped off the plane,
while getting the salute, I cased the
place. I always do that when I walk
out. .. .” Nor is Nixon handicapped by
old-fashioned codes of loyalty, such as
the one that compelled Dean Acheson to
say that he would not turn his back on
Alger Hiss. When Chotiner’s, and later
Sherman Adams’, usefulness was over,
Nixon turned his back evidently with-
out a tremor.

THIS honest and remarkably revealing
book covers much more than Nixon and
his amorality. There are vivid pictures
of the Vice President’s role in the Taft-
Eisenhower fight of 1952; of Stassen’s
curious dealings with him; of the con-
tinuing tension between Nixon’s people
and Eisenhower’s; of Nixon’s doubts and
tears and occasional decisions to quit
politics altogether; of murderous Repub-
lican infighting. But somehow one’s
thoughts always return to the void with-
in which Nixon conducts his operations.

There is one sure thing in politics, the 79

Vice President has said — “what goes

up comes down | and what goes down

often comes up.” The coming election

year will be an interesting test of this a

notion. Le , r uf .

THE LIVING AND- THE DEAD: A
Study of the Symbolic Life of Amer-
icans. By W. Lloyd Warner. Yale
University Press. 528 pp. $7.50.

' W. G. McLoughlin
WITH this fifth volume W. Lloyd War-

ner has completed the famous Yankee
City Series. When the first two volumes
appeared in 1941-42, they were rightly
hailed as a great pioneering effort in
social anthropology, and the terms
“upper-upper,’ “lower-upper,” “upper-
middle” and so on quickly became part
of the American vocabulary. But, like
most pioneering works, the Yankee City
Series came under increasingly heavy
attack with the passing years and to-
day most sociologists regard it as in-
adequate, outmoded and misguided.
Among the more important criticisms
made of the project have been that its
definition of classes is too subjective,
that it lacks historical perspective, that
it is (because of the influence upon
Warner of Elton Mayo) too enamored
of the status quo, that it pays too much
attention to questions of social prestige
and too little to questions of economic
and political power, that it makes un-
warranted assumptions about the stabil-
ity and typicality of Yankee City (ie.,
Newburyport, Massachusetts) and that
its research techniques were inadequate
because of the mistaken preconceptions
upon which they, were based. In this
final volume of the series Warner has
tried to answer some of the objections.
For the general reader the first of
the five sections of the book will un-
doubtedly prove most illuminating. The
story of Andrew J. “Bossy” Gillis (here
called Thomas Ignatius “Biggy” Mul-
doon) would be uproarious and signifi-
cant in any form, although Warner al-
most succeeds in smothering it by
heavily underlining the obvious. Gillis’
first election as Mayor of Newburyport
in December, 1927, made _ headlines
across the country, for the outspoken,
two-fisted, red-haired, Irish, navy vet-
eran was as colorful a symbol of the urban
Sa upheaval in that era as Al
mith. Historians and political scientists
ll criticize Warner for failing to com-
eae Gillis to Boston’s Mayor Curley,
~ Chelsea’s Mayor Quigley and Salem’s
~ Mayor “High Hat” Hurley who were
_ similar manifestations of the social rev-

7 eT So

G.M cLOUGHLIN is the author a
Billy hi Was His Real Name and
F M ‘n Revivalism. Mr. McLoughlin i is
chair ah the American Civilization
rm at Brown University. — i

rot. .

ly me
ah oF
4 4
iy 4
4

st View of Yankee Cit

olution in Massachusetts politics in the
1920s. But Warner employs sufficient
quotations from current newspapers and
the participants concerned to bring out
the full flavor of the immigrant upris-
ing against the Yankee aristocrats.
Where Warner’s analysis falls short is
in his explanation of Gillis’ political
defeat and popular decline after four
years in office. Ignoring the obvious
questions of power politics, party ma-
chinery and voting habits, Warner of-
fers instead a farfetched contrast be-
tween Gillis and Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln, “like Biggy,” was attacked as

a buffoon and rustic clod incapable
of the responsibilities of high office.
Yet Lincoln rose above the limits set
for him by his enemies . . . [by his]
willingness to play the game of so-
cial mobility according to the tradi-
tional rules. . He changed his
speech and his dress, the houses he
lived in and their location, modified
his manners and some of his values,
as he advanced to higher levels.

According to Warner, Biggy lost his
popular support because he was “too
deviant,” because he refused to “con-
form” and instead “attacked and tried
to destroy the symbols of status.” But
the truth is that “Bossy” Gillis was
neither a natural leader nor an astute
politician; no matter how much he had
conformed to the “symbols of social
status” set by the upper classes of New-
buryport, he would never have been an
Abraham Lincoln nor even a James
Michael Curley.

THE second section of the book rep-
resents Warner’s attempt to answer the
criticism that the earlier volumes of the
series made too little use of historical
material. In the year 1930 Newburyport
held a mammoth tercentenary celebra-
tion. The forty-two historical events
chosen by the Tercentenary Committee
for tableau-floats in the big procession,
because they presumably represented
the most significant events of the city’s
past, offered Warner an excellent op-
portunity to examine “the ritualization
of the past.” But all that the reader is
given by way of establishing historical
fact against which to judge historical
symbol is a series of charts showing the
chronological distribution of the forty-
two events anda cursory account of the
history of the city based upon a heter-
ogeneous - assortment of secondary ac-
counts. (Works. siteg 4 cheek by jowl in-
clude such diverse interpretations of

American histery as those by James

oe eer) te ne

Truslow Adams and'Perry Miller, V.
L. Parrington and Samuel Eliot Mori-
son, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. and
Henry Adams, Charles A. Beard’ and
Frederick Jackson Turner.) We are
taken through labyrinthine but incon-
clusive explanations of such questions
as why the Tercentenary Committee did ‘
not include a float for either the War ae
of 1812 or the Mexican War, why they cy
did include a float depicting a witch-
craft trial, why there was no tableau
for the Acadians, why the Knights of
Columbus sponsored the tableau of La-
fayette’s visit, and why the Jewish com- i)
munity of Newburyport reneged on its ia
decision to sponsor the float depicting Oe
Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Quebec.
And then finally we are told: “The
evidence at very best is no more than
suggestive and any conclusions must be vi
pushed beyond induction and inference a
to speculation.” The laudable attempt ane
to employ history to amplify sociology
consequently benefits neither. Z f

HOWEVER, I found the third section is

of the book, dealing with the ritual of ,
burial in Yankee City’s five cemeteries, Dah
more rewarding. It contains a verbatim
conversation between two gravediggers ada
(lower-lower) and a cemetery superin-
tendent (lower-middle) which is clas-
sical in its earthy commentary on social ‘e
climbing via the re-burial of parents and ae

grandparents into more fashionable ne
plots. ‘There is a shrewd analysis of the ote
secularization of Protestantism which te

describes how “the minister is often
humiliated by having to compete with
the undertaker for the central role in

burying the dead.” .
The last two sections of this book
will raise the most eyebrows. In his
“exploration” of “the traditional core
of Christian symbolism,” as an evoca-
tion of “man’s moral and_ organic
(species) life,’ Warner leaves the reader
with two basic questions: What has
this to do with Yankee City, and where
is social anthropology headed if, as
Warner maintains, religion “is not an
‘illusion,’ as Freud contended, but a
reality of far greater significance than
our present scientific competence allows —
us to understand”? Warner answers
first question by insisting that the ine
habitants of Yankee City are pats
Western Christendom and part of t
human species and therefore i iss
vant to study the way in whic ar
and bols help | ma

to adjust to his moral and af
in the ‘se. Yet it pth. Fo
of the original work of the proj

liturgies of the Roman Catholic and
Episcopal churches when Warner claims
that “evangelical and Calvinistic Puri-
tanism” is “still the principal and domi-
nant faith of Yankee City.”

As for the future of social anthropol-
ogy, if this book is any indication it
will soon be caught up in the current
revival of religion:

There are many indications that

-we have reached the limits of the

Protestant revolt and that a counter-

revolution supporting and using evoc-

ative symbols is developing. The
present may be the extreme limit to
which the technological symbols of

Marxism and. similar systems take

us... . The truths it [Christianity]

contains, the significant non-rational
beliefs, feelings, and actions it ex-
presses and evokes, cover the entirety
of what man is and wishes to be.
.. For the last few centuries we have
partly succeeded in developing a sci-
entific understanding of ourselves and
the world around us. For further aid
we need to turn to our non-rational
collective and individual mentalities,
for the tools of rationality are not
_ enough.

_ Best Book
~ Contest is

$1600 Cash Awards plus 40% return. All types
of. manuscripts invited. For Contest, rules
and details of famous publishing plan, write
for free Brochure N

Pageant Press, 101 Fifth Ave., N. Y. 3

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36 |

my ie sia ve

Hamlet Off Staze " ee eon

THE QUESTION OF HAMLET. By
Harry Levin. Oxford University Press.
178 pp. $3.75.

Allardyce Nicoll
THE TITLE given to his book by

Professor Levin is presumably intended
to be a concealed double pun. Toward
the very beginning he insists that
“Hamlet without Hamlet would, of
course, be altogether unthinkable; but
Hamlet without Hamlet has _ been
thought about all too much”; and the
three sections of his study are headed
“Interrogation,” “Doubt” and “Irony.”
He concerns himself, therefore, both
with the question, or problem, of Hamlet
and with the question, or questioning,
which runs through Hamlet’s structure.
He discerns in the play the exercise of
a kind of metaphysical wit, and the
epithet metaphysical might well be ap-
plied to his own critical approach and
method.

For the core of the volume, he prints,
with some modifications, his University
of Toronto Alexander Lectures (de-
livered in 1958); but in addition there
are three supplementary studies, an es-
say on the “Antic Disposition,” a re-
view of Professor Peter Alexander's
Hamlet: Father and Son, and an at-
tempted explication of the Player’s
speech. Through all of these the author
displays his characteristic critical qual-
ities — keenness of mind and acute ob-
servation. In particular, he contributes
to our appreciation of the imaginative
processes which went to the creating of
this drama by his subtle emphasis on
its repeated phrases and toyings with
words. He thus calls to our notice the

way in which “the hopeless phrase ‘no
more’ runs through the play”; he shows
how Laertes’ “Why as a woadeock to
mine own springs, Osric” “harks back
to his father’s early suspicions: ‘Ay,
springes to catch woodcocks!’”; he sees
Claudius’ “union,” the pearl which he
puts into the poisoned cup, expanding
into an “ironic image” so as to grow
into a symbolic pun.

All of this is interesting and valuable,
but in the method itself dangers reside.
First, there is the danger that what may
be common to numerous plays may be
treated as though it were the special
attribute of Hamlet. Professor Levin,

ALLARDYCE NICOLL is Director of
the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-
upon-Avon, and professor of English at
Birmingham University. He is the au-

thor of many books om the English

drama.

‘hia . eine alt

for example, singles out two qualities
in this tragedy — the continued use of
questions and the duality implied in
such phrases as “A double blessing is a
double grace.” True, in passing, he
acknowledges that questions can hardly
be avoided in any dramatic dialogue,
and he even makes reference to Macbeth
and Lear in this connection. Yet the
stress which he lays on the questioning
gives the impression that interrogation
dominates more in Hamlet than in any
other of Shakespeare’s works — a sug-
gestion which may hardly be maintained
when we think of the questioning re-
frains which echo through Macbeth
and which have been taken by other
critics as a key to an understanding of
that drama, or when we consider how
“Lear’s Questions” have been viewed
as equally characteristic of the com-
panion tragedy. And who can escape
the perplexing and profound emotion
aroused by the repeated emphasis upon
the word “double” in Macbeth, with

the accompanying paradoxes of “fair
and foul’?

A SECOND danger lies in the fact that
this method tends to take us away from
the theatre, for which, after all, Hamlet
was written. No doubt, when we view
the crass materialism and_ simplifica-
tion which most modern producers im-
pose upon Shakespeare, or when we find
these producers ruining tragedies and
comedies alike by crude insensitivity to
their poetic values, we rejoice to find
this keen appreciation and fervent de-
votion to the drama’s words — from
which derives the enduring power where-
by it has made its impact over three
and a half centuries. The difficulty, how-
ever, arises from the obvious fact that
what is perfectly calculated for au-
dience-perception may become for
reader-perception either so puzzling as
to lead to over-subtle explanation or so
different in appeal as to lead us astray.
To those who see the tragedy in the
theatre, for instance, is Hamlet’s refer-
ence to “the undiscover’d country from
whose bourn no traveller returns” real-
ly difficult to fathom? The Ghost re-
turns, it is true, but Hamlet, at that
moment thinking of death, has no de-
sire to revisit earth in ghostly form.
Nor does the action of the play-scene
pose any real conundrum. Unconscious-
ly, spectators realize that here Shakes-
peare has a purely dramatic problem;
he must give to his audience an indica- —
tion of the whole plot of “The Murder
of Gonzago,” and yet clearly he cannot
act out even a short play-within-a-play —

The Naiton

bei Ad)

’

“since TClaudivs 44 to rise Talaee the first
few words in a frenzy of fear. The util-
ization of a dumb-show is Shakespeare's
excellent solution, and all the discussions

t concerning why Claudius did not start

up earlier are beside the point: the scene
aims at no particular subtlety and, if
Elizabethan stage conventions are taken
into account, one would think that a
critical attempt to read into the situa-
tion Shakespeare’s comment on _ the
King’s character is as much off the mark
as any modern producer’s irritating

“realistic business” to suggest that
Claudius’ attention must have been dis-
tracted from the players’ actions.

Professor Levin is justified when he
states that “it may indeed prove salutary
to reaffirm, with Hamlet himself, the
ascendancy of the poet over the player”
(or should he have said “over the pro-
ducer”?) and he has richly illuminated
many of the poetic qualities in Hamlet,
yet Shakespeare’s innermost secret can
be revealed only when stage and study
are in common accord.

Obituary for a Building

Leslie Katz

THE OLD Produce Exchange building,
at the foot of Broadway opposite Bowl-
ing Green, was a work of art. It had
the quality of its contemporary, the
Brooklyn Bridge, a structure that per-
sonified the grandeur of its use: an im-
mense, solid edifice of offices built of
red brick and terra cotta. The exterior
walls were designed to form tiers of
arches resembling a series of Roman
aqueducts mounted on top of one an-
other, diminishing in size at each suc-
ceeding level. At street level were
thirteen great arches (for the thirteen
states), while the topmost row ap-
peared as a line of tiny, scalloped aper-
tures. Mounted on one side was a gi-
gantic square tower that increased in
width at a cupola top (like the stack
of a Civil War railroad engine, or the
chimney of a Victorian house). The
building was studded with ribbons of
terra-cotta sculptures and plaques —

_ decoration rimmed its entire girth be-

tween the principal floors. Above the
street level, every few feet, garlanded
with wreaths and borders of vegetable
ornaments, were large heads of domestic
animals, the pig, the lamb, the cow, the
bull, the donkey — each with an in-

-nocent and dignified expression. At the

corners, higher up, were the prows of
ships, and between them, in series, the
Seals of the States, sculptured in a uni-
que, folk-like style. The over-all color
was a rich, deep hued, intrinsic red,
that ° became more beautiful with ite
years.

When twilight from the harbor

flooded Battery Place, the Produce Ex-

change seemed to emit a beneficent an-
swering glow, charged with a resplendent

consciousness — a pagan, capitalistic

altar place of meats and provisions, a

PROSE RATZ writes Hid

essays. His first book, Invitation to the
Voyage, was published in England last

temple of agricultural commerce. It was
a building you could have a feeling
about. Your eyes could repair to it,
rest upon it, contemplate it, from Bowl-
ing Green (a tree-shaded place). The
building gave you a sense of relation to
place and moment, a gratified signifi-
cance to your feelings about the city,
the struggle of the city, yourself as a
part of the city. The Produce Exchange
had civic meaning as a Greek or Renais-
sance structure.

Max Lerner

ship.” —

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It was recently torn down (and
nothing of it saved). As a thing of com-
merce, it had become uneconomic. The
dramatic and historic site it occupied
was needed for larger business use.

Now to lament the demise of this
building could be like mourning the
passing of the clipper ship, and its
displacement by the transatlantic liner.
To praise the past, one need not berate
the present. This obituary has awaited
the completion on the same site of a
new building, known as “2 Broadway,”
a structure that one could hope would
be a modern phoenix, a fresh magnifi-
cence supplanting an earlier glory, alum-
inum and glass taking the place of
brick and terra cotta as the steam en-
gine outmoded the sail.

“2 BROADWAY,” recently completed,
is a thirty-story, fully air-conditioned
office building, substantially modern in
all its appointments and facilities, with
outside “curtain walls” forming a facade
almost entirely constructed of glass and
aluminum. The front extends the full
width of the exceptionally wide block,
and the largeness of the site has per-
mitted the builders to continue the
building upward with tower floors that

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provide an unusual amount of floor
space.

Just as a rocket cannot be described
simply as a machine, “2 Broadway” can
hardly be called a building. Viewed from
Bowling Green, it is more an installation,
a package, a broad box encased in
shiny wrapping, sheer, sharp and gleam-
ing. This striking edifice, though it has
a name (a number), presents an essen-
tially anonymous and faceless pérson-
ality. Its over-all effect is one of un-
mitigated self-assertion negating every-
thing in sight but itself — a glittering
nonentity. It appears to have been con-
ceived not at all in terms of its loca-
tion, and makes no concession whatso-
ever to the character of its surroundings.
Designed “purely,” in terms of economic
function, it seems to contain the max-
imum number of floors and space fea-
sible within existing building code re-
quirements. Inside such a building, (as
in many commercial structures), it
barely matters where you are or where
you're going; up or down, above ground
or below, the effect is sameness. (As,
‘while riding the smooth elevators, you
know your direction of travel only. by
the indicator numbers.)

Can one blame this building? It fol-
lows current building practices. Con-
ceived as a container, the outside shape
is as an afterthought, the walls a glassy
partition serving to separate the air-
conditioned interior from the un-air-
conditioned exterior. The visual effect
outside is unrelieved, repelling and_un-
pleasant, but proudly so.

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THE NATION Index

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are prepared to furnish free the

current index — January-June, 1959
— when it comes off the press.

Make your request by posteard to
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nS | Lo ee ee ’ a
‘ ; rua) etd: he eae ae ;

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y v ’ me oN ye

As a gesture of art and decorative
daring, the fagade is glorified and en-
shrined at its entranceway by a large,
wide, abstract mosaic, an innocuous
arabesque of round and jagged colored
shapes, (constructed of fragments of
Venetian glass expréssly shattered for
the purpose). Like the building, ‘this
mosaic is committed to nothing beyond
the mystique and logic of its own spec-
ialized, abstract function as a_ thing
apart, a law unto itself, a disrelation.

WE LIVE, it would seem, in a time of
rapacious and calloused introversion, In
fashionable art, as in hard commerce,
self-concern is dominant, egotism sacro-
sanct. The concepts that began as a
revolution of functionalism have become
a puritanical romanticism, like the fin
fenders on autos, the photo-electric cell
cameras to take snapshots, miraculous
television a medium dedicated to the
sale of toilet tissue. The “lonely crowd”
is actually a complacent mob. The spirit
of liberation from old restraints, the en-
lightened freedom of the modern, has
become in its stylish aspects, the free-
dom to be trivial, to be inane or nasty,
to grab at betterment, exploit your

neighbor and live by rote, in the name
of self-expression and the latest thing.
~The terms in which we define irreduc-
ible necessity become the terms of our
ideals. A beautiful modern building, as
large as the new one, could have been
built. Instead we have a greedy hulk
disguised as functional modernity, rank
conservatism masquerading in avant
garde dress, a menacing presence hov-
ering over Bowling Green. ,

When after seventy-five years the
Produce Exchange was leveled, its for-
tress walls had to be chewed down by
pneumatic drills. It was built to last,
with a consciousness of the past and a
respect for the future. When the time
comes years hence to dismantle “2
Broadway” perhaps the only. tool need-
ed will be a beer can opener. We live in
an age tyrannized by growth, obsoles-
cence and quick turn-over,. The dis-
posable building, like the disposable
handkerchief,. will have its. day. . But
later, civic pride and. civic concern may
become resurgent, civic self-respect may
intervene, and then “2. Broadway” may
itself be replaced by a structure worthy
to occupy the site.of the old Produce
Exchange.

RECORDS

Lester Trimble

SERGEI PROKOFIEFF’S L’Ange de
Few has never, to my knowledge, been
performed in this country. Indeed, the
opera seems to have had very few pro-
ductions anywhere, a fact which is both
astonishing and unfortunate. For it is

‘an. important work — tloquent, strong

and saturated with attractive color,
partially a result of French influence
(mainly that of Pelléas et Mélisande)
acting upon the affirmative and vigor-
ous style which one identifies with Pro-
kofieff. Since L’Ange de Feu was written
during the composer’s period of ex-
patriation (1918 to 1927), the presence
of non-Russian qualities 1s hardly sur-
prising. More remarkable is the fact
that even on a recording (Westminster
has issued the work as a “U.S.A. Pre-
miére”) and without any of the visual
appurtenances of theatrical drama, the
opera can raise itself up vividly before
the mitid’s eye. This proves that Pro-
kofieff succeeded in embodying and pro-
jecting dramatic situations through the
music itself. There is a crucial difference
between a score that simply underlines
or backgrounds action, mood and chat
acterization, and one that synthesizes
these elements in the medium of sound,

Great works for the lyric stage almost
always fall into the latter category.
L’Ange de Feu is a large, rich work,
not only because it has five acts, but
because the ideas with which it deals
and their musical embodiment both

‘have amplitude. The story, set in six-

teenth-century Germany, deals with only
the most elemental passions, examining
them within a mystical-religious con-
text. Renata, the opera’s leading female
character, sings for nearly ninety minutes
and transmits an incredible series of in-
tense experiences and emotions. As a
child, she had a mystical, partially physi-
cal, relationship with her Flaming Angel,
who told her that she was to become a
saint. In her seventeenth year, the angel

left her, and her life from that time —

has been an agonized attempt to find
him in another, possibly human, incar-.
nation. Finally despairing, she rejects
the world to enter a convent, But the
demons which have pursued her since
her loss of the angel, infest the con-
vent. At the final curtain, accused of
sorcery, Renata is condemned by the
Inquisition to torture and the stake. —

Difortunately, short of printing the
entire libretto, it is impossible to convey
"h N TIC

Pp wrt oe,
florid dramatic quality the text ac-
‘cumulates in the process of examining
good and evil. Demonism, mysticism
and eroticism are strong materials for
drama, and Prokofieff’s music makes
them even more potent. L’Ange de Feu
might disturb a few souls in a stage
production, but it would hardly bore.
Perhaps the Metropolitan Opera will
take it in hand. It belongs with them.

The Westminster recording (OPW-
1304; 3 discs) is extremely good. Jane
_ Rhodes, who sings the part of Renata,

is vocally well suited to the role, and

projects its constant intensity without

a lapse. Xavier Depraz, Irma Kolassi,

Janine Collard, Jean Giraudeau, Paul

Finel, André Vessiéres, Gérard Fried-

mann, Bernard Cottret, Claudy Mas-

Michel and Janine Pieret are the other

singers, and with a few minor excep-

tions, carry their parts in exemplary
fashion. The Chorus of Radiodiffusion-

Télévision Francaise and the Orchestre

du Théatre National de l’Opéra de Paris,

as well as the other forces, are splendid-
ly directed by Charles Bruck.

_ MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH gives a
_ commendable performance of the Schu-
mann Concerto for Cello and Orchestra,
Op. 129, on a Monitor recording (MC-
- 2023). He does not exploit completely
the work’s potential for passionate lyri-
cism and a tint of stodginess occasion-
ally creeps into both his playing and
that of the Moscow Philharmonic Or-
chestra under Samuel Samosud. Never-
theless, this is a highly respectable and
convincing performance. On the second
side, Schumann’s seldom heard Concerto
for Four Horns and Orchestra, Op. 86,
is well recorded by the State Radio
Orchestra of the USSR with Alexander
~Gauk conducting. Except for the use
of considerable vibrato by the soloists,
which gives their tone a quality not
_ popular in this country, the performance
is splendid, not to say of virtuoso cali-
ber, especially in the high horn parts.
The piece itself is odd but appealing.

THE complete Corelli Concerti Grossi,
Op. 6, are presented on three Vanguard
Bach-Guild discs (BG-585/7). These
lovely works are played by the Chamber
Orchestra of the Societas Musica, Copen-
hagen, with Jorgen Ernst Hansen direct-
_ing from the harpsichord. The level of
performance is high, with the accent on
solidity and fullness of tone and ex-
‘pression rather than on the sleekness
| with which contemporary Italian cham-
ber groups play such music. It is a
wholesome approach; not bedazzling,
but comfortable. oe SEs

; er Vanguard record (BG-

has the Danish organist, Finn Videro,
playing the J. S. Bach Preludes and
Fugues in C Minor and C Major, the
Fantasia in C Minor, and the Toccata
and Fugue in F Major on the organ
of St. Johannis, Vejle, Denmark. Videro
is a communicative musician, and the
organ itself is a joy to the ears, being
both richly solid and clear in its basic
tone, and deliciously bright in the high-
est registers. On the review copy, the
beginning of each piece is preceded by
a faint bleed-over of the recorded sound
into the silent grooves.

The Festival Quartet, consisting of
Szymon Goldberg, violin; William Prim-
rose, viola; Nikolai Graudan, cello; and
Victor Babin, piano; has recorded the
Beethoven Piano Quartet in E Flat,
Op. 16, and the Schumann Piano Quartet
in E Flat, Op. 47, for RCA Victor
(LM-2200). These are all, of course,
top-drawer musicians, and their collabo-
ration at the Aspen Festival (which led
to the formation of the Festival Quartet)
seems to have given them an ensemble
unity not always found in chamber ag-
gregations of virtuosi. They play, too,
with immense exuberance, which is an
attractive quality, especially when it
is controlled.

FILMS

Robert Hatch

AS IT comes to the screen, Robert
Traver’s bestselling Anatomy of a Mur-
der adds a new concept to American jur-
isprudence—justifiable insanity. Michi-
gan, where this small-town killing takes
place, is one of the few states which
recognize “irresistible impulse” as a
form of temporary derangement render-
ing a man not responsible for his acts.
As the case develops, a psychiatrist tes-
tifies that Lieutenant Frederic Manion
(Ben Gazzara) was gripped by just such
an impulse when he shot café owner
Barney Quill for having raped Mrs.
Manion (Lee Remick). This should
wrap up the case for the defense, but it
turns out to be only the beginning.
The bulk of the argument turns on
whether or not Mrs. Manion was in fact
raped and on whether or not her hus-
band believed that she was so molested.
These speculations are awkward for the
defense because Mrs. Manion is shown
as the kind of girl whom only an amorist
of the most singular impetuosity could
have occasion to attack. She is ludi-
crously available, not to say aggressive,

_ and her husband’s lawyer (James Stew-

art) is himself put ‘o the trouble of

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defending his virtue during several brief
interviews with her. For a time it looks
as though the thesis of Mrs. Manion’s
violation cannot be made to stick, and
the defense is sadly down at the mouth;
but at the last moment her missing
undergarments are discovered under
circumstances suggesting that they had
been in Quill’s possession immediately
before the shooting. They are torn and,
to my surprise, both sides agree that
torn panties are proof of rape.

But why should the degree of Mrs.
Manion’s reluctance be a point at all?
The case hinges, not on the state of
her virtue, but on the state of her hus-
band’s mind; presumably he would be
as powerfully impelled to erase a rival
lover as to punish an act of violence.
What the jury is really being asked to
consider is not whether Lieutenant
Manion was deranged, but whether he
had a reason more acceptable than
jealousy for his derangement. Hence the
new doctrine of justifiable insanity.
Joseph N. ‘Welch, who must have de-
veloped a taste for acting during the
Army-McCarthy hearings, plays the
judge in Anatomy of a Murder. His de-
portment on the bench is almost ex-
cessively quizzical, and it occurred to
me that he was having some trouble to
suppress his laughter.

Aside from this exercise in circuitous
legal logic, the picture is a good court-
room melodrama. But melodrama set in
courtrooms have so easy a time of it
that I am inclined to be severe with
them. In this instance, Otto Preminger
has directed his actors to behavior of
such broad flamboyance as to wash out
their particular humanity. Brooks West,

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as the local prosecutor, recaptures the
righteous stupidity of Margaret Dumont
being baited by Groucho Marx. In the
book this public servant was distin-
guished more by his political connections
than by his native wit (Traver was once
trounced in a race for county prosecu-
tor), but that is no reason for making
him gape like an irritated frog.

George C. Scott is cast as a wolfish
assistant district attorney sent up from
Lansing to strengthen the prosecution’s
team. Mr. Scott, well-known for his
impersonation of Shakespearean villains,
gives us his Richard III bit, and its
probable effect on a north Michigan jury
can scarcely be imagined. James Stewart,
on the contrary, is as easy as an old
shoe and quick as a trout. Mr. Stewart

has been playing David Harum longer

than Joe Jefferson played Rip van
Winkle. Ben Gazzara, eyes hooded, spells
danger; what Lee Remick spells in rodeo
pants I shall not specify here.

The virtue of Mr. Traver’s story is
that, for the jigsaw precision of most
crime entertainment, it substitutes’ the
inconclusive and frustrating welter of
deeds and motiyes that normally beset
men seeking truth and justice. But by
hanging an obvious tag on each prin-
cipal in the case, the movie has thrown
the yarn toward horse opera. The char-
acters are drawn to be clear on the
smallest TV screen, and TV is prob-
ably the target at which the picture is
really directed.

AFTER almost two years of maneuver-
ing, the French screen adaptation of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is at last on
public view. I never expected it to get
by—not that this version of Lawrence’s
novel is sensationally erotic by present-

day screen standards; there are one or ~

two explicit scenes and it is quite clear
that the characters are not discussing
the weather, but the film is at least as
much expurgated as the cut edition of
the novel that has been selling freely
here for years. Nonetheless, I thought the
censors would block it forever because
the lovers break traditional morality
and do not pay—indeed give promise
of living happily ever after. This eat-
your-cake-and-have-it attitude toward
sex has ever enraged our guardians, and
the release of Lady Chatterley is a
splendid defeat of Pecksniff.

That it amounts to much of a victory
for Lawrence is another and more de-
batable point. Lady Chatterley is a
thesis novel (that shame of the body
is inexorably linked to aridity of the
mind and pettiness of the soul) more
than it is a love story. Under Mare
Allegret’s direction, it has become an

. Cn . * ¢

picture has turned out Lady Chatterley —

as the well-known folie anglaise, ;
q's 4 ‘ P = 4 ;

s eee a
amorous romance, and a rather odd one.

Predictably, the removal of Mellors’
animal husbandry seminars in sex de-
prives the film of much that Lawrence
was trying to teach—the joy of calling
things by their right names and enjoy-
ing them in their proper usage. But
beyond that, the development of situa-
tion is enigmatic and the characters
are askew. Thus, Sir Clifford (played
by Leo Genn, who speaks a lunatic
“plume de ma tante” French) quite
literally breaks up the show when he
suggests to Lady Chatterley that she
go off somewhere and get herself preg-
nant. There has been nothing to pre-
pare the lady, or the audience, for this
bizarre proposal and it gets no more
plausible as the action unfolds. Then,
soon after becoming reconciled to Mr.
Genn’s linguistic eccentricities, you will
notice that Lady Chatterley appears to
be an excellently self-possessed. and
worldly French matron (which is not
surprising, since she is played by Daniel-
le Darrieux). That such a lady should
take a discreet lover would not be re-
markable, considering the invalidism of
her husband; but it is improbable that
she would do anything irresponsible in
the way of game wardens and quite
unthinkable that the most philosophical
of woodsmen could instruct her in the
aesthetics of the. flesh.

How then to accomplish the first
“mystic” seduction? Allegret manages it
by throwing his heroine into a trance
so deep that I suspected Mellors of
employing drugs. And from then on
she vacillates between Parisian sophisti-
cation and girlish awakening with an
abruptness that I found sobering.

As for Erno Crisa, playing Mellors,
he seemed a good man bent on capturing
a woman who looked to be a match for
him. More power to that—but the set
speeches from Lawrence’s guide to basic —
British social patterns visibly astonished
his Sicilian mind as they came trooping
didactically from his lips. Early in the
picture, I was troubled by the anachron-
isms of zippered clothing and post- —
World War II automobiles, but I soon
decided that there were larger displace-
ments to wonder over.

If Allegret had only scrapped Law-
rence’s purpose entirely and settled for
his plot, he could have concocted a
worldly comedy in which the lady kicks
up her heels for the groom. Of course, —
such a yarn might not strike a French- |
man as brilliantly novel, but as the |
becomes just that story, overlaid with —
what seem fits of madness—which I
am certain French audiences shrug off

7 IN ATION

]
|

Crossword Puzzle No. 828

By FRANK W. LEWIS

ert

a
ht ea
er

Bt ee
Be

A004 Jeo

Bey. || 1d
ee

ACROSS:

1 Mulligans frets. (5)

4 Common nien, perhaps, like Capt.
John and Gen. Walter Bedell. (6)

11 A poet might make it so, or a ver-
sion at least. (7)

12 Burns might have been soothed by
at. (7)

13 Tubes get a long and narrow shape
when they are cut. (9)

14 on a catch, or try to make one?

15 Not an original writing. (13)

17 Longfellow wasn’t, in recounting
what John paid for his friend. (5, 8)

22 See 8 down

24 Suggests something Ananias had,
but not to his credit. (9)

25 It’s funny there’s nothing in the
package! (7)
26 ae spirited form of Kringle?
)
27 Time for one putting two and two
together? (6)
28 Invocation to the wise Indian, (5)

DOWN:

2 Comparatively neat when ll
a 3 on TV. (7) ee ey

3 Occidental ? (9)
5 Conditional strength? (5)

18, 1959

Fluttering reiteration. (7)
Sink put in order. (6)

8 and 22 across Of Shakespeare, they

' suggest something shaken in a
hurry. (5, 5)

9 State one point, and sing in a com-
bination. (The point is of thorn, by
the way!) (5, 8)

10 Occupation levels for
(7, 6)
16 oye to get sick as these at table?

fighters?

18 To make the head slippery? (Grease

ean!) (3, 4)

19 You need it in getting out a paper,
as you can see! (7)

20 See 23 down
21 His playboy was a 3. (5)

.23 and 20 Uses something smaller than
coffin-nails? (Or just pipes?) (11) |

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 827

ACROSS: 1 and 20 Changing of dest

Guard; 9 Repel; 10 Refracted; 11
Yankees; 12 Release; 13 Nears: 14
Bloodshot; 16 Chemistry; 18 Heats; 19
Augusta; 21 Tiny Tim; 22 Gearshift:
23 Spurn; 24 Disinfectants. DOWN: 1
Carrying charge; 2 eee 3 Gal-
leys; 4 Norms; 5 Offertory; 6 Trailed;
7 Extra; 8 Advertisements; 14 Bat-
talion; 15, Heartburn; 17 Insists; 18
Handset; 21 Tithe.

Fore

Gamma LAKE EST. N.Y. Se

Printed in the U. S. A. by RCR Publication Printers Corp., N. ¥. C,

VACATIONS

New Faces of Summer 59

A new season—a new crowd—young, alive and
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CHESTERTOWN 5, N.Y.
Phones: 3830 N.Y.C. LU 65-1678

ON ORANGE LAKE
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A pleasantly informal vacation in friendly at~-

mosphere. Swimming, ‘Boating, Fishing on Nat-
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other sports. Records, books. Summer Theatre,
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erous quantity. $55.00 Weekly; $8.00 Daily;
Weekend: Fri. Supper thro Sun. Dinner $16.
14% hrs. from N.Y.C. via Thruway
Jane C. Arenz, R.D. No. 1, poe Charest, 1D No. ee ee N.Y.

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Burlingame, Calif,

AUGUST 1, 1959 . . 25c

HITCHHIKING
ACROSS ALGERIA

by Shane and Judith Mage
KAaAKKKKKAKAKH

TEST CASE ON ATOMIC WASTE

by Gerald McCourt

MESMERIZED BY McCARTHY

a review by George Dangerfield

PUBLIC LIBRARY

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Pca Cea oy!
aS PRIME Cy ote cyt

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LETTERS

Stale Stuff

Dear Sirs: The Ronald W. May article,
“Organized Crime and _ Disorganized
Cops,” in the June 27 issue, was most
enlightening. I had noticed that the
FBI seemed more interested in gaining
appropriations from Congress to check
subversive activities than in tangling
with gun-toting gangsters.

There are a number of things which
have bothered me about the McClellan
hearings. One is that in the Texas cases,
at least, the evidence had already been
through the courts. Why bring up
evidence and charges which had already
been disposed of? I wish the investiga-
tions would get into something more
substantial. So far, except for the Team-
sters suffering in their public relations,
about the only thing we have learned
is that a disbarred judge in Tennessee
was given a Cadillac by his wealthy
friends when he was convicted of taking
a Pontiac from a Teamster he had on
trial,

RosEMARY Scott
Houston, Tex.

City Politics

Dear Sirs: In “The Urban Vacuum”
(The Nation, July 4) Professor Reagan
says: “We also need a reversal of the
tradition, well entrenched in some areas,
that national party lines have no place
in local politics. As local problems come
to require national leadership and finan-
cial aid, an alliance of city political
leaders with national parties becomes
essential.”

The statement runs counter to all
American municipal government experi-
ence. The cities without national party
lines in local politics have a much better
governmental record than the cities still
using them. They even do better in
the matter of getting recognition and
assistance from the federal government,
because they generally know better what
they need and know better how to use
the help they receive.

Ep, F, ALEXANDER
Cincinmnan, O.

F No Jobs Yet

Dear Sirs: For the fifth time within the
ast four years, the courts of New York

State have ruled against the New York

_ City Board of Education policy requir-
ing that teachers become informers in
_ order to clear themselves of subversive
taint. The latest decision was rendered

BB,

cit

by the Court of Appeals about two
weeks ago. The Board of Education has,
thus far, made no move to reinstate the
four teachers and the principal to whom
the decision applies.

If individuals can be persecuted for
refusal to deny moral principles univer-
sally recognized as essential to human
decency, if the ruling of the court in
redress of such injustice can be ignored,
even in one small corner of the country,
then the undermining of our democracy
is still a very real danger.

SytviA KATZEN
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Competition in Cruelty

Dear Sirs: In your issue of May 9, you
state editorially that while both Missis-
sippi and South Africa can boast of the
highest concentration of racists in the
world, in South Africa the beatings of
non-whites are “official” while in the
Southern state they are “unofficial.”
Unhappily, there are “unofficial” beat-
ings here in South Africa, too — per-
haps more than in Mississippi. Lately,
our English press has been exposing the
frightful conditions in the farm-jails, in-
to which Africans who have transgressed
the complicated “pass laws” are pressed
into service and where they receive
beatings instead of wages. Occasionally,
a particularly cruel farmer is taken to
court, but the Minister of Justice has
declined, presumably in the “public in-
terest,” to institute an inquiry which
I am certain would make your Missis-
sippi racists look like “nigger lovers.”

H. B. KimMe
Cape Town, South Africa

Taking Jazz Out of the Kitchen

Dear Sirs: In the June 27 Nation, Nel-
son Algren writes: “I happened to be
behind the piano the night Mr. Hentoff
tried to make Miss Bessie Smith put on
a lorgnette before he’d let her sing
‘Nobody Knows You When Youre
Down and Out.’”

Mr. Algren must have been well be-
hind the piano, because in that scene
from Xanadu, what happened was that
Miss Smith was bugged at having to
keep singing her jazz “in the kitchen.”
Visitors to the kitchen like Mr. Algren
may well make an appreciative audience,
but they haven’t had their lives —
economic and sometimes otherwise —
depend on the carnivorous squares who
often run the kitchens and the booking
agents who act as flesh peddlers
(a cliché that still is often accurate).
It’s a matter of bread, not lorgnettes.

In asking for wider and more serious

T, "hs Pe ie if + mS

ateenoniee? jazz _— — eve 1

‘

Review's “mouldering crypt” _ I'm also
trying to get for jazz players more of
the kind of audience and working con-
ditions in which they won’t be exploited
as they have been in the kitchen. Mr.
Algren’s romanticizing indicates that he
has little notion of how many jazzmen
— including Bessie Smith — have had
to live.

Nat HENTOFF
New York City

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
41 @

ARTICLES

43 '@ Test Case on Atomic Waste
by GERALD McCOURT

45 @ Hitching Across Algeria
py SHANE and JUDITH MAGE

50 '@ TVA: The Unlearned Lesson
by LLOYD ARMOUR

53 @ What Mr. Walter Likes: A
Dialogue
by WADE THOMPSON

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

54 @ Mesmerized by McCarthy
by GEORGE DANGERFIELD

The Ethies of Sociology
by W. J. H. SPROTT

Rites of Violence
by DAN WAKEFIELD

The Artist (poem)
by STEPHEN STHPANCHEYV

Letter from Chicago
by JEAN MARTIN

Theatre
by HAROLD CLU

Folk Music Festival
by ROBERT SHELTON

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 60)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

AIA

= George G. Kirstein, Publisher
Carey McWilliams, Editor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Editor
Robert Hateh, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, European
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager {
The Nation, Aug. 1, 1959. Vol. 189, Na, 8 t )

The Nation published weekly (except for omis-
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A. by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
New York 14, N. Y. Second class postage paid
at New York, N. ¥.

Subscription Price Domestic-——One . Two
years $14, Three Years $20, Adaislemel Tange
per year, Foreign and Canadian $1.

Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed a

Here Sit idae tte Acta nse

view est, ex abor i
Affairs, Information Service, Dramatic Index, —

55 @
56 @
56 '@
57 @
58 '@

RMAN
59 @

i =

“er

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 3

NATION

EDITORIALS

“What Strike?”’

A half million steelworkers have been forced on strike.
They are not asking for a shorter week or a fully
guaranteed annual wage. At the final bargaining ses-
sions, in almost panicky retreat, President David J.
McDonald reduced the union’s initial list of 250 de-
mands to a modest wage increase and maintenance of
the status quo in plant conditions. Since the Kefauver
committee had established that a small rise was justi-
fied by technological improvements, the moderate wage
adjustment for which the union was willing to settle
could not have been the real issue on which negotiations
were suspended. Nor does the industry’s protestations
that it needs more freedom to determine work rules
make much sense in view of the enormous profits which
will shortly be announced for the first six months of
the year. One must, therefore, sympathize with Mr.
McDonald’s plaintive question: “What strike? The
steel companies have deliberately shut down the Amer-
ican steel industry.”

On February 21, Senator Kefauver suggested that
the steelworkers might well agree to limit their wage
demands to the increase in productivity, to be deter-
mined by an impartial fact-finding board, on condition
that the steel companies agree not to raise prices. But
he was told, and by Mr. McDonald, to keep his nose
out of the steelworkers’ affairs. Yet it is no secret that
the union would have eagerly settled for an increase
well within the range of the savings to be made pos-
sible by increased productivity. Should the strike now
be settled without a wage increase, the industry will
be able to appropriate these savings which the Kefauver
committee estimates at approximately $100,000,000 an-
nually. If management is genuinely concerned about in-
flation, it can easily demonstrate its sincerity by agreeing
to pass these savings to consumers in the form of re-
duced prices. Rep. Chester Bowles has expressed the
belief that the steel industry could, if wages were not
increased, reduce prices by $15 a ton and still keep its
profits at record level. But given the strong bargain-
ing position of the industry, this is most unlikely. The
real cause of the shutdown, one suspects, is the indus-
try’s desire to exhaust huge steel inventories and thus
pave the way for both wage and price increases.

If the steel strike is not settled by August 17, when
the AFL-CIO executive council meets prior to the
September convention, the leaders of American labor
will be plagued by a first-rate question. If the workers
in an industry as enormously profitable as steel cannot

make genuine progress in a boom period — progress
that keeps pace in some substantial measure with in-
creased productivity — then just when can American

labor expect to make further social advances?

The Success We Don’t Repeat:

Is the TVA “yardstick” principle obsolete? The
moment TVA challenged the identical bids of Amer-
ican manufacturers of electrical equipment by making
awards to European low bidders (see “Buy American
and Pay More” by George H. Hall, The Nation, June
20), the industry miraculously ordered a 15 per cent
reduction in the prices of large turbine generators. And
in other respects as well TVA has more than fulfilled its
brilliant initial promise (see article p. 50). Today the
success of the TVA “experiment” is incontestable —
one of the rare unarguable facts of American politics.
From every quarter of the world, engineers and social
planners flock to the Tennessee Valley to marvel and,
ultimately, to imitate. Why, then, are we so reluctant
to repeat a success of this magnitude? Why has TVA
remained the sole river valley authority?

To be sure, a nagging Republican opposition persists
and the private power lobby is still vocal; for the last
four years TVA has been unable to expand facilities
to meet new demands. But a giant can afford to be
magnanimous and a new bill offers substantial conces-
sions to the critics of TVA. It would regulatize TVA’s
finances by making it possible for the agency to finance
new power installations by the issuance of revenue
bonds which would not be tax-exempt. No longer would

To Nation Subscribers

During July and August, The Nation
will appear on alternate weeks only, The
next issue will be published Aug. 15. The
nornial weekly printing schedule will be
resumed with the first September issue.

eet

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, KD ge vy OO et A

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ier

Congress appropriate funds for new generating facilities,
It would also limit the area to be served by the project.
But even if the President signs the bill—there has been
talk of a veto—it will not mean that we have at
last learned the lesson of TVA. The TVA idea may
be copied in Egypt but not in Oregon and Washington;
TVA has spawned progeny on the Nile, the Euphrates
and the Zambezi but not on the Rio Grande, the Mis-
souri, the Colorado, or the Columbia. And for this the
old-line operating agencies in Washington, such as the
Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation,
rather than the power lobby, are primarily responsible.

Under Democratic administrations as under Republi-
can, under liberal as under conservative leadership in
the Department of the Interior and other departments
directly concerned, the empire builders of the old-line
agencies, with their fears and vested interests and
powerful connections, have continued to block the river
valley proposals. TVA itself cannot be handcuffed; the
giant continues to work night and day and will now be
permitted to expand to meet its area’s new demands for
power, which increase at a rate of about 12 per cent
each year. But those servants of the people, the
bureaucrats of the old-line agencies, will not permit the
same idea to be applied elsewhere. In a democracy the
/ i ultimate power is the bureaucratic.

Trujillo on the Hot Tin Roof

Reliable news from the Dominican dictatorship is hard
to come by, as it is from any hangout of thugs and
gangsters, but by all indications Generalissimo Rafael
Leonidas Trujillo Molina is in grave trouble. The be-
havior of the chief gangster himself is revealing. On
Monday he announces that everything is fine and he is
pondering new benefactions for his loyal subjects. On
Tuesday he announces that his powerful army, navy and
air force have just wiped out the latest invasion force
of eight men in “an inferno of fire.” On Wednesday
tranquillity rules once more, but on Thursday the
Generalissimo’s Minister of Labor, an “outstanding
liberal influence,” is killed in a mysterious automobile
accident which, according to Representative Charles
O. Porter, a specialist in Trujillo criminology, “shrieks
of murder.” Friday is one long siesta, but then The
New York Times correspondent who reported the sud-
den death of the minister is hustled out of the country,
after which a new rally is ordered to dedicate two new
statues to the great benefactor. In addition to these
_ hectic alternations, efforts by Batista to get out of the
“Republic” are evidence that the Dominican climate has
ee become insalubrious for dictators, active or retired.
it the end of the Trujillo reign is near, few Americans
will be sorry. But there will be some mourners besides
_ the Generalissimo’s paid press agents. Apparently a

4 : PY ;

Woolf,

the Catibbear haat only ae kindlicst feel towa abd

their host, as long as he has his yacht and palaces. Sen-
ator Eastland will drop a tear; according to the Domini-
ean Diplomatic Information Bulletin, he eulogized Tru-
jillo as one of the free world’s great men and went on
to say, “As a U.S. Senator I respect him, I admire him,
and I render him homage.” To Senator Eastland, Tru-
jillo is a bulwark against communism. For such bul-
warks the Communists can be sincerely grateful.

The Eastern Bulwark

If the Dominican dictatorship is a bastion of anti-
communism, the same is true, and in greater degree,
of the Spanish dictatorship and its Generalissimo,
Francisco Franco. And again there are Americans to
extol and defend. On July 16, the Hon. Joseph M. Mon-
toya (D., New Mexico) came before the well of the
House to “salute the friendly Government and the
great people of Spain.” Yielding from time to time to
gentlemen from Massachusetts, Wisconsin, California,
Ohio and other states too numerous to mention, Mr.
Montoya eulogized the conquistadores, the missionary
friars, Queen Isabella and, in the loudest burst of
eloquence, Generalissimo Franco himself. Between them,
he and his coadjutors occupied sixty minutes and nine
pages of the Congressional Record. Tending to the
literary, Mr. Reuss (D., Wisconsin) paid tribute to
“that delightful classic, Don Quixote, by Cervantes,”
but almost all the speakers referred to Franco as the
nearly indispensable man in the struggle against Com-
munist tyranny, and thanked God for the bases he has
kindly allowed us to establish in his fair land.

Under cover of this tremendous flow of Hispanic-
oriented praise, preparations were being made to admit
Spain as a full member of the Organization for European
Economic Cooperation, the cooperation in this case
consisting of credits in the amount of nearly $500 mil-
lion, largely, of course, from the pockets of American
taxpayers, But would this latest subsidy avail, any more
than earlier ones? After the injection of $1 billion in
American aid and an additional $400 million for the
construction of bases, Spain was still in a state of
economic crisis, with inflation and corruption slowly
accumulating the makings of an anti-Franco uprising.

There is not the slightest sign that anything has been,
or can be, fundamentally changed in Spain as long as
Franco and the Falange remain in power. The value of
the peseta has been cut almost in half. This may help
tourism, but for the Spanish it means more belt-tighten-
ing. Meanwhile, Spain is being drawn, willy-nilly, back
into the main currents of European economic and po-
litical life, from which Franco has long and sagaciously
kept it isolated. “No human being,” writes Leonard

“can be quite as cynical, quite as ironical, as
facts.” It is as true of Franco as of anyone else,

— ar

we: wf

Men of Principle

Late in June, thirty-four employees resigned from the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and another thirty
workers signified their intention to resign. Almost all
were top operating personnel in the Talks and Public
Affairs Section of CBC radio, and their departure
promised to erase broadcast opinion from the Canadian
air. The cause was management’s decision to drop a
three-minute morning program, Preview Commentary,
on which guest political reporters summarized their
opinions of current Parliamentary business. Within
forty-eight hours, the Board of Governors at CBC had
“reconsidered” and Preview was back on the air. The
resignations were not accepted and the staff returned to
work,

This is both a heartening and a somewhat foreboding
incident. The men who quit CBC were not challenging
management’s right to decide which shows should stay
and which should go. They resigned precisely because
they believed (and subsequent conversations in Parlia-
ment abundantly confirmed their opinion) that CBC
had not decided, but had knuckled under to political
threats. CBC Acting General Manager FE. L. Bushnell
was quoted as saying that heads would roll if the show
were not killed; among the heads mentioned was that
of Revenue Commissioner George Nowlan, who could
be put to the block only by Prime Minister Diefen-
baker. Because they were willing to go jobless for their
convictions, and because they moved at once and to-
gether, the CBC staff forced their bosses to act like
men of principle. Morale of this quality is an object of
wonder in these accommodating days.

But behind the furore, which engrossed Canadian

public and government for several days and unhappily
knocked Queen Elizabeth’s itinerary right out of the
headlines, there is a baleful murmur. One member of
Parliament was heard to say: “The CBC is trying too
hard to build a Hollywood-type empire.” During the
crisis, The New York Times correspondent in Ottawa
filed a story to the point that CBC is a deficit operation
and uses public funds. During one moment of panic,
Mr. Bushnell was heard to speak of plans for “wreck-
ing” the CBC. And last month a Commons committee
report on broadcasting recommended that revenue from
certain types of very profitable program, sports broad-
casts, for example, should be relinquished to private
interests.

Doubtless, there are business and political groups in
Canada that would like to wreck the CBC and sub-
stitute free-enterprise broadcasting. And the recent
flare-up, though happily settled, is an argument for
them that they will not overlook. They will note piously
that no government agency can be free of political
threats and that one cannot expect employees to be
heroes on every occasion. The only way to assure free-
dom of the Canadian air, they will say, is to turn the
facilities over to private, competing networks. Here is
the Toronto Star on that possibility:

The choice is between a Canadian state-controlled sys-
tem... with some Canadian content and the development
of a Canadian sense of identity, at a substantial public
cost; and a privately-owned system which the forces of
economics will necessarily make predominantly dependent
on imported American radio and television programs.

The insurgents at CBC won a battle for principle;
they must now make sure that in the continuing war
their victory is not made to count against them.

TEST CASE ON ATOMIC WASTE « « Gerald McCourt

New Britain, Conn.
WHAT MAY COME to be known
as “the case of the radioactive gar-
bage” has set this industrial com-
munity on edge, and carries with it
important implications for the atomic
age into which the world is slowly
and irresistibly moving. To put the
issue quite simply, the people of
New Britain, aroused by the public
controversies over the dangers of
radioactivity, don’t want a local
trucking firm to haul atomic wastes

GERALD McCOURT is the New
Britain correspondent of the Hart-
ford (Conn.) Courant.

August 1, 1959

along their streets or to store the
wastes, even temporarily, anywhere
within their city.

Now, of course, what the people
of New Britain — population 80,000
— want or don’t want isn’t of itself
going to haul the curtain either up
or down on the atomic era. But this
is the third Connecticut community
that has barred the same trucker
from pursuit of an atomic dollar;
and a similar situation has arisen
in Houston, Texas. Since we are
only on the threshold of an atomic
industry, and since American sen-
sitivity to the dangers of radioactivity
seems to be increasing, the outlook

for more trouble of the same kind
could not be brighter. The wider the
use of atomic energy, the bigger the
waste problem is going to become.
To appreciate the local situation
in New Britain, it is necessary to
grasp something of the broader pic-
ture. Since 1945, this country has
acquired a sixty-million-gallon cess-
pool of atomic wastes, at a cost to
taxpayers of about $2 a gallon. These
are “hot” wastes, with a high radio-
activity level, derived directly from
the Atomic Energy Commission's
atomic plants, and 95 per cent of
them are stored in steel and concrete

pits near Hanford, Washington. Sci-
43

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entists at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory are examining the prob-
lem of “hot” waste. Some of it can
be reprocessed into useful isotopes,
but in the process new wastes are
produced, so reprocessing is not like-
ly to be a final answer. Abandoned
salt mines in Kansas are being sur-
veyed in the hope that they can be
used safely for disposal purposes.

But aside from this “hot” material,
there are also low-level radioactive
wastes. Radioactive isotopes, used
with increasing frequency for medical
purposes and in some industries, con-
taminate everything they touch: a
glass receptacle, a rag, a carcass
used in an experiment, a bit of
chemical or mechanical apparatus —
all present a disposal problem. The
accepted method for disposal is to
collect the material in steel drums
and bury it under a minimum of
6,000 feet of sea water. Obviously,
it would not be economical for a
barge to set out to sea every time
a steel drum has been filled; the
drums must be collected, transported
to a storage place, and held there
for the final sea journey.

The AEC has set down rigid rules
for handling such material, from
specifications for the container to
regulations governing the amount of
wastes that can be held at any time
in a “collection” point.

Since much of the low-level radio-
active wastes is produced by non-
governmental institutions — _ hos-
pitals, industrial plants, etc. — their
disposal is usually arranged for by
contract with a private firm. A
company going into this business
must acquire a license from the
AEC; moreover, there are always
local health and zoning ordinances
regulating the disposal of waste ma-
terials, whether they are radioactive

or not. Prior to 1958, the AEC had
licensed three firms for the purpose
~— one in San Francisco, another in
Culver City, California, and a third
in Boston. Since then, a half-dozen

dditional firms have been licensed,
ost of them on the West Coast.

THE WALKER Trucking Co. of
y Britain is a subsidiary of the
iris Trucking Co., a large local
m; its president is Robert FE. Har-
. Some time ago the Walker out-

1 tl os ll Sei 1a

fit tried to get permission to operate
locally in the atomic-waste disposal
business, but abandoned the effort
when opposition developed. Mr. Har-
ris then applied for, and obtained,
an AEC license to operate in nearby
Portland, Conn. But Portland town
officials quickly passed an ordinance
prohibiting the establishment of any
atomic-waste plants, and on the
basis of this ordinance Mr. Harris’
permit was revoked.

The Walker firm then switched its
attention to Newington, a small town
adjoining New Britain. Here, again,
it ran into opposition from residents.
The next step was back to New
Britain. In late May, the Washing-
ton, D.C., correspondent of the Hart-
ford Courant ferreted out of a gov-
ernment publication a small item
which announced that, on June 3,
public hearings would be held in the
New Britain Post Office on the ap-
plication of the Walker Trucking Co.
for a permit to handle atomic wastes.
“In the absence of cause shown to
the contrary,’ the announcement
read, “the Atomic Energy Commis-
sion staff proposes to recommend
that a permit be issued for the opera-
tion.” Since up to the moment when
the reporter’s eye fell on the an-
nouncement, nobody but the AEC
and the Walker Trucking Co. knew
of the impending “public” hearings,
it is not likely that any “cause to
the contrary” would have been
shown, Now, via the Courant, the
matter reached the local press, and
within twenty-four hours New Brit-
ain’s health director, Dr. Louis J.
Dumont, was on record as opposing
the permit because of the “possibility

: ss 7 ‘
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of spillage of the waste material
city streets during the transporta-

tion period.” New Britain’s citizens, —

and particularly home-owners in the

vicinity of the area where Mr. Har- ©

ris proposed to store the wastes,
joined in bringing pressure to bear
to stop the project.

This was a big jolt to the Walker
Trucking Co. which, apparently con-
fident that things would go smooth-
ly both with the AEC and with the
city authorities, had already built a
steel-and-concrete storage structure.

City Alderman Patrick C. Nolan,
in whose ward the plant was situated,
set machinery in motion for a hur-
ried meeting of the City Council “to
go on record in opposition to the
trucking firm’s request.” Mr. Harris
countered by urging the city fathers
not to “pre-judge” his application.
Pointing out the high standards of
safety demanded by the AEC, and
his firm’s reputation for reliability,
he said that the public was “demor-
alized and confused by statements
made by unqualified officials and
self-styled authorities.”

ON THE night before the deadline
which the AEC had set for filing
petitions for leave to intervene in the
June 3 hearings, the City Council
met, with an audience of restive
home-owners from the affected area
in attendance. The city fathers were
also presented with a petition, signed
by 1,000 New Britain residents, op-
posing the project. Alderman Richard
J. Bordiere was critical of the AEC
for having failed to give adequate
publicity to the impending public
hearing. But none of this moved the
City Council. Possibly with an eye
on the city’s tax base (which would
be broadened by the addition of the
new plant), the council voted down
Mr. Nolan’s motion, adopting a
“wait and see” attitude.

In preparation for the AEC’s
public hearing, home-owners opposed
to the project retained Algert F. Pol-
itis, a local attorney. Mr. Politis
sought, but was denied, a ninety-

day postponement, and the hearing _

opened on schedule in the Court

House, the Post Office having proved —_

too small to accommodate the crowd.

Officials of the trucking firm testi- —

fied

pae 5
that the building erected to
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August 1, 1959

store the waste materials was in

strict conformance with AEC regula-
tions; government witnesses testi-
fied that the ten-acre site on which
the building was located was safe
for the storing of atomic waste. A
scientist from the AEC’s division of
licensing and regulation testified that
radiation from the waste materials
to be handled would be “well with-
in AEC safety limits.”

The opposition, which had been
unable to secure the services of ex-
pert witnesses in the short time since
the Courant had broken the story,
was unable to score many points
against this impressive array. It did,
however, secure from the AEC an
adjournment of the hearing, first for
three weeks and then, subsequently,
for sixty days. The hearing is now
scheduled for resumption in Septem-
ber, but because of collateral devel-
opments, the results are likely to
be academic.

FOR meanwhile the aroused citizens
consolidated their organization — it
is now known as People vs. Atomic
Waste — and secured 2,000 more
names for the anti-waste petition.
Apparently it was public pressure
that forced the City Council, on
June 17, to approve an ordinance
prohibiting “the storage, temporary
or otherwise, packaging or disposal
of any fissionable or radioactive ma-
terial or by-products within the

limits of the City of New Britain.”
The vote was on strict party lines,
eight Democrats voting for, and four
Republicans against. So, unless the
City Council can be prevailed upon
to change its mind again, the Walk-
er Trucking Co. will have to find
another use for its new edifice.

Robert E. Harris insists that he
will go to the courts if necessary in
support of his application to pursue
a legitimate and “socially necessary”
occupation. “These wastes have got
to be disposed of somewhere,” he
said. “The AEC’s strict regulations
make the operation I propose ab-
solutely safe. So sure am I about
this that I purposely located the new
plant on our own property, only 400
feet from my home. Would I have
done this if I thought there was any
danger to my six children?”

Mr. Harris pointed out that, un-
der AEC regulations, he could store
only a limited number of drums at
any one time, depending on the in-
tensity of the radioactivity of the
contents. The drums would then be
trucked — possibly in lots of 100
to 200 — to a point along the Con-
necticut shore, loaded on a barge,
and dumped in the nearest AEC
dumping ground about thirty miles
off the New Jersey coast.

Meanwhile, People vs. Atomic
Waste is not remaining idle. In prep-
aration for the mid-September re-
sumption of the adjourned AEC hear-

ing, the citizens’ group has asked
two scientists from New York City
to prepare a report on the whole
project. The report, when it comes,
may open the way for something that
is urgently needed: a state-wide, per-
haps a nation-wide, standardization
of the processes by which AEC and
local permits are issued for the dis-
posal of atomic wastes.

“This is something which affects
everyone in a community,” said one
member of People vs. Atomic Waste.
“In Houston, Texas, an AEC ex-
aminer granted a_ waste-disposal
license after a hearing in which two
Texas counties and the Sportsmen’s
Club of Texas appeared in opposi-
tion. The Sportsmen’s Club appealed
to the AEC, which will re-hear the
issue in October. Clearly, the AEC
is sensitive to public sentiment. But
public sentiment must have time to
generate. It may be that the opera-
tion proposed by Mr. Harris is ab-
solutely safe, but the manner in
which the matter was handled is
certainly subject to criticism. If a
reporter had not accidentally come
across that tiny item in Washing-
ton, what kind of ‘public hearing’
would we have had?

“Only now is the public getting
some information about the fallout
from nuclear explosions. We are
equally entitled to information about
the ‘fallups’ from buried nuclear
wastes.”

HITCHING ACROSS ALGERIA e « Shane and Judith Mage

Tums, July 2
IF ALL THE barbed wire in Algeria
were stretched taut, there would be
enough to form a Cross of Lorraine
as broad and deep as the Continent
of Africa.

After an eight-day hitchhiking
trip across Algeria, barbed wire was
our most vivid impression: bales of
barbed wire serving as roadblocks,
barbed wire strung around military

SHANE and JUDITH MAGE, an
American husband-and-wife writing
team, have just completed a tour of

North Africa.

compounds and “regrouped” villages,
tangles of barbed wire along the tops
of walls, running above the hedges
of private gardens, cutting off paths
in the parks, blocking streets. Old,
rusty barbed wire; new, gleaming
barbed wire.

We had received our ten-day Al-
gerian transit visa from the French
consulate in Casablanca following
a two-and-a-half-month delay. At
Oujda, the refugee-packed city on
the Algero-Moroccan frontier, we
boarded a truck transporting oranges
to Algiers.

“No photos from here to Oran,”

the clerk at the Border Control
warned us. We crossed the frontier.
Opposite, on the wall of an aban-
doned farmhouse was painted Icl, LA
FRANCE in block letters. Old men,
jogging along side-saddle on their
donkeys, wore tattered European
clothes, rather than the customary
djellabas of Morocco.

A few kilometers beyond Marnia,
in a region of barren, eroded slopes,
we drove past a collection of tents
cramped together on a hillside above
a French military post. “That’s a
prison,” the driver explained. Two
truckloads of Algerian prisoners

passed us, preceded by a jeep, fol-
lowed by a truck with a mounted
machine gun. All along the route
were more abandoned farmhouses;
their proprietors have moved into
the cities and towns, and return only
during the day to supervise the work
in their fields. We were halted sev-
eral times on the outskirts of vil-
lages and at crossroads, where very
young, fresh-faced soldiers checked
our papers.

For most of the distance from
Oujda to Oran the land seems a
single vineyard. On the walls of the
small-town cafés are signs advertis-
ing sulfate additives and the Ameri-
‘ can vines whose high yield and low
: quality are flooding the French
abs market with cheap Algerian wine,
me, ruining the small French vintner and

contributing no littl to French
alcoholism.

“ICI, LA FRANCE’? In Oran one
might almost think so, The narrow,
traffic-jammed streets, the tall, nar-
row apartment houses with their
peeling walls, suggest a section of
Paris or Lyons. The war seems dis-
tant from Oran—the surrounding
region has long been counted as
“pacified” and the city itself is the
only one in Algeria where there is
no curfew. But cafés and restaurants
! are full of soldiers on weekend leave,
a hotel room impossible to find. Any-
thing not occupied by soldiers is in-
habited on a permanent basis by
colons who have taken refuge in the
city.

Oran does not know the sharp
division between Arab and Euro-
pean quarters characteristic of Mo-
roccan cities, and some of its neigh-
borhoods could even be called “in-
tegrated.” We visited the Bas Quar-
tier, the old Spanish town near the
port. In the inner courtyard of a
tenement, Algerian, French and
Spanish children played together,
their mothers gossiping as they hung
the wash.

_ That evening we met a young

_ draftee who has spent the past eight
months in Algeria. “I have yet to
see a fellagha,”’ he told us. “I earn
000 francs a month ($2.03). I’m in
. for twenty-eight months and they’re
et to increase this term. The
d is terrible. We're practically at

| cs seashore, yet the fish comes from —

4 ”

ee ah ’
Oran, is a week old and decaying.
Everybody in camp gets dysentery
sooner or later.”

The next day, en route from Oran
to Algiers via Orleansville, we heard
more about the plight of the draftee.

“The little soldiers are sent here
to defend the colons,” the young wife

of a French gendarme told us as she.

drove us toward Algiers. “But the
colons never even invite them to
their homes, even though they’re re-
quested to do so by the TSF [Army-
controlled radio].”

The gendarme’s wife hastened to
inform us that she was from the
“Metropole,” in Algeria only because
her husband had been sent here for
a three-year term. “You must un-
derstand that our ideas are not those
of the settlers. What’s happening
here is their fault. They treat the
Moslems like dogs, especially the
Spanish settlers. Anyone would take
up arms under those conditions. And
now it is we, the little people, who
have to sacrifice for the rich colons
who aren’t even French.”

Our next driver, an army captain,
invited us to eat lunch at his officers’
mess. When we arrived at the head-
quarters of the 3rd Alpine Infantry
Battalion, 12th Company, we were
offered a guided tour and provided
with a jeep, a young second lieu-
tenant to drive, and another soldier
to mount guard in the back seat with
a machine gun across his knees. We
bounced along feeling somewhat
exposed—the lieutenant had _ been
vague about the frequency of “inci-
dents” on these rutted back roads.

First stop was the regrouped vil-
lage of Bou Henni completed about
six months ago. One hundred and
twenty cement-block houses, ar-
ranged in even rows, shelter families
who were formerly scattered in little
douars in the hills. The whole is en-
closed in barbed wire; at the entrance
a large wooden sign reads:

Commission du Construction
L’Amélioration de l’Habitat Rurale.

But the lieutenant freely admitted

the object of the regroupment: to

prevent delivery of money and sup-
plies to the FLN forces. “This way
we can protect the peasants from
the demands of the: ellaghas.”

The regrouped villages are a very

‘recent cfeation; the

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little more than a year ago. |

tt date Hom peopl ek ike prisoners here. Me was

me. fee }
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But ia
ready more than one million Algerian
peasants have been regrouped (the
Moslem population of Algeria is
about nine million). Last April Le
Monde printed lengthy excerpts from
a report drawn up at the order of
Paul Delouvrier, de Gaulle’s “special
representative” in Algeria. Accord-
ing to this report, villages are often
established so far from the peasants’
fields that they are unable to con-
tinue cultivation, or to maintain
their livestock. Consequently, many
villages become entirely dependent
on the French commandant for sus-
tenance.

a
:

WE entered one of the cement-
block houses. A walled-in court, two
small rooms, dirt floor. A tall armoire
with the family crockery, a low table,
a pile of bedding heaped in a corner
to be spread out on the floor at
night. Though a water tower has
been built for the village, no plumb-
ing has yet been installed. No elec-
tricity. No sanitary facilities. But
these will be provided, the lieutenant
said. Water is obtained from a near-
by irrigation canal—safe water is too
distant to be carried in jugs. There
is much stomach trouble. “But I
don’t have the impression that they
have any more illness than we do.”
The lieutenant grinned.

Down the road was another village
only two weeks old—that is, only
two weeks earlier the villagers had
been brought here and lodged in
army tents. Immediately some thirty
soldiers of the Alpine Infantry Bat-
talion and some ae Algerian po-
litical prisoners had set to work de-
molishing the former houses, carting
the blocks of sun-baked earth down
from the hills, and putting them to-
gether again, When we arrived, the
soldiers and prisoners were laboring __
under a broiling late-morning sun.
The soldiers dropped their shovels
and clustered around the jeep.
“They'd rather be off in combat,”
the lieutenant remarked.

In two weeks nearly five houses
had been reconstructed, but sixty
families remain in the tents, They
have built brush enclosures for their
animals, though there appears to be —
nak grazing land in the vicinity,

asked the lieutenant if the

en woes

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ame

surp! ris ed a
come and go a

‘Cer tainly d
5 they please.”
~ “But can they return to their old
homes?”

“No, that they cannot do—be-

sides, their old homes no longer
. »”

We wondered why a_ village
couldn’t be constructed before the
people were regrouped. “Impos-

sible. This is an operation that is
decided upon and carried out rapid-
ly. In addition, there is absolutely
no money allocated by Paris or any-
one else to build these villages. For
Bou Henni we managed to secure a
loan, For this village we have noth-
ing. The labor is the soldiers and
prisoners, the materials from the old
houses.”

“L’Amélioration de l’Habitat Ru-

rale.”

AT 2 P.M. we were out on the road
again, in the scanty shade of an olive
tree, awaiting a ride. After some time
a car stopped, but when we saw the
driver we hesitated. He was a para-
chutist, in full regalia from boots to
beret. He was, we discovered, a For-
eign Légionnaire, an Austrian, sta-
tioned the past twelve years in
Madagascar, Indo-China and now
Algeria. Master sergeant and radio
technician, he earns 145,000 francs
a month ($300), 145 times the pay
of the second-class draftee. He drove
as a para should drive, leaning hard
on the horn as he came up behind
other cars, turning about and shout-
ing Salaud! at drivers who didn’t
move over fast enough.

We reached Affreville at about
5:15 P.M. At 5:30 the road closes,
for the next eighteen kilometers wind
through deep gorges. The control
waved us on. The road was badly
rutted, and after five minutes a tire

See ee) wee
went flat. We got out and the par

started changing the tire. On either
side, steep, thickly wooded hills. We
edged away from the car and our
all-too-conspicuous companion. “I
hope another tire doesn’t go,” he re-
marked as we piled back in. “I don’t
have another spare.” Several min-
utes passed, when suddenly the car
began to shudder. We generously of-
fered to remove ourselves, thus reduc-
ing the pressure on the wheel. He
thanked us and apologized for not
getting us to Algiers. We soon flagged
down a delivery truck.

Our new driver was middle-aged
and, we noted with relief, Algerian.
We drove by a couple of regrouped
villages. A line of men sat propped
against a wall.

“The people there are forced to
come,” the driver said suddenly.
“They are led there and then the
soldiers destroy their houses. After
the war is over they'll all go back.
Before, they had a little wheat, a
place for their herds to feed. Not
much, but enough to live. Now they
have nothing. It is a real atrocity.”

“The war is a terrible thing,” he
added. “There have been frightful
atrocities on both sides. But what
can we do? It is not in our hands.”

Our driver went only to the next
village. A big, slow truck that had
passed us during our first break-
down, halted. We squeezed into the
cab with the driver and his assistant,
both Algerians.

For some distance the driver re-
mained silent, He’d seen us with the
para. We explained that we were
Americans, tourists, hitchhikers. “Are
you journalists?” he asked.

“We've written a few articles.”

His suspicious attitude quickly
vanished. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know
what you were.”

We were passing a large farm.
Again, the floodgates opened with a
surprising suddenness. “Our labor
has given the colons everything they
have—and they treat us as less than
slaves. They tell you Algeria is
France? They themselves aren’t
French; they aren’t human beings.
They have no hearts.”

Are all the Europeans who live
in Algeria like this?

“No. I come from the region of
the Aures [mountains to the south
of Constantine, where the revolution
began in 1954]. There are Europeans
there who have never been hurt.
Why? Because they have always,
even before 1954, treated the Alger-
ians as fellow men. They invite us
to their table. When they employ
an Algerian they pay him a decent
wage. They respect our religion.”

Are there many like that?

“More than one might think—but
still a small minority. And they can-
not open their mouths. I have a
friend whose brother was shot down
by a colon last year. A European saw
it and went to the police to denounce
the murderer. That night the police
came to take him and the next day
he was found dead.

“Here it is the colons who are the
law. They can kill an Algerian on a
whim. In 1956, my wife was eight
months pregnant and [| sent her to
have the baby at the house of her
father in Biskra. A colon went wan-
dering through the streets one day,
shooting at Moslems. My wife was
killed in her father’s doorway by a
sub-machine gun volley.”

“Do things like that go on to-
day?” we ventured.

“Today—and tomorrow as well,
and right here in Algiers. Not dur-
ing the day but at night there will
be Algerians killed. But remember,

— M EDITERRANEAN ==3SEA

SP. MOROCCO

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Sygate?

Algiers

Bordj bow Arreridj

ALGERIA

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it is not the army that does it but
always the colons.

“T hope you'll keep your eyes open.

The French are trying to fool peo-
ple. They’re suddenly building
schools—they don’t even have real
teachers. It’s all a masquerade. Like
the elections when they forced us to
vote at gun point. Or like last year
when they said our women had
thrown away their veils. It was only
nh the prostitutes who did that.”
. As a truck driver he makes 30,000
francs a month ($60) on which he
must support seven people. He had
been out of work for a year before
finding this job a week ago.

“Why the long unemployment?”

“T went to school. I know too
much and [I think for myself too
much. They don’t want someone
who can think—they want someone
who will work like an animal.

“You must understand the strug-
gle of the Algerian people is not for
independence. Independence? That’s
an empty word. We are fighting for
only one thing: human dignity.”

THE TRUCKER drove us to the
door of the youth hostel in Algiers.
A group of soldiers had requisitioned
most of it, leaving only a_ base-
ment and a corridor which had been
packed with beds for young voyagers.

Although the war is measurably
closer here than in Oran, Algiers too,
gives the impression of a bustling,
prosperous city. Crowds fill the
downtown sidewalks throughout the
day and evening. Department stores
are packed with customers, though
at the outer door every man is frisked
and the women must open their
handbags.

In Oran there were police and
soldiers but no paratroopers. In Al-
giers paratroopers abound. Along the
streets leading from the post office
to the Place du Gouvernement paras
are stationed at each corner. Tall
and grim, generally Vietnamese, they
_ grip machine pistols with both hands,
le asked a para if we could take
me picture. He said no, unsmiling.
The next morning, map and guide-
| eats in hand, we entered the Kas-
bah. Ancient wooden doors, decor-
ated with bronze tacks, now bear

tickers and posters:
VoTER, C’EST BIEN; VOTER OUI,

2 OE eee ee ee eee
> “% t 7 a yee FP +4

H
Oe a ee hve.
at 1 "v2 1a

Vorun| NON, C’ES’ - Vipiorir; NE
PAS VOTER, C’EST LA TRAHISON

La FRANCE CONSTRUIT; LE FEL-
LAGHA DETRUIT

FAITES CONFIANCE DANS LA
FRANCE GENEREUSE

We strolled through the twisting
streets, splashing a little as the drain-
age system is very poor, passing un-
der the buttresses which keep the
sagging buildings from toppling. We
turned a corner and came face to
face with a machine gun. The two
soldiers stared as we walked by.
Soldiers or police? “There are ten
different kinds of police in Algiers,”
the trucker had said.

We continued through the Kasbah
to the Place du Gouvernement, where
we came upon a large café with all
its windows blown out. The café was
filled to overflowing, and we con-
cluded that whatever happened must
have happened long ago. That eve-
ning we read in the Journal d’ Alger
that a grenade had been tossed into
the café the night before, wounding
four Moslems.

The French of France and the AI-
gerians of Algeria both tend to think
of the Europeans of Algeria as rich
colons. Even our brief glimpse of Al-
giers and Oran, cities half of whose
populations are European, showed
what a dangerous over-simplification
that is. These Europeans, whose
great-grandfathers came to Algeria
from France, Italy or Spain, are
mainly people of very modest con-
dition: shopkeepers, workers, gov-
ernment employees. If they are sub-
stantially privileged in comparison
to the mass of desperately poor Mos-
lem Algerians, they are at least as
far removed from the great overlords
of Algeria: the Borgeauds, Blachet-
tes, de Serignys, Schiaffinos.

WE LEFT Algiers for Constantine
equipped, as usual, with much di-
verse and discordant information as
to the security of the route. From
Bouira, about one hundred kilome-
ters east of Algiers, to Bordj bou
Arreridj, some 120 kilometers further
on, the road passes through the foot-
hills of the Grande Kabylie, and it
was at Bouira that we decided to
hold out for a truck—with an Al-
gerian driver.

oat Eo a3 to

a truck Bry ing | steel girders
Bordj vided us up. The ‘driver as-
sured us we were sensible to prefer an
Algerian. “The FLN operates here
even in broad daylight. They’ll stop
a car or truck, burn it, take the driver
into the hills and cut him in two. At
night the Algerian soldiers come
down and write ‘République Algé-
rienne’ on the road.” He pointed out
one of these inscriptions as we passed
over it, as well as an ALGERIE VIVRA
LIBRE painted in green on a wall, the
only such slogan we saw in Algeria.

“The FLN can hold the mountains
for twenty years,” the driver assert-
ed proudly. “The war will never end
until we have independence.”

Might a compromise be reached
short of that goal?

“Never!”

FROM Bordj to Setif we rode with
a French engineer who has set up
eighty-three prefabricated schools in
the mountain villages during the
past six months. “Not too many
teachers as yet; soldiers and the
Koranic scholars fill in. But it’s bet-
ter than nothing.”

From Setif to Constantine, the
road runs through endless fields of
still-green barley. A young soldier
picked us up. We asked if he was
stationed in Constantine. He point-
ed to his epaulettes. “Don’t you
know what this stands for?”

No.

“The SAS — ‘Section Administra- —
tive Specializé.’ I am what you call
a ‘political commissar.’ It is the SAS
which is conducting the struggle with
the FLN to win over the population
of Algeria. That is the real goal of
the war, you know.”

The “political commissar,” a lieu-
tenant trained at St. Cyr, spent one
school year learning Arabic, to pre-
pare for this work. There are only
649 others like him’ in Algeria,
charged with the control of some
1,300 “communes.” He himself is re-
sponsible for three. His task is to
break up the FLN “politico-admin-
istrative network” and _ substitute
that of the French.

We asked how the SAS operates.

“Our chief arm is the loudspeaker.
But on the other hand there is the
need for repression. If I catch a
member of the FLN politico-admin-

When we had waited three Lona network—a collector of
_* The Nation

«EST MIEUX
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. i"
is se ’ : . ‘ ‘

August 1, 1959

funds, arms, supplies for the fa/-
laghas—I have him shot on the
spot.”

How are such people discovered?

“Primarily through denunciation
by villagers who are fed up with the
demands of the FLN.”

Algerians suspected of nationalist
activity are placed in internment
camps. “They are not badly treated.
They work. But those who we think
are real salopards are shot.”

But the message of the SAS loud-
speakers is: the FLN means violence
and misery, France stands for peace
and well-being.

“Tt is our program of medical aid
that really backs us up. Army doc-
tors are placed at the service of the
village. Most who come are women
and children. A few men now, though
in the villages under real FLN dom-
ination there are no longer any men.”

IN preparation for the delicate SAS
mission, the lieutenant was instruct-
ed in more than the Arabic language.
“T had to learn the mores, the cus-
toms, the psychology of these peo-
ple. They don’t have the same men-
tality we do, they don’t think the
same way at all. We look toward the
future, we try to improve our
existence. But they take everything
as it is. If they have fifteen children,
‘It is God’s will.’ If ten of them die,
‘It is God’s will.’

“They will go with whoever is
the strongest. They have a proverb:
‘When you are a spade, bow your
head. When you are a hammer, strike
hard.’ And another: ‘Kiss the hand
that strikes you, but bite the hand
that caresses you.’

“T have under my command some
Goumiers [Moslem regular army sol-
diers]. If one of them does something
bad I don’t imprison or dock him. I
give him fifty lashes with my cra-
vache. Afterwards he thanks me.”

We mentioned having seen a large
number of Moslem soldiers in French
uniforms in the cities and towns.

“There are 150,000,” he said.

Reliable?

“Yes. About two-thirds are in for
reasons of personal vengeance—the
FLN killed members of their fam-
ilies, blew up their shops. . . . But
there is a small minority, especially
the educated, who understand what
we are fighting for.”

Did he find no Algerians, we won-
dered, who supported the FLN, not
simply because it was, momentarily,
the stronger, but because they de-
sired independence?

“*TIndependence?? No one wants
‘independence.’ The concept doesn’t
exist in their minds. Proof is that in
the Arab language there is no word
for independence.”

Was the political warfare of the
SAS succeeding?

“Yes. It is due to us that the Al-
giers and Oran regions are cleaned
up and tranquil now. Constantine
is the most difficult. It was here that
the war began, and here where it
will end.”

The last thirty kilometers to Con-
stantine were traversed in a delivery
truck of the Constantine Dépéche.
The driver, an Algerian, carries the
papers each morning from Constan-
tine to Bougie on the coast, starting
out at 3 A.M. He has been shot at
four times, but always before dawn.

From the hills, two or three kilo-
meters distant, we noticed a column
of smoke rising. “That’s the FLN!”
the driver and several Moslem pas-
sengers exclaimed. “They are roast-
ing a sheep.”

The driver declared that the FLN
is losing strength.

“When the revolution began they
had 90 per cent of the people with
them. Now it is different.” Only Al-
gerians, we discovered, would pro-
nounce the word “revolution.” For
the French it is the “rebellion” or
more likely, the “events.”

AT NOON, in Constantine, the
hotels were already filled—with sol-
diers, with colons, with people who
can find no other place to live. While
searching for a hotel in the old quar-
ter north of the Place de la Breche,
we passed the big police headquar-
ters. From the basement, whose
grilled windows extended halfway
above street level, we could hear
loud and terrible cries, each cry ac-
companied by a thump. A little yel-
low sticker pasted on the wall caught
our eye. “Dépéchez-vous de les ap-
peler mes fréres, avant que lautres
ne les appellent camarades.” (Hurry
up and call them brothers, before
others call them comrades.)

We walked up the main street
leading from the Place de la Breche.

Here, as everywhere else in the city,
every bar, every café, every restau-
rant is fronted with iron grillwork,
fine enough to keep out all but the
smallest fragments of a bomb or
grenade. Sometimes the grillwork
forms a kind of maze in front of the
door. Every side street leading off
this main thoroughfare was barred
midway by an iron fence topped with
barbed wire.

For the third time during our trip
we were stopped on the street and
asked for our papers. But not at gun
point, as were the Algerians. The
police grew friendly after the check,
and commended us on our courage.
Being called “courageous” so often
had begun to get on our nerves.

We started the next morning for
Bone where we were to take the
plane to Tunis. From Bone to the
Tunisian frontier is only 116 kilo-
meters, but passage across the fron-
tier is impossible. All our informa-
tion, so contradictory as regards
other sections of Algeria, was in ac-
cord on this point.

Our first ride was with an elderly
rural policeman, an Algerian, who
by his own admission was “with the
French.” “What choice do I have?
I work for them.” But he spoke with
pride of how the FLN, despite its
lack of heavy arms or planes, keeps
the French occupied.

“Everyone wants an Algerian gov-
ernment,” he said. “But extremists
—the FLN—want it without the
French, and moderates want it with
the French, a sort of federated sys-
tem like you have in the United
States.”

We asked if the FLN would be
willing to compromise.

“Yes,” he answered, “they will
compromise, Everyone is tired of the
war.”

The rural policeman turned off on
the route for Phillipville, leaving us
at the junction where we were pick-
ed up by a very young Frenchman,
an inspector of the prefabricated
schools that the engineer from Setif
was putting up. He too must drive
a great deal on the back country
roads. Once his car was riddled by
machine-gun bullets. “It happened a
few kilometers further along this
road. I'll show you the place.” We
scrounched down a little in our seats,

As he drove he glanced suspicious-

‘ei Part ee pce Se TART a Sara
$ wep vy ae 8 pan tab ee. etal A

beta eg iaiuh

Sori ‘pall = ll noe

ly at the agricultural workers labor-.

ing in the fields along the road.
“Sometimes the fellaghas disguise
themselves like that and when you
pass they shoot at you.” We
scrounched down a bit lower.

For the first time we passed French
heavy artillery, pointed at the near-
by hills. “They’re going to shell for
several hours and then go in and
clean it out.”

We reached Bone. Once again we

CET Sadan 7h
5 ¢ ‘

mu Laren ce | Pye
Pe et ; u ,
were cpeetea! by aMeinted ‘slogan:
LA SEINE TRAVERSE PARIS, LA MEDI-
TERRANEE LA FRANCE.

THE SAS lieutenant had told us:
“You may have expected to find Al-
geria a country of fire and blood,
but now you see this isn’t true.”

We saw neither fire nor blood. But
in everything we did see, they were
implied.

Is Algeria nearly “pacified,” as de

" ae
en ae

Ga i He rind aS inelh he ac elera
peasantry and place it under close
surveillance, the interdiction of travel
on main highways after early eve-
ning, the continued presence of more
than half a million French troops
who, in the words of the SAS man
“suffer very heavy losses whenever
we take the offensive against the
fellaghas.” ... We had a right to be
dubious.

TVA: THE UNLEARNED LESSON e « Lloyd Armour

Nashville, Tenn.
TWENTY-SIX years separate the
historic legislation creating the Ten-
nessee Valley Authority from the
latest important TVA measure: a
new method of financing the con-
tinuing work of the agency. In that
time, a new generation has grown
up without knowing what it was like
in the days before TVA. And an older
generation has had time to forget.
This is a fitting time, then, for a
_ new look at the reality of a dream,
at an experiment that has become a
$2 billion going concern. How does

See editorial, “The Success We Don’t
Repeat,” page 41.
it justify its costs to its owners, the
people of the United States? What
has it done for the people of the
Tennessee Valley? Is it “creeping
socialism,” as some have claimed, or
is it “democracy on the march,” as
others describe it? Does the Valley
use the agency as a lure to uproot
industry elsewhere? Does TVA steal
pennies from the pockets of taxpayers
elsewhere to subsidize cheap power?

Does it build steam plants as an
_ excuse for continuing its work, now
that the task of developing a river

is all but complete?

_ These are some of the questions
raised by a continuing barrage of
criticism against TVA. For the an-
swers, it is necessary first to go back,
briefly, beyond the TVA era to some

far-sighted statesmen such as The-
odore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and
Senator George Norris. These were
men who pondered long about ways
of conserving and developing the na-
tion’s resources. From their thinking,
and that of others, emerged the con-
cept of total development of river
valleys. In the depression years, a
small band of men in Congress began
a long fight for such an experiment
in the Tennessee Valley.

FROM almost any standpoint, the
choice was an excellent one. The
South as a whole was underdevel-
oped, and it was labeled by some as
the nation’s No. 1 economic problem;
and in the South, no region presented
a greater problem than did that val-
ley washed by the deceptively
passive Tennessee River. For each
spring, this sleeping tiger awoke and
became a roaring, rampaging flood.
Residents fled in terror to. the high
ground as the water swept away
crops, homes and land. Millions upon
millions of tons of topsoil vanished
in hours. Businesses were wiped out,
and with them sources of taxation.

The region depended upon a one-
crop economy. “Balance” in agri-
culture was a phrase of the profes-
sors. There was little industry and
much poverty. Malaria, tuberculosis
and malnutrition left their marks
upon the people and the burial places.

But the sickness that sapped the
region most was one for which no
doctor could prescribe. It was the
sickness of fear. There was fear of
the river, fear of the land that pro-

duced less and less. There was fear
of the future. And in the beginning
there was fear of TVA.

But the building of dams meant
jobs and a flow of money. As the
mighty dams took shape, hope rose.

There was a new look about the land.

Ears began to listen to what the ex-
perts of the fledgling TVA had to
say. Eyes began to see help, as
in mosquito control. There were
specialists looking at the land, test-
ing it and finding the need for fer-
tilizers of a particular type. Since
the type wasn’t being produced, TVA
began to make it.

Quickly, the Valley learned some-
thing about the TVA: It would help,
but there had to be cooperation.
Soon the Valley farmers, guided by
their extension services and county
agents, began to apply lime and
phosphates to jaded land in the first
of many, many thousands of farm-
test demonstrations. They began to
learn about soil needs, about contour
plowing, about the importance of
trees as windbreaks and_ erosion
curbs. In a few seasons, the barren,
soil-scalped hillsides were green, the
valleys below them lush.

As research and production de-
tails were worked out and TVA-born
fertilizers developed fully, the agency
turned over its data and its processes
to private industry—free of charge.
In addition, industry got another
gift—a ready-made market. Since re-
search, introduction and promotion
of any new fertilizer is costly, the

industry moved slowly. But here | A
TVA was doing the whole job with

i tna

tion of the campaign to Capaate’ the

-tiliz educational pro-
grams for the farmer.

Today, the farmer in Wyoming or
New York, as well as in Tennessee,
benefits by the TVA fertilizer pro-
gram (which is paid for by appro-
priations from Congress). Minnesota
farmers saved almost $750,000 from
1949 to 1954 by using TVA-devel-
oped and promoted “4-16-16” and
“5-20-20” fertilizers.

It may be noted here that a chem-
ical paradox—the fact that nitrogen
is both a life-giving plant food and
an ingredient of powerful explosives
—makes it possible to turn the TVA
fertilizer development center from
peacetime to wartime use in a day.

As TVA was helping to promote
a new and more productive farm
economy, it was also having an effect
on commerce and navigation. The
series of high dams which canalize
the Tennessee created a long, deep
waterway over which freight traffic
moved in increasing tonnage. Tows
hauled automobiles from the indus-
trial North to the Alabama plains,
saving more than $10 a car. Ferro-
alloys moved from Muscle Shoals,
Alabama, to Pittsburgh $5 a ton
cheaper.

What does this mean to shippers?
On 12.1 million tons of traffic in
1958, they saved more than $24
million. Deducting the annual cost
of the waterway—$4.2 million—there
was a net transportation benefit of
$19.8 million. This is a 14.5 per cent
return on the $136 million net in-
vestment in a navigation system
which contributes to inter-regional
commerce and strengthens the whole
nation,

It is axiomatic that navigation de-
velopment and industrial growth go
hand in hand. Since 1933, private in-
dustry has invested nearly a billion
dollars in more than 130 terminals
and plants along the river. All in all,
more than 3,000 new industries have
come to the TVA region.

This growth has prompted many
critics of the agency to raise cries of
“industry piracy” on the part of the
Valley. But the vast majority of new

- plants represent branches and sub-
| sidiary operations of industry which
| still have their headquarters else-
ie wnere, 1n a lecent survey” » yh

stration plots, fer-

Engineering Development

it was found that during a nineteen-
year period only twenty-five plants

pulled up roots elsewhere and re-
located in the TVA area. During this
time, nine much larger plants left
the region. The twenty-five incom-
ing plants represented 3,800 jobs;
the nine outgoing, 2,000: net gain for
the Valley, 1,800 jobs.

The truth is that while indus-

trialization in the Valley has been
rapid, it has lagged behind the nation
as a whole, and the cry of “industrial
piracy” is absurd.

ORIGINALLY, cheap electric pow-
er was considered among the less
important objectives of TVA. It was
viewed merely as a by-product of
river control that would allow for in-
creased rural electrification and en-
courage a moderate expansion of
industry. But with the coming of
World War II, the picture changed.
A “secret” installation known as Oak
Ridge needed power in enormous
quantities. Opportunities for increas-
ing hydro-power were limited: new
dams might justify their costs in
power terms, but not, at the time,
in other ways. Besides, a huge dam
is not an overnight project. In 1940,
TVA turned to a much quicker
method of adding to generating ca-
pacity: the steam plant. First to be
built was the Watts Bar plant, with
a capacity of 240,000 kw.

Aiter World War II, and with the
beginning of the Korean conflict, it
became increasingly clear that more
sources of quick power were needed.
Not only were farms, homes and fac-
tories demanding more current, but
entirely new energy-devouring in-
stallations were entering the area:
atomic-energy plants, the. Arnold

Centerjl ceed the entire federal investment

A ie :

bai Mareen yet ea 3 Aa

and the Redstone eel: where the
Army was building Grecles:

By fiscal 1958, the atomic-energy
plants and other federal defense
agencies in the area were using 51
per cent of all TVA power—more
than 29 billion kwh. This is more
power than was sold last year in any
of the states outside the Valley ex-
cept four.

SO TVA became a defense weapon,
But it had an extra meaning for tax-
payers in that it provided very large
savings on the government’s electric
bill. Perhaps this will show how
much:

From 1953 to 1958, TVA delivered
129.8 billion kwh. of power to Oak
Ridge and Paducah, Kentucky,
atomic facilities. This cost the gov-
ernment $590 million. If there had
been a one-mill per kilowatt-hour
increase in this cost, the bill would
have been $130 million more—about
the cost of the U.S. share of the St.
Lawrence Seaway.

Now compare the average cost of
producing and marketing — electric
power by TVA with that of pri-
vately-owned utilities, Last year, the
operating cost for TVA was 5.21
mills per kilowatt-hour; the corre-
sponding cost of privately-owned
utilities was about 10.09 mills. At
that rate, the government’s $590
million electric bill would have been
almost doubled.

But, say the private utilities, TVA
doesn’t pay taxes. It’s a subsidized
operation. True, TVA doesn’t pay
taxes in name, but it makes pay-
ments to state and local governments
in lieu of taxes. In 1958, these pay-
ments (from TVA and its distribu-
tors) totaled $13,751,000. Excluding
federal agencies, about 6.3 per cent
of the electric bill of all TVA con-

sumers was paid to state and local

governments. Corresponding taxes of ©

private utilities in neighboring areas
ranged from 5.1 per cent to 11.8
per cent,

In addition, the law requires TVA
to repay to the Treasury, from i

i ia
—

seen Re ein er SU arc all 3 Se

power revenues, the entire invest-

ment in each power facility: within

forty years. To date, payments ry \

$250 million put the agency
ahead of schedule. The payments ex-

LOR AIED eh trate ug CAM ah By
Itt, 2 } te ee! ne
4a

in the first thirteen dams TVA built.

There are other money savings in-
volved. Millions of electricity users
in other parts of the nation are pay-
ing lower electric bills because of
TVA’s rate policies—the so-called
“yardstick” of power. Electric rates,
according to Federal Power Commis-
sion data, are lowest in the TVA and
Bonneville areas, and grow progres-
sively higher as the distance from
these public-power facilities increases.
Before TVA, rates in a semicircle
through parts of Texas, Oklahoma,
Towa, Michigan and New York were
$10.08 for each 250 kwh, In 1958,
rates for the same area averaged
$7.10.

The power companies nearest the
Tennessee Valley have made the
greatest reductions in retail rates.
Nevertheless, their earnings have in-

"i
\
)
/
f

creased at a rate substantially great-
er than the average of all the large
utilities in the nation. From 1937 to
1957, according to published Federal
Power Commission figures, earnings
available to the common stockhold-
ers of the larger privately-owned util-
ities multiplied three and one-quarter
times; similar earnings of companies
bordering the TVA increased eight
times.

SO MUCH for power. To many peo-
ple, a more important objective of

TVA is flood control. The Valley is

now protected by ten major multiple-

purpose dams providing six million

acre-feet of storage for flood waters.

Were there no TVA dams, a flood
stage of 57.9 feet in the Tennessee

River today would cause $100 million
in damage to

low-lying Chat-
tanooga. The total estimated annual

> average value of flood regulation by

the reservoir system is $11 million.
_ Over twenty-six years, this annual
‘sum more than equals the annual

cost and total inve

Ph eee, P
st oe)
a : A
- ru t f

of the system’s flood-control facilities,
TVA’s extensive ' experience in
mapping, advising and aiding in en-
gineering studies “a flood control is
being put to work in many sections
of the country. One of the agency’s
special interests now is the tributary
watershed program—away from the
rivers, back among the creeks and
branches where flooding is also de-
structive, though less so than on the
rivers. This program seeks to estab-
lish ways by which, under state
leadership, communities can organize
themselves, study their problems and
apply Smee through their own
agencies and their own resources.

Critics charge that the citizens of
the Valley are the helpless victims
of an autocratic project. How well
have these “helpless victims” done
with the help of the TVA? In 1933,
only 3.4 per cent of the total federal
income-tax collections came from
the seven states of the TVA region.
By 1958, the percentage had more
than doubled. From 1933-56, total
collections amounted to $21,900,000,-
000. If we assume a rate of gain based
on the 1933 percentage, TVA has
meant an extra $10 billion in federal
tax revenues—almost five times the
entire cost of the project.

At the same time, the Valley has
become a vast market for goods pro-
duced outside. From 1934 to 1958,
TVA alone purchased $1.1 billion
worth of outside goods. Users of TVA
power spent $1.8 billion for electrical
appliances. Still another billion has
been spent on automobiles, boats,
motors and other products.

wert

THESE FIGURES should not lead
anyone to envision the Valley as
more prosperous than any other sec-
tion of the nation. It is far from that.
It lags the national averages in al-
most all economic measurements.
‘Twenty-five years ago the per capita
income was only 45 per cent of the
national average; despite a sizable
gain, it is only 63 per cent today.
There is a great deal yet unaccom-
plished. The balance between agri-
culture and industry is short on the
industry ‘ side. Too great a portion of
the region’s youth leaves each year
because there are not enough jobs.
Farms are too s pall and too many.

a natural environment.

to ee Wye eeced epee’

The demand for Sect iteity { is grow-
ing at a rate of 800,000 kilowatts a
year. People are just naturally using
more power—the air conditioner, for
example, is: a big sales item where
it once was a rarity. Business expan-
sions, new industry, demand more—
and the Valley must have these if it
is to continue to progress.

So TVA must have new funds
merely to keep abreast of demand.
That is why. its supporters have
fought for a self-financing measure
(a method, incidentally, first sug-
gested by the Eisenhower Adminis-
tration). TVA will be lucky if the
$750 million made available by the
latest TVA legislation can adequate-
ly provide for needed facilities in the
Valley. The pattern of progress has
been set, and there can be no slack-
ening off without harm to the region.

The great irony of TVA is that its
value is given’ more recognition
abroad than in the United States. It
is the one great American project
that draws a steady stream of poten-
tates, students, engineers and_ poli-
ticians from every corner of the
globe. It is the one great idea we
have exported with success. Eight
foreign countries now have big proj-
ects based on TVA—countries rang-
ing from India to tiny Lebanon.

Efforts have been made to estab-
lish TVA-type authorities in the val-
leys of other American rivers: the
Missouri, Rio Grande, Colorado. A
new Columbia Valley Authority bill
—the Neuberger bill — is before
Congress. None of these efforts has
thus far succeeded.

The TVA was an experiment at a
time of national economic distress
when the public was receptive to
daring innovations. The electric util-
ity interests, natural enemies of such
an enterprise, were themselves in
trouble. These interests, reviving,
have since fought the spread of the
TVA idea with a rising fear. While
keeping TVA under carping attack,
they have sown widely and nurtured
well a confusion that restrains the
people of other sections from emulat-
ing a valley program that is, never-
theless, the outstanding example of a
people’s ability to make the most of

y
wt

HAT

AS ANY wise man knows, that
strange and outrageous breed of peo-
ple whom we denominate generally
as aftists are persistently unhappy
with the way things are going, and
quick to flay their fellow man with
their poems or paintings or musical
compositions. It is almost a sure bet
that where you find a great artist,
you will find a dissatisfied man. As
Plato said, and as every later cham-
pion of respectability must find out,
these lean and hungry people are
troublemakers. Provoke them, and
you'll find yourself — like Dante’s
enemies — roasting in the eternal
fires of their fury.

There has always been a war —
not necessarily hot and raging, but
at least a cold war with intervals of
heat — between the artist and his
natural enemy, the Philistine. The
artist feels vexed because the Philis-
tine persists in denying him simple
access to his daily bread. The Phil-
istine feels outraged because the
artist persists in desecrating and
kicking about his great god, Inanity.

The opposition of strengths is ludi-
crous. On one side are a few motley
and fantastic individuals—undisciplin-
ed, cavorting and frolicking—without
leadership, without uniforms, without
ceremony, or drums or flags or bugles,
without eyen a common cause, and
identified only by an astonishing
dexterity in the use of their weapons.
On the other side is a gigantic army,
covering the horizon rank on rank;
fully be-generaled and be-ribboned,
drilled, disciplined and determined —

_ and marching to battle to the tune of
“T don’t know anything about art,
but I know what I like.”

The actual combat is a spectacle
to inspire real pity for the Philistine.
Weighted down by inarticulateness
and insensitivity, he can only lunge
clumsily at his agile tormenter — hot
tears rolling down his cheeks as he
blubbers over and over that he knows
what he likes and so does his business
competitor and so do his wife and the
ladies of the church bazaar. A gro-
tesque buffoon is he, who will be as
indignant if you kick Inanity as he
would be if you were to kick Norman
Vincent Peale.

WADE THOMPSON teaches litera-
oy at Brown University. B ; “My

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in The Nation. :

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—Q. But if the sam Fis
American general,
‘rusade Against Football’ * appeared

yala'ads

R. WALTER LIKES: A DIALOGUE

I confess that I get a certain mali-
cious kick out of watching an open
conflict between the parties I just de-
scribed. An opportunity came up
last month when the House Un-Amer-
ican Activities Committee suddenly
decided to get disturbed about the
political morality of a number of
American artists whose works are
to be shown in a forthcoming exhibit
in Moscow. Representative Francis
E. Walter, Chairman of the commit-
tee, announced that Americans will
not “stomach this nonsense,” and
promised to spit on his hands and
churn up a full-scale investigation on
just who the hell these artists thought
they were and what the hell they
thought they had a right to paint. A
tremendous battle loomed, and I hied
myself to Washington and Congress-
man Walter’s office.

Congressman Walter of Pennsyl-
vania is a man of affable demeanor
but of something less than Sophoclean
sagacity. I warned him, when I in-
troduced myself, that he and I might
— if we pried into this matter at any
length — find ourselves in funda-
mental disagreement, but that I had
no intention of misrepresenting him
in this article. I can assure the reader
that I could not conceivably exag-
gerate the murkiness, the impene-
trability, of the black fogs in which
the following conversation took place.

(I am Q., Walter is A.):

Q. Do you believe that the political
convictions of an artist necessarily
affect the quality of his work?

A. No, no, it doesn’t make any dif-
ference what an artist’s politics are.
Q. But you are objecting to the forth-
coming American exhibit in Moscow,
solely because of the politics—or al-
leged politics—of the artists.

A. Well, but, these Commies are using
their art to further an international
conspiracy.

Q. Then it does make a difference how
an artist thinks politically.

A. Well, I think that even if a card-
carrying Communist were to paint a
nice pleasant pastoral, that would be
perfectly all right.

Q. You wouldn’t object to something
like that being shown in Moscow as
an example of Ameri ican art? "

A. No.

a A

n you object.

es Well, he’s heapi

verican general. :

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an satirizes an.

- by Wade Thompson

that a general is a member of the
autocracy.

Q. Does that mean that you don’t
like anyone who satirizes American
generals?

A. No, no. That’s all right, but Pm
pretty proud of what we’ve got here
and I don’t like to see it ridiculed.

Q. Then you do object to satire?

A. No, no. But this fellow is using
satire to further the Communist con-
spiracy.

Q. Oh. Then satire is all right so long
as it isn’t used by a Commie.

A. Mmmmmm.,

Q. How many American Communists
are there?

A. 27,000.

Q. How effective is the House Un-
American Activities Committee in
combatting this army?

A. Well, I have it on the authority
of Mr. (I swear, I was asked
to keep his name confidential!) that
if it weren’t for the House com-
mittee, there would be Commie fronts
springing up all over the place.

Q. Well, do the investigations do any
good in changing the personal con-
victions of the artists, or the people
being investigated?

A. No.

Q. Are you aware that many of the
world’s greatest artists—throughout
history—have been radical dissenters?
A. Oh, yes, but you see the original
intention of this exhibit was to present
works that would give the Russians
an idea of what life is like in America.
Now, for one thing, the works were
supposed to be chosen from a period
of over seventy years, and I thought
there were going to be some pleasant
Whistlers and things like that, but
for some reason the committee didn’t
choose anything that was painted be-
fore 1918.

Q. Mr. Walter, do you know any-
thing about art?

A. No.

Q. Do you know what you like?

As Yes,

Q. What do you like?

A. Well, I like good realistic pictures.
Now what I would like to know is
how is anybody going to get any

idea of what American art is like by |
seeing just a white strip with i a

blo pasted at one end of < yrs

Congressman Walter is a busy. ‘man —
and I was beginning to feel too weak

to carry on, so we ended our inter- |
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BOOKS and

the J

Mesmerized by McCarthy

SENATOR JOE McCARTHY. By
Richard H. Rovere. Harcourt, Brace
& Co. 280 pp. $3.95.

George Dangerfield
SENATOR JOE McCARTHY seems to

have been composed by two writers. On
the one hand, there is a trained journa-
list—let us call him Rovere (A)—who
recites, with telling irony and suitable
disgust, the story of a fraudulent politi-
cal scoundrel named Joseph R. McCar-
thy. On the other hand, there is a less
straightforward person, Rovere (B),
who appears to be seized with admiration
for the man whom he excoriates. How
the second writer got into the act is,
to my mind, by far the most depressing
question raised by this melancholy
book: depressing because it seems to
be unanswerable.

Although the two writers alternate
throughout the book, so that you can
never be sure which one of the two is
going to confront you from page to
page, Rovere (B) is mostly in evidence
at the beginning and at the end of it.
(A), on the whole, reports; (B), on
the whole, appraises.

Here, taken from the opening pages,
is a fair example of the work of the
second Rovere.

The late Joseph R. McCarthy, a
United States Senator from Wiscon-
sin, was in many ways the most gifted
demagogue ever bred on these shores.
No bolder seditionist ever moved
among us—nor any politician with
a surer, swifter access to the dark
places of the American mind... . By
the spring of [1950], he was a tower-
ing figure, and from then on, no man
was closer than he to the center of
American consciousness or more cen-
tral to the world’s consciousness of
America. He filled, almost to the
letter, the classic role of the corsair
of democracy, described twenty-four
hundred years ago by Aristoph-
anes, i...

“Most gifted demagogue,” “surer,
“towering,” “classic” —how
mournfully inappropriate these terms

ey are, if you try to place them in any

GEORGE DANGERFIELD is the aw
_ thor of The Era of Good Feelings (win-
ner of a Pulitzer prize in 1953), Vic-
toria’s Heir, The Strange Death of

ren England and other books.
+

kind of historical perspective. Once upon
a time, to be sure, McCarthy seemed
to justify them, but that time has long
since gone. Once upon a time the mistake
was made, by those who detested no
less than by those who admired Mc-
Carthy, of projecting upon him a variety
of emotions to which he was totally
inadequate. Everybody was tempted to
assume that he was, in one way or
another, for evil or for good, a sub-
stantial figure. Rovere (B) still suffers
from this unaccountable misapprehen-
sion.

He says, toward the end of his study:
““There are heroes of evil as well as
of good,’ La Rochefoucauld wrote, and
McCarthy was surely a hero—the only
one, I should think, since Franklin D.
Roosevelt.” And again: “ ‘Here,’ [Nietz-
sche] wrote, ‘is a hero who did nothing
but shake the tree when the fruit was
ripe. Do you think that was a small
thing to do? Well, just look at the
tree he shook.’ It was quite a tree,
and it took quite aman to shake it as
he |McCarthy] did.” The italics, in both

instances, are mine.

ONE can only register a violent dissent
to this sort of thing. I have no idea
what is meant by a hero of evil, unless
it be some great standard figure like
Milton’s Satan. Satan was brave, in-
telligent and, in his puritanical way, an
outsize gentleman: moreover he perform-
ed the essential role of helping man to
get along with the business of falling
from grace. Clearly McCarthy was
nothing of this sort. If “hero” is to be
used as a criterion, then McCarthy was
an anti-hero like Thersites. As for being
“quite a man”—a truly appalling term
—I can only say that, using merely
the insights of Rovere (A), one can
readily see that he was hardly a man
at all

“In what remained of the Truman
years, McCarthy was nothing but an
engine of denunciation. Still without
power except as a junior Senator from
Wisconsin, he denounced and accused
and blamed and insulted and vilified and
demeaned.” An engine of denunciation.
Here, as in so many other places through-
out his book, Rovere is right. And he

is right, surely, when. he says that Mc-

Carthy “lacked the most necessary and
awesome of demag gifts—a belief
in the sacredness of is own enission ae.

If [a man] has no convictions, he can
scarcely draw courage from them.” A
denouncer without convictions—here, I
think, we are beginning to get a little
closer to the historical McCarthy.

It is, unfortunately, as close as Ro-
vere ever gets. His error, and I believe
it to be a gigantic one, is to persist in
seeing McCarthy as a great demagogue.
He had some demagogic traits, but
compared to a real American demagogue
—a Huey Long, for example—he was a
pitiful amateur. Even the most mis-
chievous demagogue retains, somewhere
in his soul, a small and weird belief
in the rightness of his cause. From the
evidence supplied in this book, if one
goes no farther tham that, McCarthy
was not the believing type: he had no
belief in “Communism” or “treason” or
“truth”; moreover, he lacked the dema-
gogue’s occasional feeling of spiritual
communion with his followers. McCar-
thy had a large following among the
haters and all along the lunatic fringe,
but he really didn’t believe in that
either. He came as close as any human
being can to believing in nothing at all.

SO THAT to call him a “corsair of
democracy,” and liken him to Aristoph-
anes’ sausage seller — to Cleon of
Athens—is to use the wrong historical
analogue. Rovere’s admirable physical
descriptions of McCarthy suggest the
right one: McCarthy with his shaking
head, his big skull, his shambling walk,
his brief case full of phony documents,
his pockets bulging with blank sub-
poenas. Is not this the picture of the
latest example in an age-old succession
of infamous delators? Whom is he going
to accuse next? In that question, and
in that question only, lay the secret of
his influence. And the correct analogu
for McCarthy would be the Reverer

Titus Oates, who bestowed upon himse:
a spurious Doctorate of Divinity frot

Salamanca, and sent a number of inn

cent persons to the gallows i in the day

of Charles II by accusing them—ol?
false evidence or no evidence at all-

of being concerned in some totally non
existent Catholic plot to murder the
King. Oates was an arch-informer, and
so was McCarthy.

In the world of the informer, stature
is in inverse proportion to status: an
informer is low, an arch-informer is even.
lower. An arch-informer never bothers
to turn up anything, he invents as he
goes along: and, like Oates and McCar-
thy, he depends ‘upon the fear and ais | i.

MO Cy sn fe

THE ATOMIC scientists, a notably
cautious group, have been for some
‘time pondering the relationship between
art and science, apparently since as long
ago as 1954 if a special issue of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is any
indication. At that time there was an
exhibition at the University of Chicago
in which the “works of art” had all been
produced in the laboratory in the course
of normal scientific research. The ex-
hibit “. . . made artists aware of the
visual and conceptual beauty of the sci-
entist’s world, and made scientists aware
of the degree to which aesthetic enjoy-
ment entered into their own activity.”

This year the Bulletin elaborated
further on this theme with a special Art
and Science Issue which, wonder of
wonders, turned the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists (which ordinarily func-
tions as a conscience mouthpiece) into
an object of popular interest and gave
the little office at 5750 Ellis Avenue its
first sold-out issue. In an introduction
to the Art and Science Issue its editors
pointed out that “. . . the moment of
creative conception seems to involve
mental or psychological processes that
are nearly identical in the two fields,

however different may be their elabora-

tion. In many contacts with humanist
and scientific friends we have noticed
only one consistent difference of profes-
sional attitudes — the scientists are
jealous of their ideas; the humanists do
not seem to mind if someone appropri-
ates their ideas but are outraged by
plagiarism of form.”

An even more basic difference, how-
ever, might be that “The scientist
. . . is limited to working at any one
time with few and simple aspects of
the world. Both experimentally and
conceptually he attempts to exclude
complications, which means that, for
the moment, he ignores other interrela-
tionships and lets the whole assembly
look after itself. The artist, conversely,

is concerned principally with complex

relationships. [He] exploits the
wonderful capacity of the human mind

- to comprehend wholes without seeing

the parts and to balance innumerable

unspecified factors into a harmonious

aggregate. (This he does by abstraction,

for human beings shrink from really

‘comprehensive systems. Man is’ always
regretfully looking back to a adi

| «JEAN ed is a ;
_ tnbu tor, [

Jean Martin

when things were simpler.)” Along those
same wistful, paradise-seeking lines the
issue also includes a quote from that
old name-dropper, Albert Einstein: “I
agree with Schopenhauer that one of
the most powerful motives that attracts
people to science and art is the long-
ing to escape from everyday life.”

A RECENT such deflection—from the
everyday life of the New York Stock
Exchange to Chicago’s art world — has
been that of Richard L. Feigen, a
twenty-eight-year-old wunderkind of
money-making who put a kind of double
reverse on the Horatio Alger bit by
turning his back on a talent for making
money (he sold out his self-earned
Stock Exchange seat) to open a tiny
gallery on elm-shaded Astor Street
whose residential zoning sanctioned ad-
vertising to the maximum extent of an
engraved calling card in the mailbox.
While many a crochety old member of
the Athletic Club has probably asked
himself what might have happened had
he quit the market to have a try at
what he liked to do best, Feigen, en-
visioning his Chicago gallery as a stop-
ping-off place for collectors (as Zurich
is for some in Europe), put himself
carefully on record as being able to ob-
tain anything a collector wanted (“I
mean where else could you sit here like
this and see three Tanguy oils, approxi-
mately one per cent of the man’s life
work?” he tells you) and turned in a
total sales for the year of $250,000.
Thus he made the best of both possible
worlds.

On the other hand, a minuscule move-
ment to get art out into the everyday
world has been evident of late in a
school of thought which holds that an
art exhibit is nothing, but nothing, un-
less it manages to convey A Message
above and beyond its merely aesthetic
one. While in the old days (the good
old days, if one may editorialize) it was
considered sufficient to gather a group
of paintings from a single art movement
(“Expressionism”) or time (“Nineteenth
Century”) or even just a plain One Man
Show, nowadays we get things like
“The American Artist Paints the City,”
“The Artist Looks at People,” “The
Artist Paints the Figure,” “Social Ob-
servation and Comment in Art,” ete.

Since Chicago is = which takes
fondly to all small, e, personal, not

to say downright private forms of art,

it has hat more than its fair share of

¥ if

“A book to give
us the kind

of perspective
we need...

“The book makes one proud to be
an American, but it is far from
encouraging smugness. . . . It
should be widely read, and I think
it will be.” —GraAnvitte Hicks,
Saturday Review.

=» )
ae Pere

“Tt is a rare and courageous non-
American thinker who can look at
the United States and resist the
temptation to misunderstand; who
can comprehend what we are try-
ing to do for ourselves and for the
world (even though we often fail);
and who can say, clearly and
brightly, what he has seen. This
has been done by Raymond Leo-
pold Bruckberger, in Image of
America. ... Just a few intelligent
and sympathetic foreigners have
understood America both in its
high ideals and in its doggedly
pragmatic achievement, and have
written books worthy of their sub-
ject. Such are the little classics of ©
Tocqueville, Bryce, Siegfried, and

Brogan. Clear, original, witty and

sensible, R. L. Bruckberger’s Image

of America ... joins that small but

distinguished company.” —GILBERT

Hicuet, Book-of-the-Month Club

IMAGE
AMERICA

by R. L. BRUCKBERGER —

Fie

BF Pa pg Ne

a ~

these little “theme” exhibits. Even the
usually uncolloquial Art — Institute
(though its print department held
stoutly to its traditional esoteric shows:
“The Housebook Master and his Con-
temporaries,” “The Master of the Am-
sterdam Cabinet and Ais Contempor-
aries”) earlier this year lent its main
wing to the rather coy “The Artist
Looks at People.” This was a show in
which any object of any period by any
artist of whatever merit which happened
to depict a human face could presum-
ably qualify for inclusion and occasion-
ally did. The resulting assortment. in-
cluded some objects which quite ob-
viously might not have made it up from
the basement except as padding for a
convenient theme, and the inescapable
question arose in many minds as_ to
which comes first in these shows, the
chicken or (alas, as: it frequently turns
out) the egg. In the case of “The Artist
Looks at People” it was only neces-
sary to enter the last room (devoted to
three conversation-piece portraits of
local art patronesses) to discover what
the show was all. about. The museum
seems to have been in the position of
a hostess who felt obliged to throw a
masked ball for the neighborhood when
what she really wanted was a ‘small,
priyate tea party.

ANOTHER case in point came up
recently with an exhibit put together
as a benefit for The Ryder Community
Fund. This one, shown for one night in
the Hotel Sherman’s Bal Tabarin Room,
was titled, obviously by someone with

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a light touch in these matters, “Social
Observation and Comment in Art.” A
note at the top of the program put the
observer in a properly respectful mood
with a gloomy quote from Thomas
Mann: “A critical element is inherent
in all Art. ... . The artist cannot dis-
associate himself from a certain opposi-
tion to... society.” Except for won-
dering exactly what those last, loaded
dots had left out, the observer was free to
wander among a group of ninety-seven
completely unrelated paintings by ten
wildly assorted Chicago artists ranging
in mood from Ivan (“That Which I
Should Have Done I Did Not Do”)
Albright to Playboy magazine’s Leroy
Neiman. The paintings were hung un-
cosily, if not actually despondently, in
a large circular room which resembled
an armory decorated by Dorothy Drap-
er. Since the majority of them had been
done years before and under as various
a set of circumstances as human ex-

istence will allow, what Social Observa-

tion and Comment was audible amount-
ed to a slight clearing of the throat or
at most a polite cough on the part of
the painter. The program, however, took
care of all that with yet another quote:
“All is one, all is different. How many
natures exist in Man? How many voca-
tions? And by what chance does each
man ordinarily choose what he has heard
praised?” — presumably one of Paseal’s
more inscrutable pensées. All in all
though, it was an ideal example of the
way the “theme” exhibit manages with
maximum difficulty to convey A Mes-
sage whose primitive simplicity one has
probably not encountered since the days

of, “I am a Gingerbread Boy, I am, I -

am. I can run, I can, I can.” It seems
hardly worth the effort involved just
to remake the rather labored point that,
whatever the “theme” is, each artist in-
variably sees it uniquely and in his own
individual manner,

THEATRE

Harold Clurman

THIS is to report briefly that, after a
sticky start with Romeo and Juliet, The
American Shakespeare Festival Theatre
at Stratford, Connecticut has come up
with an enjoyable new production of
The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I do not know what the scholars think
of this farce—as a matter of fact, I
don’t care—but I found it a solid job of
craftsmanship by Shakespeare in his
most adept box-office manner. The story
of how that fat slob, John Falstaff,
knight (he is much more than that in
the “Henrys”) is made a_ fool of,
thoroughly gulled as he is by the bour-
geoisie of Windsor—this is one of Shake-
speare’s few “contemporary” plays—
makes for fine sport.

The plot must have been old even
in the sixteenth century, and has been
used many, many times since. No mat-
ter. What vitalizes this play—like so
much in Elizabethan literature—is the
quality of the writing. Shakespeare’s
prose is almost as rich as his verse.
Listen to Falstaff speak of his little
accident:

Have I lived to be carried in a
basket, like a barrow of butcher’s
offal; and to be thrown into the
Thames? Well, if I be served such
another trick, I'll have my. brains
ta’en out and butter’d, and give them
to a dog for a new year’s gift. The
rogues slighted me into the river
with as little remorse as they would

have drowned a bitch’s blind puppies,

fifteen 1 the litter: and you ‘may

know by my size that I have a kind
of alacrity in sinking; if the bottom
were as deep as hell I should down.

I had been drowned but that the

shore was shelvy and shallow: a death

that I abhor; for the water swells a

man; and what a thing should I have

been swelled... .

The company in Connecticut this sum-
mer is astonishingly young—in quality
as well as, for the most part, in years.
This can be disturbing in Shakespeare’s
tragedies, much less so in such comedies
as The Merry Wives. At first, I felt that
there was too much huffing and puff-
ing, too much straining for comedy, and
that the lustiness was forced. This may
have been due to the eagerness of a first
performance. As the action progressed,
the actors relaxed and the play took
over.

Larry Gates, who is at his best when
his face is masked with elaborate make
up, gives his most satisfactory charac-
terization since he played Christopher
Sly in The Taming of the Shrew at The
City Center. Gates’s eyes beam zestfully
through Falstaff’s whiskers. His tongue
darts in distinct yet somehow discreet
anticipation of pleasure and is most
serviceable in aid of good delivery. Mor-
ris Carnovsky, too often employed to
convey dignity and high mindedness,

ohm

is a wonderful low comedian, Here he —

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as pial A Bidramieah Ni ght’s EDream gets
a chance to clown hilariously.
A special word is due Hiram Sherman
whose diction in all the many roles he
has undertaken at the “Festival” has
been impeccable, not only for intelli-
gibility but for clarity of thought. Few
actors speak Shakespeare with such
apparent effortlessness. More than that,
the quietly humorous benevolence with
which he invests whatever he plays is
completely winning. The last time I saw
this play—many years ago—Lyn Hard-
ing, an English actor of formidable phy-
sique and natural power, was cast as
Ford—which is probably right—but
Sherman, with very modest means,
captures us in a more appealing way.
Of the women, Sada Thompson as
Mistress Quickly contributes most
through her ease and playful eyes. But
details matter less than the production
as a whole which, I repeat, is a success.

Folk Music Festival

Robert Shelton

Newport, Rhode Island
DURING the last decade American
folk music has been flourishing in its
latest and biggest revival. LP recordings
have proliferated, guitar and banjo sales
have boomed, listeners have been turn-
ing out in numbers to hear old and new
singers. With that momentum behind it,
“poor man’s music” swept into this once-
haughty watering place on July 11 and
12 for its most ambitious effort to date.

The first annual Newport Folk Festi-
val brought together nearly seventy-five
musicians and scholars from all over the
country in three concerts, a workshop on
instrumental techniques and a seminar.
Despite the heavy fog and rain that suc-
cessively harassed the outdoor programs,
the attendance reached a total of be-
tween 12,000 and 14,000 for the weekend.
The festival was not a complete artistic
success and it raised questions about
future directions that remain to be re-
solved; but it was a stalwart beginning
for what promises to become one of the
most invigorating projects on the sum-
mer music scene.

In a curious reversal of roles—jazz is
the musical stepchild of Afro-American
folk music—the folk gathering at New-
port is the offspring of the six-year-old,

the news staff of The New York Times
and reviews folk music co

prosperous but non-profit, Newport Jazz
Festival. Despite a reported loss of sev-
eral thousand dollars (the folk festival
was prepared to lose $10,000), the
group’s president, Louis Lorillard, was
“happily amazed” at the turn-out. Fes-
tival co-producer George Wein, with a
Hurokian gleam in his eye, believes these
folk events may grow to “fantastic pro-
portions” .when the international folk
music and dance veins are tapped.

To attend the festival came an audi-
ence of much more serious purpose and
attentiveness than the one at the jazz
festival the weekend before. Predom-
inantly youthful, it was mainly a North-
eastern urban slice of the national audi-
ence. From Wellesley College in trim
blazers, from Washington Square in
faded blue jeans a year too old and a
size too small, from the campus dens
of Chicago and the coffee houses of the
West Coast the listeners came in pil-
grimage. Here they joined enthusiastic
local residents, many of whom were
present to hear that embodiment of a
sophomore’s dream, the Kingston Trio.

JUST what is folk music? In formal
and informal discussions by scholars, per-
formers and masters of ceremonies at
the festival, the definitions emerged. It
might be called the music that grows
out of life, from work, play, worship,
personal or collective joy or sorrow. It
is a music transmitted orally that ex-
presses the inner needs and external
conflicts of a regional, occupational or
social community. Folk music borrows
freely from and invents many musical
forms, shifting and growing in its “folk
process,” to reflect new aspirations and
old traditions. It can be as old as an
Elizabethan ballad or as new as “Hard
Times in Poplarville Jail.”

These definitions emerged in nearly
sixteen hours of performance and dis-
cussion. The performers had been saga-
ciously assembled by Albert Grossman,
co-producer of the festival. Mainly he
relied on dependable “name” attractions,
but he laced these with many little-
known performers. Together they were
a catalogue of current trends and styles
in American folk music which, somewhat
arbitrarily, might be grouped as follows:

Theatrical, trained singers (Odetta,
Leon Bibb); ethnic traditional singers
(Jean Ritchie, Jimmie Driftwood, and
from Ireland, Pat Clancy and Tommy
Makem); collector-singers and popu-
larizers (Pete Seeger and Frank War-
ner); art-concert singer of international
folk songs (Martha mm); blues
singers (Brownie M Shee, Memphis
Slim, Sonny ony and Barbara Dane);
peenra country music (Earl Scruggs,

the Stanley Brothers and the New Lost
City Ramblers); gospel and _ religious
singers (the Rev. Alex Bradford and
the Rev. Gary Davis); city folk singers
and instrumentalists (Billy Faier, Frank
Hamilton, Oscar Brand and the Kossoy
Sisters); eclectics (Cynthia Gooding, Ed
McCurdy, Bob Gibson and Joan Baez);
popular and commercialized folk singers
(the Kingston Trio). In a class by him-
self is a traditional singer with conserva-
tory training, a collector and arranger
of folk music — John Jacob Niles.

To put this mélange of currents and
styles together was a challenge, and the
festival rose to it. Thanks must go in
part to the three masters of ceremony,
Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand and Studs
Terkel, Chicago radio announcer. These
hosts effectively placed the performers
in their cultural contexts and drew out
what the music meant in the lives of
the people who made it. Folk music is
demonstrably one of the most potent
forces for inter-group and inter-class un-
derstanding to be found in American
cultural life today, and the festival
could not fail to foster it.

But all was not completely harmoni-
ous on this first occasion. On Saturday
night Odetta, possessor of a voice that
is one of the richest, burnished-leather
contraltos in or out of folk music, gave
a commanding performance of a prison-
escape song, “Another Man Done Gone.”
At the seminar the next morning, two
panelists suggested that the festival next
year invite Vera Hall, an Alabama cook
from whom “Another Man Done Gone”
was collected. But Langston Hughes, a
member of the jazz festival board, re-
marked to me, “How do we know that
Vera Hall could do as well here as she
has recording in her own home?”

Here is the crux of the “great debate”
at the festival — how do you transplant
the “root” singers and put them on
side by side with the large-voiced, pol-
ished and earnest professionals who are
not indigenous folk singers but who have
been drawn to the music? The question
becomes more vexing in the light of the
fact that two of the most influential
figures in American folk music, Jean
Ritchie and the Rev. Gary Davis, were
unable to perform as effectively at New-

port as they have in small concerts or

on disks. By contrast, Odetta, Leon

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Bibb, Pete Seeger and “many others

were as much at home at the festival
as the fish are in Narragansett Bay.

One old hand in the field has sug-

gested that Freebody Park, a baseball
field, is not exactly the place for cer-
tain singers. He thinks that part of
the festival should break up into small
song-swapping sessions in hotels and
homes at Newport. Although that would
be a reporter’s nightmare, the sugges-
tion is here enthusiastically repeated.

But another authority, a homey,
small-scale, non-theatrical performer,
was able to offer the solution in his
own performance. Frank Warner, as
Seeger was to do the following after-
noon, converted the stadium into what
seemed the intimacy of his living room
as he sang and reminisced about the
pleasures of encountering folk artistry
in the hills and farms of America. War-
ner’s triumph leads one to think that
it is not merely the physical surround-
ings that need change, but that the
performers must, as did the jazz men
who went from smoky night clubs to
Carnegie Hall, exert an external order
on their performances to fit into their
new environment.

UNLESS it wants to drift in a com-
mercialized and theatrical direction, the
folk festival must resolve these prob-
lems. One has confidence in Messrs.
Wein and Grossman to seek the best
advice on talent and programming. An
advisory board similar to the jazz fes-
tival board would seem in order to as-
sist with the special problems of folk
music. The following could help keep the
folklore and musical aims in focus:
Moses Asch, recording executive; Fred
Hellerman, guitarist-singer and arranger;
D. K. Wilgus, folklore scholar from
Kentucky; Frank Hamilton, performer
and teacher; Stanley Edgar Hyman,
folklorist and educator; Willis Laurence
James, musicologist and authority on
Negro folk music, and Bascom Lamar
Lunsford, performer and leading light of
a quarter-century-old folk festival in
Asheville, N.C.

Regional festivals all over the coun-
try should be watched closely, as they
would have much to offer Newport in
experience and talent. So, too, would
the gospel singing of Mahalia Jackson,
who canceled her appearance at this
year’s jazz festival, reportedly to avoid
confusing her singular art with jazz. Her
place is at the folk festival.

The Newport Folk Festival is off to
an excellent start, [f it shows flexibility,

‘digs deeply for new performers and nur-

tures the roots as well as the branches
of folk song, it should grow in stature.

The Narion

Crossword Puzzle No. 829

By FRANK W. LEWIS

5
10
11
12
13
14
15
18
21
24

26
27

29
30

August 1, 1959

ACROSS:

It has the same composition as
rhyolite. (8)

Does it imply a popping noise to
speak equivocally? (6)

See 13 across

Getting something off the pad? (9)
The next best thing to striking—
but not too much of it. (7)

and 10 Used the cerebellum com-
pletely and with some regard. (12)
Various water birds might be. (6)
Rearmed, but not fully awake. (7)
Found in a runner very frequently
to lose control. (7)

One from heaven calls for announce-
ment. (6)

One might find out the old king has
the heart of 18? (7)

They might be wood for water. (7)
How an epee is used in good health?
(e000 4)

The morning everything comes
me (Possibly loaded and high!)
5)

Showy—somewhat like a fish? (6)
Tea-set in which one might find
liqueur. (8)

DOWN

Being clumsy is nate to a sucker,
perhaps! (6)

2 Saint Olav might have sought it. (9)
3 Life with Father? (7)
4 Declares the measure up, in time.

ee | eer |) a
lm | tt | Teh
Ae | Melt)

}
|

Encompass with a half-measure at
hand. (7)

Support of .a young flyer who
doesn’t get to go (5)

Argue ’til it ties things up. (8)

In the habit of being satisfied? (6)
Speak disparagingly of the worker?
That’s bad! (9)

Excelling at tall tales on the border?
(8)

Unexpectedly professional carillon-
neurs? (7)

Something that might crawl in G.I.
wear? (6)

Aoi as a pledge, and exist to know
it. )

You might find one sold in a Chi-
nese restaurant. (7)

Avoid the prank which takes no
notice inside! (6)

and 13 across Where 10 is found in
this puzzle wouldn’t be a first im-
pression. (12)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 828

ACROSS: 1 Stews; 4 Smiths; 11 Ari-

osto;
Troll;
porter;

12 Unguent; 13 Baguettes; 14
15 Transcription; 17 Court re-
24 Liability; 25 Cartoon; 26

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Planes;

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Phones: 3830 N.Y.C. LU 56-1678

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AUGUST 15,

CIGARE
and t

CAMPUS | David Cort

Puerto Rico

STATE . | Merrill Rippy

agazine Jigs Gardner

LETTERS

Praise from the Profession

Dear Sirs: The article, “Why Hospitals
Exploit Labor,” in your July 4 issue, 1s
of such interest and importance, | am
passing it around to the executives of
the Philadelphia Blue Cross Plan.

We in Blue Cross can substantiate
Mr. Kirstein’s statement that hospital
supply costs, along with other costs, are
skyrocketing. . . . To ease some of the
hospital costs, Philadelphia Blue Cross
allows, for subscribers over sixty-five
. years in age, two days’ care in a nursing
home for each hospital day they have
left over from their entitlement period.
Other Blue Cross plans have nursing-
home benefits also.

j D. G. RoEnrs
Public Relations Dept.
Philadelphia Blue Cross

Philadelphia, Pa.

Dear Sirs: “Why Hospitals Exploit La-
bor”... particularly caught my atten-
tion because the views expressed are
identical to those which have been re-
peatedly expressed by the president of
the Board of Trustees of the Elizabeth
Gamble Deaconess Association which
_operates The Christ Hospital in Cincin-
nati, Ohio. While I do not entirely agree
with the solution offered, the problem
and its etiology are clearly and forth-
rightly stated.

Please accept my congratulations on
a very vivid explanation of the whole
story.

Lioyp E. Larrick, M.D.
Director, The Christ Hospital
Cincinnati, O.

Dear Sirs: Your explanation of the his-

toric and present forces involved in

“Why Hospitals Exploit Labor,” is the
finest I’ve ever seen.

P. F. Luccnest, M.D.

Executive Vice-President

and Medical Director

The Albert Einstein Medical Center

Philadelphia, Pa.

A Cheer and a Rap

Dear Sirs: Of the many fine articles
and stories that have constantly filled
re your pages, Wilma Shore’s Fourth of

ed. ‘a new high. Expertly ours
loaded.

f ere e other hand, in the same issue
— 0n Ageto,. the oa ee S som

what does al

ty ae - July story, “For Spacious Skies,” reach- —

nei ry

this magnitude is m more suitable for
the pages of Time, not a magazine
which consistently focuses so brilliantly —
on real issues.

SANnrorD RosENZWEIG
Indianapolis, Ind,

Battle over Beard

Dear Sirs: Until I read Professor Main’s
review of McDonald’s We the People
“The Prosecuting Historians”; The Na-
tion, June 13] I had assumed that the
Beard thesis on the Constitution was be-
ing quietly consigned by a growing num-
ber of reputable historians to the limbo
of historical relics.

Readers of The Nation should be
warned that, contrary to Main’s asser-
tion, Beard made more than “a few mis-
takes” and historians have corrected
more than “peripheral errors.” The en-
tire Beard thesis is of dubious validity.

. Both Beard’s own evidence and thi
of other scholars seems to indicate thit
most men could vote in 1787. If a ma-
jority of “conservative” businessmen /a-
vored the Constitution, so also di/ a
majority of “city workers” and the snall
farmers. If the vote in the ratifying con-
ventions has any relation to pcpular
sentiment, the Constitution won by a
greater popular majority than did either
Franklin D. Roosevelt or Dwiht D.
Eisenhower.

Main seems to be willing to accept
Beard, even though Beard had admit-
tedly not done the necessary research,
yet he rejects McDonald who claims to
have done the research that Beard fail-
ed to do... . If McDonald... was
motivated merely by a desire to refute
Beard, as Main says, his work will be
rejected in the future just as Beard’s
work is now being rejected. fe can only
hope that the process ' will no take more
than forty years as it did wi

Perhaps Main will produce
sary evidence in his fortleoming book,
but until he does, y ders would do

well to read both I 1d McDonald

East Lansing,
Dear Sirs: Wher

patient diaaa

I was rais
according te
ast month

‘rest
ed te

1 that Uncle

yy Se

my) ‘a Ping '

Ec brstigutiog McDonald’s book so
mre. a
Now

rect vi'w but gives no evidence to sup-
port hs statement.

“G) it, husband! Go it, bear!” Like
the :eutral wife in this encounter, I’m
willing to listen to more from both sides.

GEORGE JOHNSON
Rion, Wis.

h This Issue
3DITORIALS

61 'e

ARTICLES

63 @ Puerto Rico: The Next State?
by MERRILL RIPPY

65 '@ Time: the Weekly Fiction
Magazine
by JIGS GARDNER

68 'e After the Talks, the Visits
by FREDERICK KUH
Cigarettes, Cancer and the
Campus
by DAVID CORT
71 ® The Useless Weapon
by PATRICK LORT-PHILLIPS

BOOKS AND THE ARTS
74 '@ Mian: the Virtuous Animal
by HANS MEYRRHOFF
76 @ Common Sense Without Pity
by LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
78 '@ Attack from the Right
by EDWARD iS. HERMAN
79 @ Theatre
by HAROLD CLURMAN

80 '‘@ An Autumn in a Word (poem)
by
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
Crossword Puzzle (opp. 80)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

HNN
= George G. Kirstein, Publisher

= Carey McWilliams, Wditor

= Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Wditor

69 @

Robert Hatch, Books and tthe Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. lL. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, Huropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Aug. 15, 1959. Vol. 189, No. 4

Subscription Price Domestic—One year $8, Two
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es 7 a

pulled the his Perical rug out from under

. Jackson Turner Main says |
that Bard’s contention is still the cor-

>
=f

at pclae

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 4

NOV 24

NATION® &

EDITORIALS

The Ghost Soon Laid

Were John Foster Dulles alive, it is inconceivable that
the Eisenhower-Khrushchev exchange visits could have
been arranged. The irrationality of the Dulles policies
may be gauged by the celerity with which Eisenhower
dried his tears and embarked on a diplomatic experi-
ment totally at variance with the late Secretary’s prin-
ciples and techniques. Not that the President was in-
sincere: his dependence was genuine and his eulogies
came from the heart. But with his strong-willed mentor
out of the way, the ineluctable facts forced the President
to seek other advice and — it is not ruled out — at last
to think and act for himself.

Lieutenant-Colonel Lort-Phillips sums up the facts in
this issue [see page 71]. The West cannot win a war
with conventional weapons. Nobody can win an all-out
nuclear war. NATO is useless, for its only function is to
hold a front until strategic nuclear bombardment can
take effect. But the Russians would retaliate in kind;
Britain and West Germany would be totally obliterated,
the Soviet Union and the United States partly so, and
to what end? The concept of limited nuclear war is
visionary, but should it become a reality the Russians
are at least as well prepared for it as we are. Dulles, es-
sentially an old-fashioned diplomat, was always playing
with the idea of a military solution. But there is no mil-
itary solution; time and technology have erased it.

Besides these general facts, Eisenhower had to face
the facts of the Berlin impasse. Khrushchev could block
any sort of agreement at a foreign ministers’ meeting,
and did, His potentialities for mischief in this particular
sector were greater than those of the Western Allies.
Khrushchev wanted to do his own talking with his op-
posite number. There was nothing for it but to indulge
him. The Nixon mission facilitated matters, but Nixon
was at most an expediter. Events would have taken
their course without him, Where they will lead it is too

early to say. The obstacles to achieving a modus vivendt
are enormous. They may prove insurmountable, but at
least. people will be trying, while all that Dulles was
capable of doing was to make difficult situations hope-
less. His works lasted as long as they deserved: about
two months.

If Peace Breaks Out

To talk of peace at this stage of American-Soviet rela-
tions is as if a girl were to start thinking of marriage
when a man glanced at her legs in the subway. Still, one
thing leads to another, and who knows where or when?
What if the cold war should actually end, or shrink to
smaller dimensions? What will take its place if
there is no longer an excuse for government
spending on armaments to the extent of a tenth or more
of the gross national product? The experience of the last
three decades shows quite clearly that American capital-
ism, whatever its merits, needs at least that much gov-
ernment spending to hold the oscillations of the business
cycle within tolerable limits, The often cited spending
for welfare is not a realistic alternative. It is unaccept-
able to capitalists for the perfectly sound reason that it
does not yield profits to private enterprise nor permit
accumulation of private capital. Until now there has
been no practical solution. But now there may be one.
It is space, vast even within the solar system, illimitable
among the stars, and with illimitable possibilities for
spending. The cold war could thus be carried on in a

To Nation Subscribers

During July and August, The Nation
will appear on alternate weeks only. The

next issue will be published Aug. 29. The
_ nermal weekly printing schedule will be
resumed with the first September issue.

7
i
F
a
’
;

non-lethal way, for Russia, too, will be out there. After

a time, with the military pressure lessened, public
opinion might tend to favor a diversion of some of the
spatial spending to welfare objectives and a sensible
balance could be achieved between the interplanetary
adventure and the enhancement of life on this planet.
And the beauty of it is that the same great corporations
which are now cashing in on the armament boom would
more or less monopolize the space business — in fact,
they are already doing so.

President Nixon?

The ballots aren’t cast, he isn’t even nominated yet,
but his chances are greatly improved since he flew to
the Bolshevik lair. The Gallup figures in July, before
this god-sent opportunity, were: Stevenson, 56 per cent,
Nixon, 44 per cent. On August 4, Gallup reported:
Nixon, 51 per cent; Stevenson, 49 per cent. Gallup cau-
tions that the gain may be ephemeral; Nixon enjoyed
a similar windfall after his journey through South Amer-
ica and the gain of statistical popularity proved tem-
porary. But there is a difference in the two trips. Once
he had returned from the ministrations of our southern
neighbors, the Vice President was in no further danger
of being stoned and spat upon and the public could
forget about his adventure; but East-West tensions will
be in the news for a long time and the image of Nixon
as the statesman who broke the thaw (if it remains
broken) should endure as a political asset during the
fifteen decisive months ahead.

History is replete with irony; still, if Nixon achieves
the highest political prize the United States has to offer,
it will be a laugh for the gods. He has his gifts. He car-
ries the Madison Avenue virtues to their highest apogee;
an opportunist he may be, but a highly talented one;
above all, he is equipped with antennae which enable him
to sense rewards with a speed and nicety not given to
ordinary myriapods.

Still, it is strange to think of him in the chair of
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, the two Roose-
velts. Whatever their faults, these presidents, and prob-
ably the great majority of others less famed, stood for
something. They had principles, complexes, passions.
Nixon’s only public passion seems to be to get ahead.
Tt is said that he sometimes weeps. Where do the tears
come from?

Yet, if Nixon achieves his goal, or even comes as near
as he already has, it would be a mistake merely to de-
plore and decry. Rather, the significance of the phe-

- nomenon must be recognized. Ten years ago the super-
sensitive Nixon antennae sent a message to the alert
_ Nixon brain which — to use an old-fashioned expression

i ae made him the most successful Red baiter of his time.
Now these same feelers, presumably no |
seem to tell him that, for the moment at le

BP ee Pee eae eee f
Wier? if Ny eae Peeing

| |
suit of peace will Hh off better than the pursuit of R ed ds. 7 |
|

Well, is that bad? ”

As for what the people will get if they elect him, that
is quite another matter. From a moral and aesthiete
standpoint, it could be dismal. It seems most improb-
able, however, that Nixon could descend to the depths
of McCarthy. No monomaniac, Nixon would serve the
corporate powers that be, but always with his antennae
waving fearfully at incipient rebellion or even un-
popularity, and searching eagerly for votes and approba-
tion, Thus it may be hoped that the humiliations to
which the country might be subjected would be limited
by the virtues of Nixon’s defects. That is not to say
that we should be resigned to his ascension; only that it
may not be necessary to move to Canada if it occurs.

Thank God for Hoffa!

Business Week for August 1 carries a table which
must be seen — in color — to be appreciated. It is en-
titled “Record Earners Dot Profit Sampling.” The record
earners are printed in red. A few samples:

1959 1958
First-Half First-Half %

Company Earnings Earnings Change
Allegheny-Ludlum

Steel $ 12,369,009 $ 1,371,967 +801.5
American Machine &

Foundry 8,348,000 4,679,000 +78.4
Crucible Steel 8,621,061 399;327 +2,060.7
Eastman Kodak 52,720,909 37,330,269 +41.2
Ford Motor Co. 285,900,000 16,100,000 +1,675.8
Jones & Laughlin 42,206,000 5,691,000 +641.6
Pepsi-Cola Co. 7,266,000 5,582,000 +30.2
Union Carbide 90,443,000 49,901,000 +81.2

Of the 60 companies listed, 27 are record earners. Only
one company, Allis-Chalmers, shows a negative percent-
age change. Happy days are here again. And they are
going to be even happier. “Record Quarter, More to
Come,” reads the Business Week headline. With big
business thus wallowing in big profits, Jimmie Hoffa is
surely a corporate publicity man’s dream. In truth, what
business needs is more and seamier labor leaders. If these
miscreants can be hauled up periodically before Con-
gressional committees to capture the headlines, nobody
will pay much attention to the revelations in the finan-
cial pages.

Belated Smear

Leslie Fiedler, who has long been a controversial figure
in literary circles, has now become a center of contro-
versy at Montana State University, where he is the
most renowned member of the English Department.

The attack on Mr. Fiedler is focused in a pamphlet,
“Is This Your University?” which is published by Ken —
Neils, a man whose family is prominent in the lumber —

industry of the Hembivest, This pamphlet drama ome
SUM ;
P ae j hy The uo

vhs A

ily upon a dossier drawn up by Robert O. Bowen, a
junior member of the Montana English faculty. It con-
sists mainly of quotations from Mr. Fiedler’s printed
work, presented in fragments and out of context and
designed to show that he scorns truthfulness, politics,
marriage, the oil industry, the Catholic Church and
“God’s Country” (i.c., the United States).

Another member of the Montana faculty, Edmund
Freeman, has published an article in The People’s Voice
(Helena, Mont.) which restores the quotes to context
and shows in every case that Mr. Fiedler was saying ap-
proximately the opposite of what he was made to appear
to say.

Mr. Fiedler, a good many years ago, was attracted by

what he took to be the principles and purposes of com-
munism. Being a forthright man, he said so in print;
and being an honest one, he has long since publicly
changed his mind. But idle men Jike Mr. Neils and am-
bitious ones like Mr. Bowen propose to destroy him with
his old enthusiasm. They have found a recent essay in
which Mz. Fiedler recalls his earlier illusions, and dis-
play it as representing his present views.

They count on support, perhaps, from the many peers
of Mr. Fiedler who take issue with him on matters of
literary and social interpretation. But Mr. Fiedler has
nothing to fear from his peers in the present distasteful
controversy. They will immediately close ranks with
him against the Yahoos.

PUERTO RICO: The Next State? e « by Merrill Rippy

Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
WITH fifty states in the Union,
Americans may think that a logical
and final goal had been reached in
the extension of statehood. They
will then be surprised to learn that
many Puerto Ricans do not agree
with them. The movement to make
Puerto Rico the fifty-first state has
become vigorous and vocal to the
extent that it can no longer be ig-
nored. All the arguments that once
blocked the admission of Hawaii and
Alaska apply to Puerto Rico: it is
non-contiguous (so was Alaska); it
is non-continental (so was Hawaii);
it is not Anglo-Saxon (neither was
Hawaii); it is vital to the national
defense (so were Alaska and Hawaii).
But if these were ever valid: reasons
to oppose statehood, Hawaii and
Alaska have wiped them out.

What kind of state would Puerto
Rico make, assuming that it requests
admission? In area it would stand
between Delaware and Connecticut;
in number of people it would rank
with Oklahoma and Connecticut; in
racial make-up it would resemble
Ohio; in religion it would be similar
to Connecticut. Puerto Rico speaks
with two tongues, rather like New
Mexico; its per capita wealth com-
pares with the lowest rung of Ameri-

MERRILL RIPPY is the author of
Oil and the Mexican Revolution and

‘many articles in the area of Latin

American politics and economics,

— August 15, 1959

can states, its liquid capital with
New Mexico. Unlike Alaska and
Hawaii, Puerto Rico would enter the
Union with considerable legislative
power: it would be entitled to six
Representatives (the same as Con-
necticut), as well as the two Sena-
tors.

Since being admitted to the Union
has always been essentially a political
matter, the politics of Puerto Rico’s
position are pertinent and interest-
ing. It is significant in this connec-
tion that almost one-third of all
Puerto Ricans live in the continental
United States. Nearly one million
Puerto Ricans live in New York,
Pennsylvania and other states of
the mainland. Neither Hawai nor
Alaska had so powerful a_ built-in
base for political maneuvering.
Moreover, Puerto Rico is fortunate
in having its mamland population
concentrated in New York, where it
will do the most good politically. The
nearly 800,000 Puerto Ricans in New
York may very well wield a balance
of power in that most important of
states. This fact has dawned upon
people other than Puerto Ricans.

The growing power of Puerto
Ricans in New York City and State
politics is already producing some
interesting results, not the least of
which has been the effort of Con-
gressman Adam Clayton Powell to
build a united front between the New
York Negro vote and the Puerto
Rican vote. Such a front, if it were

constructed, could exercise sufficient
power to be a determining factor not
only in the city but also in the state.
The contest between the Roosevelt-
Lehman-Impelliter1 wing of the
Democratic Party and the De Sapio-
Wagner faction, along with the ma-
neuverings of Representative Powell,
has introduced the question of state-
hood for Puerto Rico as a local city
issue. [For a discussion of the Puerto
Rican vote in New York City, see
Dan Wakefield’s article in The Na-
tion of February 28.]

The almost daily interchange of
political personages between San
Juan and New York has much less
to do with the beauties of Puerto
Rico and the need of a vacation from
New York than with the 1960 politi-
cal campaign. In a short span of time
Mr. Powell, Robert G. Baker (Lyn-
don Johnson’s executive assistant),
Senator Dennis Chavez (D., New
Mexico), the Mayor of Philadelphia
and Jim Farley have appeared in
Puerto Rico. Governor Mufos Marin
of Puerto Rico has visited Eisen-
hower and conferred with Lyndon
Johnson in Washington; the Mayor
of San Juan, Felisa Rincén de Gau-
tier, has broadcast to Puerto Ricans
in New York. A delegation of “Pro-
State 51” Puerto Ricans has been
received by Governor Brown of Cali-
fornia, who announced that he wish-
ed more Puerto Ricans would come
to California rather than to New
York; the mayor of Philadelphia,

while in San Juan, praised the Puerto
Rican colony in his city; and Gov-
ernor Nelson Rockefeller enlarged
his resort hotel in Puerto Rico to
entertain the United States Confer-
ence of Governors which convened
there earlier this month.

THE PRESSURE for statehood has
been stimulated in Puerto Rico by
recent proposals to alter the funda-
mental law governing relations be-
tween the island and the United
States. Puerto Rico, from the turn
of the century, when it came under
the sovereignty of the United States,
has been governed in accord with
four basic laws: the Foraker Act
(1900-1917), the Jones Act (1917-
1947), the Amended Jones Act
(1947-1952), and the so-called Law
600 (since 1952). Each of these acts
has granted Puerto Rico a degree
more of self-government, until, as
Senator Henry Jackson (D., Wash-
ington) remarked, it can become
more sovereign only by becoming a
state or by becoming entirely in-
dependent. A former judge of the
First Circuit Court of Appeals in
Boston, the federal court which first
hears cases appealed from Puerto
Rico, has declared that if Puerto
Rico gains any more advantages
than those in the Law 600, it would
have to become independent. Rex-
ford Tugwell (New Deal Governor
of Puerto Rico) has declared that
Puerto Rico must move toward in-
dependence or statehood.

It is that.situation which arouses
the pro-statehood forces in Puerto
Rico to strong opposition to pro-
posed amendments of the Law 600.
These changes, the Ferndés proposals
(named for Fernés Isern, the Resi-
dent Commissioner of Puerto Rico
in Washington, a non-voting mem-
ber of Congress), have been present-

ed to the Senate as the Fernds-
Murray Bill (Senator James F. Mur-

_ ray; D., Montana). In some re-

spects, the amendments would in-
crease Puerto Rico’s resemblance to
a state. Cases involving the Puerto
Rican government would go direct-
ly to the Supreme Court of the
United States, Puerto Rico would set
its own debt limitation, and could
support the federal treasury by vol-
untary contributions, avoiding fed-
eral taxation,

less like a state. Reports from Puerto
Rico would be sent to the Secretary
of State of the United States rather
than to the Cabinet officers con-
cerned with the particular business;
the Customs Service would be called
that of Puerto Rico rather than that
of the United States, and judicial
proceedings would be in the name of
the Constitutions of Puerto Rico and
the United States only, eliminating
the former references in such pro-
ceedings to the United States Govy-
ernment and the President.

This development, which seems to
put Puerto Rico at a crossroads in
its relationship with the United
States, has stirred up a hornets’ nest
among Puerto Ricans in New York
and on the island. Congressman Vic-
tor Anfuso of Brooklyn is quoted as
having declared that he could not
withdraw his proposal for a Puerto
Rican plebescite on the question of
statehood, even under pressure from
Lyndon Johnson, because he had re-
ceived an incredible 400,000 signed
letters backing the idea. In Puerto
Rico, island-wide broadcasts and
telecasts on the issue have been made
almost nightly for weeks. Federal
employees in Puerto Rico and the
American Legion there (more than
100,000 Puerto Ricans are veterans),
as well as organized labor, support
statehood; its appeal to other groups,
including the politically alive uni-
versity students, is widespread.

The career of Governor Mufioz
Marin, who has been in political con-
trol since 1940, is involved in the dis-

24 per cent of the vote in 1956, A

aay

oe he as
Oe Eg ee ee
_ pute. ~Mufioz has- announced th ac
commonwealth status should be per-—

manent and definitive for Puerto
Rico; his Partido Popular Demo-
cratico has committed itself strongly
to the Ferndés proposals. Except for
the opposition of Puerto Ricans both
in New York and on the island, as-
sisted by Democratic Senators Jack-
son from Washington and Gruening
of Alaska (members of the Senate
Committee on Insular Affairs which
has to present the Fernés-Murray
Bill to the Senate), Mufioz Marin
and Fernés might very well have
got the revisions through the Con-
gress with little difficulty, partic-
larly since Lyndon Johnson seems
favorably disposed to Mufioz’s
wishes. However, Mujioz’s proposals
have been widely denounced as a
step away from statehood, and the
power of the PPD, particularly in
New York, is not as strong as it was.

MUNOZ MARIN opposes statehood
because he fears it would cut down
on American capital investment in
Puerto Rico, because it has been
pre-empted as an issue by the most
powerful opposition party and be-
cause in his youth (in contrast to
his famous father, who favored the
closest ties with the U.S.) he was
radically for independence. Mufoz
has based his political power upon
his programs of land reform and
industrialization. Economically, his
land reform program resembles
Cuba’s in every way except that it
has been accepted as legal and his-
torical. His industrialization program
has brought Puerto Rico in ten
years 600 industries employing 41,-
000 workers at low wages to make
goods for export out of imported
materials. Munoz has strongly urged
that Puerto Rico be excepted from
any increase of the minimum wage
in the United States. No one ques-
tions, however, that Puerto Rico
has made an impressive economic
advance under Munoz Marin.
These programs have not been
sufficient to prevent the opposition
party, the Partido Estadista Repu-
blicano, from enjoying a popular re-
vival on the statehood issue. The
PER has grown rapidly since its

founding in 1953, doubling its totals

in successive elections and receiving

ju’ oe

tp» ®

oe
+

Nazion,

q
|

third 2a f Roe ndependence
for Puerto Rico, has dropped from
22 per cent of the vote in 1952 to
12 per cent in 1956. In the 1960
elections the statehood party is cer-
tain to show continuing growth and
the party favoring independence may
well disappear. This development is
more than “typical Republican

TIME: the Weekly Fiction Magazine .. jis cardner

CRITICISM of the so-called news
magazines in general, and of Time
in particular, is an activity almost
as old as the magazines themselves.
If the complaints have not been
effective, the reason may be that
they were badly aimed. To point
out distortion, bias and falsification
is certainly commendable, but, I am
afraid, superficial. Such a critical ap-
proach, because it is both too serious
and too frivolous, fails to discover
the true nature of a product like
Time, and thus fails to understand
why so many seemingly intelligent
people read it. The critics are too
serious (earnest is perhaps a better
word) because they accept Tzme’s
own statement that it is in fact a
news magazine, and therefore they
censure its shortcomings in that field.
_ They are too frivolous in that they
concentrate on the surface of Time,
and do not really examine its literary
style, probably the most revealing
aspect of the magazine.
The kind of approach I am dis-
cussing was displayed by at least two
_ reviewers of Edmund Wilson’s A
Piece of My Mind when it was pub-
lished in 1956. Both writers took
Wilson to task for the closing sen-
tences of the book:

STS

_ When, for example, I look through
y Life magazine, I feel that I do not
© belong to the country depicted there,
that I do not even live in that coun-
try. Am I, then, in a pocket of the
f past? I do not necessarily believe it.
i I may find myself here at the center
eee iy things—since the center can only
- be in one’s head—and my. feelings
and thoughts may be shared by: many. _

the import rant thin

statehdod: propaganda,” ar Baber
G. Baker may rue the effort to
link the Democratic ‘Party with the
party of Munoz Marin.

Using an unfortunate metaphor (for
his purposes), Ferndés Isern declared
in his Fourth of July oration in San
Juan that July 4, 1776, was the
trunk of Puerto Rico’s political de-

The reviewers felt that this indi-
cated oldfogeyism, a refusal by Wil-
son to cope with present reality, a
withdrawal into outdated, nostalgic
conceptions of America. They as-
sumed, therefore, that a product like
Life had some inherent validity and
should be taken seriously on its own
terms. I suspect that Wilson would
make the same remarks about Time,
and that his reviewers would be even
more horrified. But Wilson, in his
usual perceptive way, has implied
something quite profound about such
products. We miss the point when
we criticize Time as a news maga-
zine, because that is just what it is
not, nor is it, as many have claimed,
simply propaganda. It contains some
news and plenty of propaganda, but
it can be adequately explained only
by seeing these elements as parts of
something larger: Time is a weekly
melodramatic fantasy, crude fiction,
and that is the reason for its wide
appeal. It must be analyzed as a work
of art (of a rather low order, to be
sure) if we are to understand that
what we have been lightly dismissing
as flaws of bad reporting are positive
stylistic and plot devices of melo-
dramatic fiction. The June 15 cover
story on Lewis Strauss is a good,
but not unusual, example of the
artistry involved.

THE TALE is titled,
Affair,” which at once
of melodrama—it soun
film. The first parag
expectations | thus rai
tomary Time render
dialogue at thou,
happened I “ this (3

“The Strauss
gives it an air
s like a cheap
h fulfills the
Slt is a cus-
of scene and

pes the _ Sony

Mi Gece ans

velopment; that July 25, 1898 (the
date of United States occupation of
Puerto Rico) was the branch; and
that July 25, 1952 (the date the
Law 600 was passed ) was the flower.
Frendés stopped the process there, but
an anonymous friend completed it
for him: the fruit — statehood —
will come from the flower.

vant, In melodrama what matters is ‘
the immediate and vivid creation of ey
scene, character and dialogue: + Re

Along a dim corridor outside the oa
U.S. Senate chamber one evening on
strode a big, round-shouldered man
with a conspicuous smile curling on
lips that more often turn soberly
downward. New Mexico’s Democratic
Senator Clinton P. Anderson was ob-
viously happy with his thoughts.
Spotting Anderson alone in the cor-
ridor, a newsman hurried up, asked
a question heard constantly through-
out Washington: “Will he make it?”
Anderson paused, drew from his in-
side coat pocket a wellworn tally
sheet, heavily marked with circles
and underlines in blue ink. The smile
tugged harder at the corners of his
mouth. “I’m not worried anymore,”
said Clinton Anderson. “There will
be enough votes.”

I hardly need call attention to the
melodramatic nature of the scene
here described. Note, however, that
in the “dim corridor” we are pre-
sented with a character, the antago-
nist in this drama, described in such
a way as to identify him subtly as
the villain. It is done not so much
by the physical description, which
is important chiefly to bring the fic-
tional character to life. Rather, the
style itself—specifically, a contrast
in dramatic momentum—identifies
Anderson as the villain, The third —
sentence, beginning with “spotting,”
builds up tension not only by the :
breathless question which climaxes it
(made more dramatic by the unid i-
tified “he” and “it”), but also | by
the speed of the ene arting
with | a dramatic verb (su
a hurried, tracking el

Stal

Ta Ta Oe eh ry a iaalaa

“asked.” We feel, in the movement
of the sentence, all the tension be-
hind the reporter’s haste and_ his
question. But here speed stops, and
with the change in stylistic momen-
tum, Anderson’s villainy begins. By
the deliberation of his actions (plus
the suggestions of unholy machina-
tions in the “heavily marked” tally
sheet) we see that Anderson relishes
his position as the self-appointed de-
stroyer of Strauss’s hopes. His vil-
lainy is made even blacker when we
read into the second paragraph,
where 7ime endeavors to make us
see Strauss as the protagonist (with
whom we partly identify ourselves),
and where the attempt to prevent
his confirmation is described thus:

.. with the U.S. already the loser
in one of the biggest, bitterest, and
in many ways most unseemly confir-
mation fights in Senate history.

So, if Strauss’s confirmation is as
vital as the breathless description of
the “newsman” would indicate, and
if our country is “already the loser”
because of Anderson’s efforts, what
are we to think of a man who takes
such obvious delight in_ blighting
Strauss’s career? Without directly
stating it, Time nevertheless makes
the point in its style.

BY the time we have read the third
paragraph, in which the opposition
to Strauss is defined as the result of
a “blood feud” between him and
Anderson, necessitated by the “chem-
istry of personality” and the “con-
flict of ideas”—this second cause of

Cy eon

es = f

conflict is never seriously considered
in the article—we are aware not only
of melodrama; we should see that
this is going to be a battle of char-
acter. Zime has several fictional
modes in stock, ranging from the
grandiose “moodpiece” to the Pete
Smith Special, or heavily ironic
comic interlude, but the issue of per-
sonality is nearly always raised.
Why? One reason is that propaganda
makes its strongest appeal to emo-
tions, rather than to logic., Another
reason can be found in 7ime’s nat-
ural reluctance to handle intellectual
conflicts, particularly when, as in
this case, such an exploration would
raise issues repugnant to its editors
(like nuclear test suspension, fallout,
etc.). But the main reason for reduc-
ing news to the emotional conflicts
of personalities is that there lies the
true basis for raw fiction. (The rea-
son is very likely unconscious: Time
workers probably believe their fic-
tional, melodramatic view of the
world.) Not only must the personali-
ties in the news be made flesh and
blood; the issues in the news must
be made credible in the simplest emo-
tional terms. How many people can
appreciate the drama implicit in a
novel of ideas, as compared with the
number who require their drama in
direct emotional terms?

The same confluence of reasons ex-
plains the tone adopted for the
Strauss tale: it might be described
as “more in sorrow than in anger.”
Time cannot vilify Anderson very
obviously without mentioning some
of the policy conflicts involved, so it
must adopt a solemn, woeful aspect,
and quietly knife Anderson while
hiding all real issues behind a small
shower of tears. The tone, however,
is also a part of the over-all emo-
tional distortion, and is thus a posi-

lL
a

Faryrr

; i ns Fn < ee =i
tive aspect of the story as fiction,

It draws the reader in, makes him
participate emotionally in the story.

FOR dramatic purposes, Time also
likes to use affairs of state which al-
ready seem dramatic to the average
reader, and nothing nowadays is
more apt than the cold war. Time
and again, the old scenery is dragged
out of the Luce warehouse to per-
form much the same function as the
battle with Norway which hovers
over the action of Hamlet. It gives
the drama a tension it would not
have by itself. More than just a lit-
erary device, the cold war serves
the editors as the known body of
myths served the Greek dramatists:
the mention of any incident, any
place, any figure prominent in a
myth assures the writer of a predict-
able response. The cold war comes
into this tale when Strauss’s con-
nection with the production of the
hydrogen bomb and the proceedings
against Oppenheimer are mentioned.
(A picture of Oppenheimer bears
this caption: “Strauss fought him
and the U.S. won.” This, despite an
attempt, earlier in the story, to ab-
solve Strauss from taking the initia-
tive in this infamous case.) Strauss,
as a standard protagonist, appears
of course on the “right side.”

Although this is a_ character
“study,” it does not lack plot, or
rather, structure; the tale moves, not
in time, but spatially, It is not what
happens next that matters, but the
strategic placing of blocks of mate-
rial and attitudes. The first two and
a half paragraphs introduce the chief
characters and arouse certain feel-
ings toward them in the reader; the
next five and a half place the con-
firmation debate in a wider context,
defining the ethical background. Like
most literary artists, 7ime recognizes
the value of having some sort of
moral backdrop for its hero. And it
recognizes that, as in Greek tragedy,
the fate of the tragic hero is always
involved with the welfare of the
state. This widens the scope and im-
plicates all of us in what otherwise
would be merely a personal tragedy.
At the same time, it makes that
tragedy seem more profound.

The next thirteen paragraphs dra-
matize Strauss’s character: the first
two make the rather prosaic point

The Navion ]

ways, and the Milgwing

_ eleven attempt to explain this star-
tling enigma by means of a brief
biography or “puff,” loaded with
doses of Horatio Alger and the Pub-
lic Servant. At the same time, but
not in the body of the story, since
this would slow the pace, we are
given a boxed sketch of Anderson’s
career: it fills him out, gives him
enough substance to stand as an-
tagonist against the fully-developed
hero. Strauss’s biography completed,
the rest of the tale returns to the
present with the Strauss-Anderson
conflict and the confirmation hear-
ings, leaning heavily, as in the be-
ginning, on the “blood feud.”

ESSENTIALLY, then, the structure
is this: confrontation of characters;
presentation of moral issues; flash-
back to hero’s youth, coming up to
present (moral issues implicit here),
coincidental with sketch of antagon-
ist’s career; return to character con-
frontation with hero fighting bravely
but evidently perishing. The struc-
ture, as here outlined, suggests an-
other aspect of Time’s fiction: dra-
matic resolution. When the story was
_ written, Strauss’s fate had not yet
been decided, but Time does its best
with the material at hand, and what
is most important to its addicts,
gives at least the illusion of resolu-
tion. So, note the conclusion:
* But anyone who knew Lewis Strauss

or his record also knew that he cared
deeply about his confirmation. He

has served too long in public life and
; fought too hard for the things in
___ which he believes to take defeat eas-
ily. As the man who fought for the
_ H-bomb, Lewis Strauss deserves his
nation’s gratitude. And that debt
_ has been shabbily paid in the bicker-
_ ing, quibbling battle on Capitol Hill.
y

The simple, definite sentences, with
their measured pace of solemn gray-
_ ity, sum up the emotions which Time
has tried to arouse in its readers,
simultaneously with the expression
of the relief of those emotions, The
alloy of partisan propaganda pre-
_vents Time from taking the lofty
_tone of, say, Sophocles at the end of

press ee. eoiovary treet sl

Oedipus Rex, but the attempt to ex-

ree 8

rsi 5, is PSieious. It is
oe naval fier i it 1s Tess honestly,
never to be so resolved; it is a
measure of Time’s ability to turn
news into fiction that it is able every
week, reporting the endless flux of
events in time, to fix and order the
loose ends of daily life in such a satis-
fying manner. Only by art is life
made so dramatically coherent.

There remains an obvious ques-
tion: If people read Time because
they are indulging their taste for
fiction, why don’t they simply read
novels? Part of the explanation is
that the sort of people who like
Time’s fiction find less ' debased
forms of literature inadequate to
their needs. The chief complaint of
these people is that literature is un-
real, impractical, sissy stuff. One of
the principal virtues of Time fiction,
to their minds, is that it is not re-
mote from their lives. Taught in
school that literature consists main-
ly of flowery descriptions of impos-
sibly pure females and equally pure
and dull males, the typical Time
addict welcomes fiction which springs
from contemporary events.

But that does not quite answer
the question. To do so, we must ex-
amine a Time device not yet discuss-
ed: the constant use of irrelevant
detail. We are told the population of
the town near which Anderson’s
father had a farm, Anderson’s height
and weight, Dirksen’s middle name,
and so on. Just in itself, the cumu-
lative weight of details helps to make
the narrative credible. Some of the
earliest examples of this device in
English are to be found in Daniel
Defoe’s novels. Defoe wanted the
reader to accept Robinson Crusoe as
if it were fact, not fiction; so, among
other things, he filled his narrative
with irrelevant detail in order to give
the reader the sense of a sincere
presentation of the chaos of ordinary
life, without intervention by the
ordering force of art. Defoe was some-
thing of a Puritan, writing with a
strong sense of moral purpose, so
that while he was writing fiction, he
shared the Puritan dislike of imagi-
native literature as fr rolous, effete
and immoral, That, part, is why
his books are derived m_ historical
events, why he is so. ] to make
his narrative seem authentic; not

7 _just true to life, b ut tn eS

;

> ee ae
s the nature

edition « of Shakespeare or So heels

vasiveness ‘of the Poe jolt in
this country, especially in our litera-
ture, is well known. From the preface
to the Bay Psalm Book (our first
printed book, 1640) to Life edi-
torials on the novelist’s duty, middle-
class Americans have been peculiarly
distrustful of imaginative literature.
If they are going to read fiction, it
must be heavily didactic, “improv-
ing.” And it must be in close touch
with contemporary practical affairs,
if they are to avoid the guilty feel-
ing that they are wasting their time.
That is the main reason for irrele-
vant detail in Time. It appeals to
people because it fulfills their desire
for wildly fantastic, melodramatic
fiction, under the guise of morally
respectable news. It is permissible for
the addict to indulge in his weekly
fantasy, precisely because he doesn’t
see it as that; he thinks he’s improv-
ing himself, “keeping up with
things.” Much like the avid encyclo-
pedia reader, the Time addict un-
consciously reassures himself that his
indulgence is justified because the
magazine provides him with good,
solid, uplifting facts, like the infor-
mation that Strauss’s cattle farm
contains 1,560 acres.

AND that, precisely, is what is so
harmful about assuming that Time
is really what it says it is: con-
sciously we think of it as a mirror of
the world, of a reality external to
our inner imaginings; but what we
are really reading is the twentieth-
century Gothic novel. The usual
apology—‘“I just read it to keep up
with the news; I discount the bias”
—is illusory. America must cultivate
an alert, acute consciousness of it-
self and the world if it is to avoid
disasters of a magnitude that might
stun even the imaginative voice of
Time into silence. Good literature
admirably helps us in that endeavor;
bad literature only confuses us about
ourselves. But the fantastic fiction of
Time, far from increasing our in-—
sights into ourselves or anything else; i)
perpetuates a dreamlike unconscious- :
ness toward our whole world. If you —
like thrilling drama, take your sub-
scription money and buy a cheap

Duy

oe if you prefer not to

> m: oo ieakn stories. At least th
harmless. ia hes 5 Hi
Toy 2) i ; 57
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VIO RD ee ee cn
a ¥ Ls 7

AFTER THE TALKS, THE VISITS . . by Frederick Kuh

Geneva, August 6
THE WESTERN POWERS have
bought a truce for Berlin on the
installment plan. Britain’s Harold
Macmillan flew to Moscow last Feb-
ruary. As a result of his conversa-
tions with Nikita Khrushchev, the
Russians shelved their six-months’
ultimatum of last November de-
manding that the Allies pull out of
West Berlin. Then the Russians kept
their hands off the city before and
during the nine and a half weeks’
negotiations among the Foreign Min-
isters in Geneva—said to be the
longest Foreign Ministers’ conference
since the Congress of Vienna.

Now that the Geneva gathering
has dispersed, will the Russians
strike? The answer seems to be
“surely not.” They promised to stay
their hand during the negotiations, and
Gromyko has agreed that the nego-
tiations are not ended, only recessed.

Still more important, the Eisen-
hower-Khrushchey exchange visits
are pending, and it is almost un-
thinkable that Mr. Khrushchev would
torpedo his own fondest dream as it
nears fulfillment. Thus, starting with
Macmillan’s February mission, the
Allies seem to have gained a stand-
still on West Berlin of almost one
year’s duration. The West won this
tacit Soviet “concession” outside the
Geneva conference room. The price
was Mr. Eisenhower’s invitation to
Mr. Khrushchev. During the past year
or so the Soviet Premier has blown
hot and cold on a Big Four conference
at the Summit, but he never wavered
in his desire for bilateral talks with
Mr. Eisenhower. That is the ultimate
acknowledgment of Soviet power.

On balance, the USSR came out
best at Geneva. The conference’s most
important development was East Ger-
many’s gradual advance toward
wresting factual recognition from the
West. It began on the opening day
when the Russians succeeded in hav-
ing East Germany seated in the room
on a par with West Germany, and it
remains the single most important
event of the whole show.

While falling short of agreement,
the discussions improved the climate
of East-West relations. Throughout
the Geneva performance there was
none of the invective that character-

FREDERICK KUH is on the staff
of the Chicago Sun-Times.

mi
$

\ PR ee

ae ee eee ve

ized John Foster Dulles’ feuds with
Molotov and Vishinsky. Instead, a
long round of gastronomical diploma-
cy and samovar working teas con-
tributed to the atmosphere in which
the exchange of visits could be set.

For many weeks an agreement on
West Berlin was almost within reach,
and eluded the Big Four mainly ow-
ing to one issue. The West called for
a Soviet pledge to refrain from uni-
lateral action against West Berlin
even after a truce, say of two and a
half years. The Russians reserved
the right to strike after the morator-
ium. In short, the Geneva conference
failed because the Soviets refuse to
admit that the Allies have rights in
West Berlin and that these shall
continue unimpaired unless otherwise
mutually agreed.

PROBLEMS other than Berlin are
expected to feature in the Eisenhower-
Khrushchev talks:

1. Disarmament: Without public-
ity, the Foreign Ministers in Geneva
moved closer toward reopening dis-
cussions on arms limitation under
the United Nations umbrella. Those
talks were suspended nearly two
years ago when Russia refused to
continue as a minority of one in a
five-nation subcommittee. Mr. Eisen-
lower is likely to agree to improve
Russia’s ratio in a new forum. A
“surprise” communique, issued by the
ministers at Geneva after the for-
malities were thought concluded, re-
ferred to “further negotiations” on
disarmament in terms which, though
extremely guarded, nevertheless im-
ply that a basis for resumption of
talks is already being explored.

2. Nuclear Tests: The American-
British-Russian negotiations for a
treaty to suspend nuclear explosions
will soon enter their eleventh month,
and the talks have just about reached
the point at which only the heads
of government can make the essen-
tial decisions. The crucial question is
how many veto-free inspections per
year shall be made on the territory
of any nuclear power.

Also, Russia has refused to reopen
the discussion of seismic data, follow-
ing fresh information America sup-
plied after Jast autumn’s Nevada test
explosions. Unless the Soviets drop
that refusal the treaty cannot cover
detection of underground bursts. Only
Khrushchev can decide.

4% 4

Pde Wye

-If he stands by his “No,” Presi-
dent Eisenhower may still propose a
partial treaty, banning nuclear explo-
sions forever in all environments ex-
cept underground, and providing for
a certain number of veto-free inspec-
tions during a limited period. That
would allow the three atomic powers
to acquire confidence in one another.
On almost all other articles of the
proposed treaty the three are either
agreed or in sight of agreement.

3. American-Soviet Relations:
Even before First Deputy Premier
Anastas Mikoyan came to Washing-
ton last January, the Russians made
clear they had bigger fish to fry than
the Berlin sardine. They are eager
for large American credits. They hope
to ease suspicions so that they can
divert resources from their military
establishment to their vast economic
expansion plans. And it will be surpris-
ing if the Middle and Far East, in-
cluding China, do not enter the Eisen-
hower-Khrushchev conversations.

After the Foreign Ministers left
Geneva, some French and West Ger-
man diplomats put their heads to-
gether and produced this intriguing
theory to account for the President’s
assent to exchange visits with Khrush-
chev: Macmillan’s February mission
to Moscow evoked a belief that the
British Prime Minister was assum-
ing Western leadership in dealing
with Russia and would exercise that
primacy at a Big Four Summit meet-
ing. Throughout the Geneva con-
ference, British Foreign Secretary
Selwyn Lloyd rekindled the impres-
sion that at a heads of government
gathering Britain might play first
fiddle. Objections to an Eisenhower-
Khrushchev twosome were thereupon
withdrawn by the French and West
Germans, who distrust what they
consider British softness.

Why did success slip through the
fingers of the Foreign Ministers? When
the second round began on July 13,
the American and Soviet govern-
ments already knew that the ex-
change of Eisenhower-Khrushchey
visits was in the making. It seems
probable that they thought to them-
selves, “Why should we patch up
a makeshift accord in Geneva when
cur chiefs are about to throw major
world issues into the hopper?” The
big plus of the Washington-Moscow
twosome may thus have caused the
minus of the Geneva foursome,

Cigarettes, Cancer and the Campus. . 5y David Cor

THE present moment in cancer re-
search yields a certain amount of
material that the layman can grasp,
but it is hard to find. Despite recent
cover stories on cancer in Newsweek

(June 22)/and Time (Jul , the

big news’ on cancer Was 2
dispatch that British mice had failed

to get lung cancer after five years
of inhaling cigarette smoke. This was
reprinted “in the public interest” by
the Tobacco Institute, at small cost
when compared to the paid propa-
ganda of the cigarette companies.

As for this great victory of the
mice, the dean of English canger re-
searchers, the late Sir Ernest Ken-
naway, said in 1957, “Negative re-
sults of smoke inhalation experiments
on rodents seem to me to be of no
significance, because the animals,
unlike smokers, keep their mouths
shut and pass the smoke over their
turbinates.” Mice, in short, don’t
really enjoy the cigarette habit. They
don’t pull the smoke luxuriantly into
the lungs after it has been heated
inside the cigarette, briefly, to about
3,000° F.

Newsweek’s story recounts the
“miracle of modern surgery” on lung
cancer, and miracle it is, except that
after the surgery most of the patients
are dead in two years, and 80 per
cent in five years. “It se@ms un-
likely,” writes a great surgeon, “that
further significant technical improve-
ments will be forthcoming, nor can
it be supposed that they will ma-
terially improve matters should they
come.” Newsweek’s handling of the
cigarette-cancer connection is the
familiar one of confusion by ver-
bosity.

Time’s story, much more thorough-
ly researched, nevertheless repeats
this technique, burying the first
mention of cigarettes under 650 lines.
It also introduces the Master Mole-
cule, the Secret of Life—a thrilling
new character, if true.

What is the cancer picture any-
way?

In 1957, 255,000 Americans died

DAVID CORT, formerly Time-Life
editor and author of The Big Pic-
ture and The Calm Man, is a fre-
quent contributor.

— August 15, 1959

from malignant neoplasis, i.e., cancer,
as against 197,000 in 1948. Of course
the total number of deaths also rose
in that decade (from 1,444,000 to
1,636,000) but even so the cancer
toll increased from 14 per cent to
16 per cent. Put in another way,
annual cancer deaths were up from
1.34 per thousand of the living to
1.50 per thousand (Time makes it
1.3). Yet as late as 1930, cancer was
considered under control at less than
one death per thousand, and not
provably on the increase except
among older people. Something has
been added since then,

Moreover, the present total figure
conceals a lot of changes. Mortality
has been reduced where the cancer
occurs in “accessible sites”—skin,
lip, tongue and mouth, bones, uter-
us. Breast cancer has remained about
the same; but there has been im-
provement in such inaccessible sites
as the esophagus in males and the
stomach and intestine in females,
Stomach and bladder cancer is gen-

erally on the decrease. Increases have
ES
Sead

come in pancreas, ki
rénal cancer and_ in leukemia. But
the massive incre 2M

cancer of the lung and_bronchus,—a

disease almost unknown fifty years.
ago, now.accounting for neap 13

per _cent_of all cancer deaths;~and

moving ug fast.

—-*

THE earlier idea that cancer might
be a “spontaneous” growth disease
has been abandoned; and hundreds
of cancer-causing agents, or carcino-
gens, have been isolated. Some of
these are 4-aminodiphenyl, asbestos,
benzidine, 2-napthylamine, certain
mineral oils, chimney soot, coal-tar,
radioactive materials, sodium arsen-
ite and cigarette smoke, all effective
in man.

A carcinogen evidently changes the
nature of the cells some time after
the host has been exposed, but can-
cer will not appear for some further
time up to’ twenty-five years. The
carcinogens are of .‘an immense
variety of chemical types and operate
by very different biochemical routes,
The question is whether they do not
all at some point bring about a
change that is chemically and geneti-

cally the same, leading to the wild,
untamable growth of the cancer.
After the change has taken place,
it does not seem to save the in-
dividual to avoid further exposure
to the carcinogen. By then the can-
cer, though not visible to the micro-
scope, is irreversible.

This mystery is at the agonizing
center of cancer research.

Can anything be done until it is
solved? Well, we can at least keep
carcinogens away from people; and
the primary one here is cigarette
smoke,

Various statistics on the percent-
age of heavy cigarette smokers in
total deaths from lung cancer put
it from 40 times to 60 times as
high as for non-smokers. Light ciga-
rette smokers and pipe and cigar
smokers (who do not inhale) fall
In all diseases except

eavy smokers are only

ar be
(lung cance
slightly worse off than non-smokers.

Don’t you begin to see a suspicious
connection between lung cancer and
cigarettes?
What ts smoking? Here we may

)quote Kennaway again:

The smoking of tobacco involves a
number of fundamental processes
which all give rise to products found
in the smoke. These are: (1) com-
bustion, producing oxides of carbon
and water; (2) thermal decomposi-
tion, occurring in or near the hot
zone and giving rise to a number of
produets which are either subse-
quently burnt or distilled away into
the mainstream smoke; (3) distilla-
tion, proceeding in close proximity
to the smouldering zone and giving
vapours that condense in cooler zones;
and (4) steam distillation, occurring
mainly during the suction period and
responsible for carrying quantities of
tobacco constituents and thermal de-
composition products into the smoke’
at a relatively low temperature. It.
therefore follows that many of. the,
more volatile constituents of the
original tobacco «re found in the
smoke and that, in addition, products
of combustion and thermal decompo- -
sition are present. With the latter
must be included subsequent reaction

ees TN a Ree te a

: products which originate from pri-
mary decompositions."

He appends a list of more than
. 110 elements and compounds found
in tobacco, and 150 found in tobacco
smoke, including ten proved carcin-
ogens.

The English are particularly in-
terested in lung cancer because it
kills two 55-year-old Englishmen out
of every 1,000 living, as against only
one American male of the same age
and slightly higher percentages for
the Danes, Swiss, Dutch and Ger-
mans. One clue to the difference may
be that the English throw away a
much shorter cigarette
mm., as against an American’s 33
mm. It has been proved that the:
higher the materials are heated, the |
more potent are the carcinogens that |
are ingested. Most of those in tobac- |
co are polycyclic hydrocarbons of |
aromatic type. Acetylene is a prod-_

uct of the eepossan, which | :
forms carcinogens: ta Rak tel
THE FACT that many doctors

smoke cigarettes has an effect on pop-
ular _opinion./ In recent interviews
" with men-on-the-street, one of them
answered, “I think all this lung can-

/ cer talk. is a lot of baloney. If it
was really true, you'd see a lot of
doctors quitting smoking, and this
I have not seen.” A doctor is not
immune to habit; and by no means
will all heavy smokers die of
cancer. Still, the profession ought
to set an example. Most young doc-
tors are said to have stopped
smoking. eae AE IES eh Et
f it 1s true that the lung carcino-
gens require about twenty-five years
to mature a cancer (and that is
the period of widespread cigarette
smoking), we may be on the thresh-
old of a still more formidable ex-
plosion of lung cancer. Some blood
strains seem to be relatively impervi
ous to cancer: this reflection is th
last recourse of resolute optimists,
Indeed, it is my own. Middle-age
smokers must now take their chance
on having some hereditary immunit
to lung cancer, or dying of some
thing else first. The young, however

eee ee

1“Some Possible Exogenous Factor
in the Causation of Lung Cancer” b
Kennaway and A. J. Lindsey. Publishe
in British Medical Bulletin, “Causatio
of Cancer,” May, 1958.

butt—23 |
and the American Cancer Society

nee AES Ly hae h

can still be free of such weary |
thoughts.

And so the rafiecee industry is
proud to report an increase in youth-
ful smokers, so that total U. S. con-
sumption of cigarettes is up 20 per
cent in five years, though many
adults have quit smoking. In view
of what has been given here, this
tactless brag is equivalent to an-
nouncing a war that will.kill off
more American men than World
War II did, and on the average

painfully.
{Somebody reacted properly to this
‘threat. In Jacksonville, Florida,

school principals, the medical society

combined to put on an anti-smoking
educational program in_ eighteen
high schools. The effect can be
judged by the pupils’ favorite ques-
tion: “How do I get my parents

_ to quit smoking?” Similar campaigns

will be put on next fall in the schools
of New York City and possibly some
other Southern cities. New York has
even asked the tobacco industry to
contribute its support.
| In Canada, a movement to ban
cone entirely was converted into
a more realistic campaign to require
cigarette advertising to state the tar
content of the cigarette (the tar
content of the hot smoke is more
important) instead of “conveying
the erroneous idea that filter tips
can protect the smoker against lung
cancer.”
| Where, then, would you expect the
cigarette companies to aim their
aviest barrage of advertising?
here else but at the colleges, since
nursery, grammar and high schools
are evidently out of bounds? And,
in fact, the main support of college
newspapers and magazines in Ameri-
ca is now, and has been for many
years, cigarette advertising.
Tareyton tells the colleges, “Hoo-
ray for college students! They’re
making new Dual Filter Tareyton
the big smoke on American cam-
puses! Are you part of this move-
ment? If so, thanks. If not, try ’em!”
(Do today’s college boys think in
xclamation points? )
Viceroy develops “Do You Think
For Yourself?” with a quiz, e.g., “Do
you believe that the expression
‘Every cloud has a silver lining’ is
(a pumy sentimentality? (b) opti-

| easy as pl....

Jicense? (c)
faulty meteorology?” and “In choos-
ing a filter cigarette, would you de-
pend (a) on the claims you read
and hear? (b) on satisfying your-
self that you’re getting the right
filtration and taste? (c) on the rec-
ommendations of your friends?” If
you answered (b) to both of these,
you think for yourself and “.. . usual-
ly smoke Viceroys.”

Winston shows dressed-up busts
‘of Napoleon and Archimedes. Thus:
“The mystery is solved! Napoleon’s
famous gesture was just to reassure
‘himself that he had plenty of cig-
arettes.” And of Archimedes: “You
can reproduce the experiment. It’s
Simply light your first
| Winston and smoke it... . Eureka!”
| And then, of course and inevitably,
| “Winston tastes good—like a cig-

Lucky Suicee runs
a contest for examples of ‘“Think-
lish.” In this game, Viking oarsmen
are Norsepower, dog pound is mut-
tropolis. Of “delegates to a jazz con-
vention,’ Lucky Strike deposes,
“the hepresentatives come from all
schools of jazz: hot, cool, and room
temperature. But they’re in perfect
harmony on one point: the honest
taste of a Lucky Strike. Get Luckies
yourself, - (You'll trumpet _ their
Se,

In a matter that concerns the
preservation of the race, such a nar-
rowly aimed advertising campaign,
for all its genial jokes and exclama-
tion points, can easily be regarded
as a frivolously treasonable con-
spiracy.

THE TOBACCO industry, despite
its sales figures, has actually been
frightened by the Jacksonville school
children. It had already tacitly ad-
mitted, with filter cigarettes, that
all was not well. The use of the dread
word, “tars,” in advertising narrow-
ed it down further. Now the propa-
ganda issued by the newly formed
Tobacco Institute may even mention
cancer.

Half a dozen new filter cigarettes
with beautiful, clean names will pres-
ently be on the market—Life and
Belair and Spring and Alpine. They
have caught the point that the heat
of the cigarette increases the car-
cinogens and so try to cripple the

We Na

ro N

draught with various filters, baffles,
dampers and porous papers.

Into this desperate arena has stroll-
ed a joker worthy of Hans Chris-
tian Andersen. Under the name of
Bantob, contracted from ban-tobac-
co, he has issued a cigarette called
Vanguard, tested in Dayton, Ohio
This solves the whole problem b
using something other than tobacco,

oy.

a heavily guarded mystery “natural | own with shredded wheat or corn

fiber.”
the retailer a gigantic profit.

that even burning hay undoubtedly
produces carcinogens, and that they
might be even more deadly than the
tobacco tars, It is to be hoped that

e citizenry will not try rolling their

The best part of the jest is |
that it pays no taxes and thus gives.

flakes.
Faced with a satirist of the caliber
of Bantob’s inventor society comes

Pe ona pity to have to point out{_to an end of the small jokes. The
next step is an imaginary cigarette.’

° There is on the market an “imagin-
ary cigarette,” consisting of a plastic
tube lightly flavored, which has found
favor with those who just like to suck.
The Editors.

THE USELESS WEAPON e « by Patrick Lort-Phillips

London
WHEN the West confronts the prob-
lem of defense, it displays a mode
of behavior that suggests to most of
us, as amateur psychologists, a mal-
ady known as obsessional neurosis.
The victim of this disorder is driven
to take certain actions to allay his
fears or anxieties; but since his ac-
tions alleviate symptoms only, with-
out removing the basic cause of his
fears, his relief is only temporary.
Thus he is compelled to repeat his
useless actions endlessly, and the
more useless they turn out to be,
the greater the compulsion to repeat
them.

So it is with nations in the West.
We seek security but can’t find it.
We therefore fall back on actions
which, in the past, once provided us
with security: we devise bigger and
better weapons, and multiply them
to the limit of our resources in an
orgy of make-believe. And security
remains as far off as ever. We have
become, in other words, obsessional
neurotics.

Now the truth is that nuclear
weapons cannot defend us. Our own
nuclear weapons will destroy the
enemy; they may destroy all man-
kind; but they cannot save us, be-
cause we ourselves are destroyed in
the process. Those who talk bravely
and glibly about fighting a nuclear
war should ponder on the evidence

LT.-COL. PATRICK LORT-PHIL-
LIPS, outspoken British soldier
who was several times decorated for
valor in World War II, is the author
of The Logic of Defense (Radical
Publications, London).

August 15, 1959

Piha sae tie ie

which General Gavin recently gave
before the Armed Services Commit-
tee of the U.S. Senate, and the fig-
ures of probable casualties put out by
the United States Civil Defense Ad-
ministration in the event of a U.S.-
Soviet nuclear exchange. Casualties of
the order of 100 million are to be ex-
pected in the first twenty-four hours.

This is not war. This is suicide. It
is no reflection on our courage and
resourcefulness that we cannot ac-
cept casualties of this order and still
carry on. Indeed, it is a measure of
our civilization and our humanity
that we instinctively recoil from
them.

Nuclear war is not a rational act.
It may be thrust upon us, but we
can never invoke it. If it comes,
there is neither victory nor even
survival; there is only disaster.
Against an enemy armed with nu-
clear weapons, and determined to
use them, we can no longer defend
ourselves in the proper sense of the
word “defend.” And this is a new,
painful and_ utterly bewildering
situation, for which there is no prece-
dent in history.

IF DEFENSE is impossible, what
about deterrence? Nuclear deter-
rence is a gigantic form of bluff.
It is a game of poker in which the
object is to persuade your opponent
to believe the unbelievable—that in
certain circumstances you will com-
mit suicide rather than submit. It
is essentially unbelievable because
most of us work on the principle
that “while there’s life, there’s hope.”

The credibility of the nuclear de-
terrent today is very thin indeed. In

r.
‘

our obsessional state of mind, we
are apt to forget that any threat
must be credible if it is to be effec-
tive. So often one hears it said: “Of
course, we have no intention of using
these weapons, but we must have
them in order to threaten the ene-
my.”

But if we have no intention
of using them, there is no real threat,
and no one will be frightened by
our threatening postures. The credi-
bility of our threat depends entirely
on the enemy’s calculations of the
circumstances in which we would of
a certainty use our nuclear weapons.
This underlines the importance to
us of knowing our own mind. We
must know and fully understand just
when we are to press that fatal but-
ton. If the answer is “Never,” then
we might as well dismantle the whole
apparatus of nuclear deterrence. If
we bluff, knowing that we cannot
play the cards in our hand, then
one day our bluff will be called—with
fatal results.

A good poker player might still
get away with playing the hand if the
players were evenly matched, But
they are not. Nuclear deterrence is
a form of blackmail, and not all na-
tions are equally adept at the art.
Blackmail is essentially the weapon
of the unscrupulous, The Hitlers of
this world are not easily deterred—
nor were the Kamikaze pilots of
Japan, as many a Navy man will
remember to this day. Such people
are prepared to go down in a blaze
of glory, dragging civilization with
them. We are not. The nuclear de-
terrent, so far from deterring all
alike, places a positive and over-

whelming advantage in the hands of
the irresponsible, the unscrupulous
and the insane.

But even this is not the full story.
The deterrent is fatally limited in
its application, even when the deter-
mination to use it exists. Nuclear
war is the end: the end of us, the
end of Russia, perhaps the end of
mankind. We cannot therefore use
the H-bomb till the end, when all
is already lost and there is nothing
more to lose. We cannot use it to
bolster up lesser ends. We could not
use it to save Hungary; we cannot
use it to save West Berlin. We can-
not, and this is the crux of the mat-
ter, use it to save anyone or any-
thing. All we can do is to avenge
ourselves after we are dead.

This being so, we cannot use it
as an aid to diplomacy, either to
frighten Russia or to reassure our
friends, President Eisenhower has
threatened to use the deterrent if
West Berlin is overrun by the
Russians. Nobody will doubt the
honor and integrity of the President;
but how many Americans have
stopped to think of the consequences
of that threat: thirty to forty mil-
lion Americans burnt to death that
selfsame day, and at least as many
Russians. Berlin, of course, will not
have been saved, but perhaps that
is beside the point. It needs a cool
gambler to play for these stakes.
And it is not a case of just one
bluff. The game may have to go
on for decades. Can it possibly do
so? I doubt it.

THE H-BOMB, I repeat, is not a
gambit to be used in the council
chamber; it is not a garment with
which to clothe a naked and self-
conscious foreign minister. We can,
perhaps, threaten our small and in-
offensive neighbors, provided always
they are not clients of Moscow, but
this form of diplomacy has little
appeal to a civilized nation.

There is one thing, and one thing
alone, which the nuclear deterrent
will do. It will deter two reasonably
civilized powers from waging total
nuclear war against each other. This
is the Balance of Impotence. The
two will be deterred from waging

_ total nuclear war, but from nothing

else. In all other spheres of action
theig freedom is unimpaired,

It is to try to overcome this Bal-
ance of Impotence that the West has
turned its attention to the possibili-
ties of tactical nuclear weapons, and
the theory of the graduated deter-
rent. The assumptions of this theory
are that since (1) nobody can win in
an all-out nuclear war and (2) we
cannot compete against Russia with
conventional weapons, because our
people are not prepared to make the
necessary sacrifices, therefore (3) we
should arm ourselves with tactical
nuclear weapons so that we may
redress our supposed numerical in-
feriority by means of our supposed
technical superiority. Unhappily, the
climactic assumption is false. We
have no significant superiority over
the Russians in military technology.
Tactical nuclear weapons can no
more restore the balance of power
in our favor than can strategic nu-
clear weapons. The Russians can
match us at any point on the escala-

tor. eel

, <i bahay
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9,4 y 8 ‘ a ~~ »"¥Z
sh A “ery oan & J oe er al

Drawing by Valdemar Nissen

It is said that the West cannot
defeat Russia without tactical nu-
clear weapons. This is no doubt true.
But it is equally true that the West
cannot defeat Russia with them. We
cannot defeat Russians with any
weapons, if by “defeat” we mean
gaining a victory that can be ra-
tionally exploited.

The decision taken in 1954 to base
NATO planning on the adoption of
tactical nuclear weapons was ex-
pressly designed to make up for the
West’s lack of manpower by addi-
tional fire power. But the trouble
with NATO planning is that the
High Command cannot make up
their minds what sort of war they
are planning to fight.

The British Defense White Paper
of 1958 states categorically that the
purpose of the Allied Forces in Eu-
rope is to “hold a front until the
strategic nuclear bombardment takes
effect.” This makes no sense at all,
because in any nuclear exchange on

The Navion

British eeoipona of the Allied
Forces would hardly have much
stomach for the fight. Nor, for that
matter, would anyone else. As an
adjunct to strategic nuclear war,
NATO is quite useless.

The school of thought advocated
by Henry A. Kissinger in Nuclear
Weapons and Foreign Policy (Har-
per’s) holds that the NATO forces
should be armed with tactical nu-
clear weapons so that they can fight
and win a limited war in Europe.
Mr. Kissinger maintains that the
NATO forces, even though smaller
than Russia’s, could do this success-
fully because there is an “inherent
upper limit” to the size of armies
which can be deployed on a nuclear
battlefield.

But, in fact, this concept of a limited
battlefield effectively presents game,
set and match to Russia. Under such
conditions, the Soviet Union could
make a limited advance into Ger-
many with a minimum of manpower
and a maximum of tactical nuclear
weapons, and from this advanced
position grind Western Europe into
atomic dust in the guise of limited
tactical operations. NATO’s own
tactical weapons would help to com-
plete the process, and any stray long
shots would destroy Poland. The So-
viet Union herself would remain un-
scathed, and the decision to enlarge
the war into a full-scale thermonu-
clear exchange would be placed firm-
ly on Western shoulders. The fallacy
behind this strategy lies in the be-
lief that to win a war with nuclear
weapons, it is necessary to invade
and occupy a country. Elimination
is cheaper and more effective than
occupation.

A rather wistful point of view is
put forward by Lincoln Gordon of
Harvard University, writing in the
current Yale Review. He believes
that the NATO shield forces should
be capable of destroying, with nu-
clear arms, a maximum Soviet at-
tack which does not employ nuclear
weapons. Why the Soviets should
launch a maximum, or any other, at-
tack against the West without nu-
clear weapons, simply in order to al-
_ low the West to have an advantage
in repelling them, is not explai

Why should Russia launch a or

y attac Regaine iit,

Bree he

es
out a clear-cut objecti te and wie
out having made every reasonable
preparation for success? Are we to
assume that the Russian High Com-
mand is composed of simpletons or
lunatics?

A MAJOR war between Russia and
the West no longer makes sense.
Total war is too deadly to be waged,
and the question which remains is
whether a limited war between them
is a rational possibility. Is it reason-
able to hope that by means of some
self-denying ordinance, or some set
of phony rules, either side can hope
for a satisfactory result from some
lesser combat? I do not think so.
The graduated deterrent does not
deter; only the ultimate deterrent
can do that. The theory of the
graduated deterrent is based on the
assumption that the would-be ag-
gressor will play the game according
to a carefully graduated set of rules
which are designed to favor the de-
fender. It assumes that the Russians
will always deploy fewer forces and
lighter weapons in an act of aggres-
sion than the West can bring to bear
in defense. But this is absurd.

Russia outnumbers the West in
military manpower (not, be it noted,
in potential manpower, but in man-
power actually serving in the armed
forces). It is at least the equal of the
West in nuclear and military tech-
nology. It has the advantage of in-
terior lines, and can concentrate a
greater military force, more quickly,
at any point on its periphery than
the West can possibly counter. If
the Soviet Union wishes to attack
its neighbors, it can choose the time,
the place and the weapons, and can
deploy sufficient forces to achieve
the objective.

Ts it conceivable that Russia would
undertake any act of aggression with-

out making full use of these advan-

tages? I cannot believe it. The West
cannot prevent a surprise act of ag-
gression by the Soviet Union. All we
have the power to do is to turn a
limited war into a total war. This is
our trump card. Yet this card —
the ring of strategic nuclear bases
by which Russia is sui irrounded, and
which renders Rt 's quest for
nuclear security a pty as ours —

can never be + ely d without invok-

ing our own ruin. In ie past, we

} . mY sg
ey

Varia a cme oe a ae Ma a

could lose the first battle and still
go on to win the war. Today, if we
lose the first battle, we can only go
on to pull down the pillars of the
Temple on our heads.

THIS IS the reason why NATO
strategy today is so utterly inade-
quate. The idea of the sword and the
shield is good in theory; but the two
are essentially complementary, and
circumstances have now divorced
them. The shield is not strong enough
on its own to provide safety, and the oe
sword is frozen in its scabbard by

the nemesis which it holds for its f
user. ‘ae
There is no military solution to
the problem. This is the paradox of “
the H-bomb. For thousands of years, Wy

men have striven to perfect their
weapons, hoping to find security in es
ultimate military strength. Now the
perfect weapon has been found, and
it is useless. Man only wants to aa
destroy his enemy: he has no wish ~ f
to destroy himself at the same time. me 8
But this is the price of the perfect ‘
weapon. There is no way out of the
impasse by pressing on. More weap-
ons can, of course, still be made, but
they will serve little purpose. With
nuclear weapons, enough is | s good >
as a feast. J
War must have a rational objec-
tive if it is to be useful, Even to t
survive is a rational objective. But i
with nuclear war there is no rational aby
objective, for no one survives; Thus
total war, in which unlimited. force
is used to secure unconditional sur-
render, has been rendered obsolete.
If the use of the force is to be ra-
tional, the objectives themselve
must be limited and rational. To say.
this is not to imply that nations will —
in fact act rationally. We cannot
guarantee that another Hitler may
not arise; but if he does, and if he
secures nuclear weapons, then no
amount of force on our part will
save us. This particular consideration
underlines the importance of stop- |
ping the spread of nuclear weapons.
Any nation, armed with nucle
weapons, and under unscrupulous
leadership, can now destro:
world, and there is nd thiegi wi
do Mechit 3 it by force of arms. Thi
where we have to start in
afresh. “eh

ws me + an |e aia per re ae
f K G) : 5: ee ' a ee ee oe
BOO and the

Man: the Virtuous Animal

A HISTORY OF WESTERN MORALS.
om By Crane Brinton. Harcourt, Brace
A & Co., 502 pp. $7.50.

Hans Meyerhoff

ip WHEN you set out to write A History
of Western Morals, the most difficult
problem you are up against is that of
accommodating the enormous, practical-

ly unlimited, amount of pertinent mate-

, rial. The job can be done only by mak-

Rn ing a careful selection of data and by
M adopting an explicit frame of reference.
a Mr. Brinton has solved this problem

admirably. He is a superb craftsman in
the history of ideas, with an astonish-
ing mastery over his material and an
enviable skill at presenting it. Reading
his study I asked myself repeatedly: how
; is it possible to pack so much—a survey
7 of Western morals from the ancient
Egyptians to our Russian contempo-
(eae raries—into so little, a single volume of
500 pages? Moreover, both organization
and interpretation of this vast material
are graced by a literary style so elegant,
urbane and enjoyable that the reader
may wrongly conclude that the book
caused the author no trouble at all.
i Two major concepts bring order into
this far-flung, enterprise. The first is
the concept of a moral ideal. The record
shows a great) variety of moral ideals
r “of what men have held up as the
admirable human being” in _ history.
Here is a partial list of the ideal moral
types developed in the Western world:
the ideal of the Homeric hero, say,
Achilles; the ideal of the Periclean age;
the Stoic (moral) hero, the Hebrew
prophet, the Christian saint, the medi-
eval knight; the ideal types of the
Renaissance, the French Empire, the
Puritan Revolution; the moral ideal of
the English gentleman, the French

romantic ideal; the moral ideals of sci-
ence and usinéas: and, lastly, the ideal
_ man of the new Siviet society. Thus,
In one respect, this history of morals
i a series of ideal portraits of moral
- excellence, and their variations, in the
_ Western world.

raid

‘HANS MEYERHOFF is the author of
Time and Literature and the editor of
qT - Philosophy of History in Our Time.

Phil ey at the University of Cali-

_ philosophie, the Prussian Junker; the —

He is a member of the Department of

The other unifying concept is conflict.
Mr. Brinton uses the Greek term agon
to designate a class of phenomena—
from warfare, economic competition and
the class struggle to the battle of the
sexes, gamesmanship, and status-seeking
—for which the words “conflict” or
“contest” are perhaps the closest Eng-
lish equivalents. In short, he holds with
Heraclitus that conflict (polemos)
the father of all things, at least of things
human. “Western man is the eternal
contestant, and there are never prizes
enough; but the nature of the contest,
its goals and its prizes, the relative
number of those who may participate in
it, even its rules, vary greatly—or we
should have no history of morals, or his-
tory of any kind.” Thus, in another
respect, this history of morals is-a
ecord of the rules by which this game,
the moral agon, has been played at dif-
ferent times, in different societies, and by
different groups in the Western world.

What does one learn from the game?
Mr. Brinton is too modest, I think, or
perhaps too circumspect, in claiming to
write a “conclusion in which nothing is
concluded.” Both this chapter and the
penultimate chapter called “The Prob-
lem of Moral Progress” present a sub-
stantial summary of findings. These
findings should be of great interest to
readers, including professional philoso-
phers and theologians, who tend to think
(wrongly, I believe) that their under-
standing of the nature, function and
meaning of morality in human life
soundest when they pay no attention
to the historical evidence. Following Mr.
Brinton’s lead—and at the risk of get-
ting lost in blind alleys where he would
not follow—lI shall set forth, briefly and
dogmatically, a few summary reflections,
partly his, partly my own, that may be
significant or provocative or both.

IN THE beginning is the cliché. “The
cliché is unavoidable,” says Mr. Brinton.
“The record shows no moral progress
comparable to our material progress.”
There is no moral progress in two senses:
(1) There is no evidence that the actual
conduct of human beings has improved,
i.c., has come closer “to the ethical
ideals” they profess. (2) There is no
evidence that the moral ideals them-
selves have improved - since the dawn
of conscience.

Strictly mye the varieties of ideal
a

7 Mr q
ra?

i a | The eae pie, being oer,

ites hs

types of moral conduct are incommen-
surable one with another. They cannot
be compared or evaluated on moral
grounds. There seems to be no adequate
moral criterion for preferring, say, the

Stoic hero to the Christian knight or —

the enlightened hedonist to the virtuous
Puritan. In their exemplary, “ideal”
form, all types seem to be equally hu-
man and equally “admirable,” i.e., de-
serving of (qualified) praise as models
for the good life. In their defective,
degenerate forms, all types, again, are
equally human and equally “bad.”
Thus the reasons why a certain ideal
type gains dominance at a certain time
and place are not moral. The question
why medieval courtly love or romantic
passionate love becomes an ideal moral
type in Western culture cannot be ex-
plained in terms of the intrinsic: (moral)
superiority of one type over another. To
the extent to which we understand these
historical changes at all, we must in-
voke extrinsic, non-moral facts of life,
e.g., biological, psychological, economic,
or sociological facts. This does not mean
that morality is sociology, or that it is
“nothing but” an ideological superstruc-
ture or introjected superego. Moral sys-
tems, as Mr. Brinton rightly insists, are
autonomous; they have their own logic
and consequences; but it is not the in-
herent logic, nor the intrinsic worth, of
a moral ideal that propels it into prom-
inence at a certain time and place so

that it commands general acceptance. -

Its emergence seems to depend upon its
function in a specific cultural situation.
There are always a number of ideal
moral systems to choose from. Which
one is chosen depends upon the social
and human realities in the world.

IN this sense, it is difficult to avoid
some kind of historical relativism, even
though Mr. Brinton points out that
“the most striking constant in the his-
tory of Western ethical ideals is the
general reprobation that intellectuals,
men of affairs, and the many alike give
to all extreme forms of ethical rela-
tivism.” At any rate, the historical rec-
ord suggests strongly, if not convincing-
ly, that the philosopher’s quest for the
moral ideal, the one and only blueprint
for the good life, is a delusion or an
expression of intellectual hubris.

The moral conduct of man spans a
wide spectrum; but it is possible to dis-
tinguish, as Mr, Brinton does, roughly
three positions on this moral spectrum.

eS AM ie Nat TION

coi

pies the middle—or the Aristotelian
mean. He avoids both extremes. He is,
as Mencken complained, neither par-
ticularly good nor particularly bad. (2)
The moral hero, or saint, approximates
the extreme of the moral ideal. (3) The
moral radical chooses the opposite ex-
treme. He may become, or be called, a
criminal.

There is no human life (not even
criminal life) without morality—with-
out a definite set of rules, both moral
and legal, according to which the game
is played. Morality has usually, but not
always, been associated with religious
sanctions. Even when it is divorced
from religious beliefs, morality invari-
ably reflects, and is conditioned by,
what Mr. Brinton reluctantly calls a
world view, i.e., a Weltanschauung or
a general, non-technical philosophy of
life. Religious beliefs do not seem to
make any essential difference in moral
conduct. The good and the bad are dis-
tributed equally among believers and
non-believers. Christianity poses a spe-
cial problem in the Western world be-
cause, in theory, it has always sub-
scribed to the moral ideal of the Sermon
on the Mount; in practice—with the
exception of some monastic or sectarian
movyements—it has always subscribed to
the double, yes, multiple standards of
the ideal type that have been dominant
in Western culture and to which the
Church, as the institutional guardian of
the ethics of Jesus, has shown remark-
able powers of accommodation.

Morality is practical. As some recent
philosophers would say, the moral
language and rules we use have a job
to do. The historical record seems to
suggest, if not prove, that the primary
function of morality in human life has
been what we tend to call inhibitory
or repressive. The materials of morals
are human emotions—more specifically,
love and hate. All the so-called virtues
which, according to Mr. Brinton, have
remained relatively constant throughout
history prescribe conduct that is called
“moral” because it controls, regulates,
tames and disciplines the expression of
emotions in action. In fact, discipline
and self-control have themselves become
primary virtues. The seven deadly sins
are various modes of yielding to the emo-
tions in the raw. There is a kind of

military flavor about moral virtues—

except such virtues as charity, com-
passion, sympathy, friendship and lovy-
ing-kindness. Even these virtues, how-
ever, especially in their ideal (or Chris-
tian) sense, require the taming and
transforming of natural impulses. Turn-
ing the other cheek is impossible with-
out an almost unbelievable self-control.

August 15, 1959

Morality, however, is natural as well
as artificial. It is artificial in the sense
that we are not born with it and that
there is no single “natural” ideal sys-
tem of ethics—except for the true be-
liever. Morality is natural in the sense
that there are no human beings without
it. We would not call a person “human”
unless he developed this capacity, at
least to a minimum degree.

MR. BRINTON distinguishes two polar
movements in the history of morals. One
movement is “between periods, groups
—and perhaps whole societies—of great
moral laxity and those of great moral
strictness.” Human conduct seems to
swing from an excessive emphasis upon
the repressive and ascetic aspects of
morality to a violent and, perhaps, ex-
cessive revolt against this extreme, and
abuse, of morality. The second polarity
is between moral conservatism and lib-
eralism. A moral conservative is a per-
son who tends to believe (1) that, given
the unruly, rebellious nature of man,
there cannot be enough safeguards to
tame, discipline and quiet him down;
and (2) that any departure from the
accepted norm, from “conformism to
established ways,” must be a change for
the worse. The moral liberal is a person
who tends to believe (1) that, change
being the supreme law in the nature of
things, including human beliefs and
institutions, every accepted norm de-
serves to be overthrown, or replaced;
and (2) that the defense of the status
quo for its own sake is a sign of moral
deterioration—or plain injustice.

This polar movement, I think, might
be expanded or expressed differently.
There are those who believe—whether
in the name of common sense, philos-
ophy, or theology—that morality, in
order to provide true and lasting se-
curity, must be a permanently fixed
and closed system; or, at least, that
the basic principles of morality must
be unchanging and absolute. There are
others who believe that this type of
moral absolutism is, at best, an article
of faith; at worst, a disguised prejudice,
and that morality cannot be anything
but an open, tentative system reflect-
ing a permanently unfinished human
enterprise. Freedom, and risk, would
then be metaphysical categories super-
seding one’s commitment to any given
moral system.

Again, there is this difference: there
are those who claim that morality, in
order to be effective, must be imposed
and sanctioned by a will or Being be-
yond man. It may be God’s will or the
will of the Church as expressed in an
encyclical; it may be Rousseau’s general

will or the will of the constitution. In
each case, the authority and justifica-
tion of morality derive from something
beyond man’s own will; and the indi-
vidual is expected to submit to this
higher authority or superior source of
knowledge. There are others who feel
that a morality so imposed (and ac-
cepted) is incompatible with human
dignity, and that man 1s free only to
the extent to which he obeys rules that
are self-imposed.

FINALLY, there is a puzzle that may
have a special bearing upon our own
situation and, possibly, upon the future.
It is not enough to say that morality
serves to curb the old Adam in man
in order to make him human; for being-
human is an ambiguous phrase and load-
ed with moral commitments. The ques-
tion is not whether morality is repres-
sive or not. It always is—even for the
Nietzschean immoralist. The question
is, repressive for what? It makes a great
deal of difference whether we look upon
religion, as Mr. Brinton seems to do,
primarily as a “sedative,” i.e., whether
we consider it an indispensable means,
possibly a necessary evil, for consoling
and reassuring people, for enabling them
to survive and endure in the worst pos-
sible world; or whether we demand
something more than this spirit of resig-
nation and submission. The traditional
moral virtues have not only a military
flavor, but also a distinctly gloomy and
drab quality, aesthetically most unat-
tractive, which may be the reason why
they did not appeal to periods and
groups with a taste for beauty and for
the enjoyment of life. The question is
whether this must always be the case,
whether it is utopian and illusory to
think—a typical case of the foolish cult
of the “Fully Enlightened,” as Mr.
Brinton scornfully calls the heirs of
Voltaire—that there may come a time
and a future race of men who would
feel free to live, and enjoy life, without
religious tranquilizers and who would
also feel that morality makes sense only
if it be a means for liberating human
powers hitherto gone to waste and for
making possible an enjoyment of life
heretofore the prerogative of the happy
few who did not take the official
morality too seriously.

But these speculations have far out-
run the course of a conventional review.
In fact, I have violated the rules of the
game by raising issues which the reader
must find puzzling without a knowledge
of A History of Western Morals. ¥f so,
perhaps he will read the book itself;
which would be his reward, and my ex-
cuse, for following an irregular procedure.

;

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Ba es or ge cementite

Common Sense Without Pity

THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN
PAVILION. By Yukio Mishima.
Introduction by Nancy Wilson Ross.
Alfred A. Knopf. 262 pp. $4.

ZEN AND JAPANESE. CULTURE.

By Daisetz T. Suzuki. Bollingen
Books. 477 pp- $8.50.
JAPAN: ANCIENT — BUDDHIST

PAINTINGS. UNESCO World Art

Series. New York Graphic Society.
$18.
BEAT ZEN, SQUARE ZEN, &

ZEN. By Alan W. Watts. City Lights
Books. San Francisco. 32 pp. 75c.

Lincoln Kirstein

IT IS RARE to find a single book
that needs only to be noticed rather
than reviewed; here are four. It is
enough to say: get these books, read
them, look at the pictures. Not that
those competent to estimate fiction,
painting or philosophy may not judge,
but here the criticism is finally more a
judge of the critic than of the object.
However, the best of books don’t sell
themselves with sufficient immediacy;
here are a few reasons why you might
want these four.

To begin with the most immediate:
Yukio Mishima is the best Japanese
novelist since Junichiro Tanizaki. His
story, here over-lengthily entitled Thz
Temple of the Golden Pavilion, (Kin-
kaku-ji, the site-name, would have been
ample), is the best novel from Japan
since Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters,
that other great portrait in depth of
contemporary life. But Tanizaki’s
chronicle, granting its inexhaustible ob-
servation of family fabric, never raises
itself to the grandeur of myth. It spells
truth; it admits us to homes we could
never otherwise penetrate. Having read
it, no upper or lower-middle-class Ja-
panese person sitting opposite us on
train or tram can ever be wholly un-
familiar. This is Tanizaki’s power and
limit. His universe is the strictly Ja-
panese archipelago of middle-class life.

Mishima is more. His subject, too, is
first of all Japan — in a climate at
once profoundly traditional and entirely
contemporary. Mishima knows New
York well, and Athens, Mexico, Paris
and Asia. He is the youthful peer of
Gide and Genet. But also, his story
is a supranational essay in psychology
and metaphysics, set in the atmosphere
of one of the world’s influential re-

LINCOLN KIRSTEIN brought the
musicians and dancers of the Japanese
Imperial Household to New York in
May- -June, 1959, i

ligious systems. It contains a series of
portraits and situations that construct
a roaring narrative. Not since Malraux’s
La Condition Humaine has there been
a translation from history into such
legendary permanence.

Ostensibly, it is the story of “a sense-
less act.” Lovers of Japanese architec-
ture, indeed of art in general, were
scandalized when, in 1950, a young
acolyte of one of the three Zen temples
in Kyoto, burned the Golden Pavilion,
first built in 1394, but thereafter re-
peatedly consumed by fires and rebuilt.
It became a national crime, comparable
to the Loeb-Leopold case. Why did he
do it? He must have been Mad. He is
mad, although still alive in some clean
asylum. However, after the novel ap-
peared, the authorities must have been
hard put to keep him there, unless he is
a progressive schizoid, a supposition
for which there is no evidence in Mi-
shima’s translucent analysis. The Golden
Pavilion shines again; some say the
phoenix on top is too bright. Part of
the brilliance may derive from two
superb works of art inspired by its
latest transfiguration, Mishima’s novel,
and the film Enjo (Conflagration) made
from it.* Mishima, who had nothing to
do with script or shooting, said it was
better than his book. He is too modest,
but it is a great film.

BOTH the publisher’s presentation of
the novel and the fact that most Amer-
icans may never see Enjo focuses the
present inadequacy of communication
between America and Japan. The novel
is beautifully translated by Ivan Morris,
a task that for complexity, poetics and
exactness, must have been fiendishly
difficult. Knopf, having obtained this
English text, then lost its nerve and
provided Mishima with a maidenly,
prolix, inaccurate and unnecessary in-
troduction by the popular novelist,
Nancy Wilson Ross. Should you read
it before the book itself, it may well
stop you. Mishima is a master of ex-
position, even in his maze of Zen rid-
dles; his story is a gloss on one of the
greatest. Miss Ross writes like a trained
nurse: Let us not be shocked; let us
try, try, try to understand.

The film £njo is not exactly Mi-
shima’s novel. It is free-fantasia on top
of it. Even in Japan, you can still get
only so far with the facts of life on

*Enjo (A Daiei Film): Produced by
Masaichi N Agata screenplay by Natto
Wada and Keiji Hasebe. Directed by
Mi Ichikawa. iby Rohs by mela

eens von by io Meyonee mi.

Nr
xD The Na iT) 10

the screen. It does go further than any
French or Italian film, and it won’t be
shown in America for our own bad
reasons. There is one crucial sequence
that can be interpreted as violently
anti-American Occupation; it is only
anti-evil. The film is also anti-religious,
inasmuch as it clearly displays the in-
stitutional corruption of modern Zen
Buddhism. A distinguished Zen abbot
tries to hide his whore in downtown
Kyoto. A small boy surprises his mother
in bed with a man who is not his
father; the father says she must be for-
given since he married a stupid woman.
The boy, become an acolyte in the
Golden Pavilion’s Temple, makes a
G.1.’s girl abort on its steps and gets
a carton of Chesterfields for his pains;
the abbot appropriates the cigarettes.

THERE are many sharp images: the
funeral of the boy’s father, on a flat,
high cliff above a hopeless gray sea;
the procession silhouetted against the
rolling sky, the coffin elevated on fat
logs which the boy lights; the coffin ex-
ploding in flames. Always flame, fire;
candles guttering; cigarette lighter;
gotta match, bud? Finally, the manic
incendiary, disguised as a stammering
child, pushed on by the perverse ex-
istentialism of his only companion, a
Iago with a clubfoot and an ancient
flute, completes his acte gratuite, in
which there is no trace of freedom. He
is locked in the conjunction of his
own stammer, the deformity of his
only confidante, the loss of the faith
of his father, the defeat of Japan, ado-
lescence and the overwhelming accus-
ing presence of that perfect Object, the
pavilion itself. Naturally he tries to free
himself. Naturally he burns the build-
ing to exorcise himself, his dead father,
his idiotic mother, the bad abbot, the
G.1.’s girl, all Kyoto and the wide world.
The enormous sky dances with a billion
golden fireflies — flakes of gold-leaf
from the torched pavilion. The acolyte
watches, satisfied, his work well done;
we see in the imperturbable pool be-
neath the charred hulk, upside down in
water, a perfect reflection of Kinkaku-ji,
shimmering, pristine, unbroken.

In the film there is a logical end
which the book only suggests. Shackled
to two not very brutal police, the boy
is taken by train to the mad house in
the city. He had run as far as the
mountains and bungled suicide. He has
to go to the lavatory; a cop uniocks his
handcuff. He races to the car door and
jumps. The final shot shows a small
army truck, running along endless
tracks, coming to pick him up.

Mishima, re-erects Kyoto, plain and

August 15, 1959

mountain, monastery, temple, town, as
Victor Hugo made Paris out of Notre
Dame. Miss Ross’s blurb invokes
Dostoevski, but there is no ratiocina-
tion here, nor self-pitying, self-forgiving
martyrization of the Western christolo-
gue. Mishima suffers without the bene-
fits of protestant agonizing or anxious
guilt from Moses and Monotheism. The
anguish of the stammerer, the plunging
disability of his clubfooted companion,
are presupposed with the alarming
stoicism of sincere Shinto peasants. This
blank cruelty, or apathy in the face of
suffering, is the other side of beauty-
loving Japan which horrifies us wita
its talent for torture, a sadism as re-
lentless and meaningless as earthquake,
typhoon and fire. And madness.

In this novel you never accept the
boy as Mad, or going Mad. Mishima
imperceptibly constructs logical con-
fusion. There is no real crisis, even at
that instant when we all agree he must
burn the pavilion (or go mad?). Natur-
ally, the temple is gorgeous and holy;
naturally he must burn it. This is a
creative act, for we credit his selfless
devotion to the Ideal, honed down to
the razor-edge of Zen’s systematic dis-
locations and induced shocks. His fire
is the stupendous joke, the quintessen-
tial thwack on the shaven skull to make
sure boy-monks meditate on their es-
sence, rather than play with their il-
lusory selves. Saturated with a sense of
active evil, comparable to Baudelaire’s
rolling horror, this is our hell here and
now, and quite lovely, too. And possible,
and acceptable and not, exactly, un-
comfortable. So, as a trained and effi-
cient exorcist, he perfumes the roof-
tree phoenix with flame. Whether or
not the fabric or its soul is consumed,
the pavilion is cleansed. Illusion is no
longer illusory; it is translated fact, in-
violate, complete. The acolyte is fire-
master and fire.

DR. SUZUKI’s beautiful book, elegant-
ly produced in the indispensable Bollin-
gen series, coincidentally gives full sup-
port to the historicity of Mishima’s
analysis and interpretation of Zen
Buddhism. The cults of tea, sword,
archery, garden, painting, handwriting
are shown as separate petals of that
precious efflorescence which, in spite of
history, madness and the disturbed sur-
face of the tangible world, are celebrated
today, inside and outside of many golden
pavilions. Suzuki makes no claims for
Zen as a practical dividend for the
West, for helping us keep our meta-
physics warm. Zen has become the con-
versation piece of the late fifties as
Thomism was of the early thirties. If

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Zen can have immediate applteation for
Westerners on any level above the
verbal, above aesthetics, or the order-
ing of visual or lyric impressions (and
it seems less likely the more you study
a monastery), it requires a conscious
deceleration which most Americans find
too boring to approximate. Books can
give only a hint of the psychic athletics
which have caused such a rich display of
the poorest Japanese materials, paper,
wood, baked earth or woven thread.
Suzuki shows how some Chinese com-
mentators attracted and fascinated cer-
tain Japanese soldiers and men of state,
and how these caused to be made many
beautiful objects — pots, gardens, writ-
ing, pictures — which took their struc-
ture from the organization of a variety
of ideas attached to the possibility of
a direct cognition of reality by common
sense. But common sense is so uncom-
mon, and man is constitutionally so
resistant to it, that means have been
accumulated to serve those men who
wish to resist it less. One method has
found its concrete monuments in some
sword blades, some rough black pots,
some writing that is still interesting to
look at (and even read), and some
gardens that are still raked and clipped.

THE UNESCO volume on Japanese
Buddhist paintings is the most beauti-
ful so far issued in this unprecedented
and irreplaceable series. Costly, it is
not expensive for what it supplies.
Here one can see images almost better
than in their original, for they are rare-
ly available to most of us in their wide
diffusion and frequently impossible hous-
ing and lighting. You can look long at
these pictures; they begin to memorize
themselves. Parallel reading will whet
appreciation; such pictures do not com-
municate automatically to those of us
chiefly trained in the assimilation of
Italian painting. In their austerity,
steep limits, playfulness and-perfection
of craft, they are the ground against
which much great thinking has been
done. They are charts for an imagined
paradise, but their promise is not blind-
ing at first view, because we are only
half-awake to the map of the minds that
made them. Watchers are tossed against
their own capacity trying to read such
works, but for many they are worth
the inconvenience.

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IT IS the final short circuit of conn

munication that the post-Korean War
generation of beatniks has affected a
superficial, poverty-stricken, Bohemian
rapture of enlightenment which, to
work, demands order, dignity and dis-
cipline of craft, psychic as well as manu-
al. Zen has always been the foe of
rhetoric, in decoration as well as Byron-
ism. Personal protest is ostentation;
self-pity is the most distasteful as well
as the most unattractive of Western
characteristics. Zen studies are a con-
structive demolition of abstract art,
Pauline ethics and romantic fallacies.
Alan W. Watts’s Beat Zen, Square Zen,
€§ Zen first appeared last summer in

the Chicago Review. It is now reprinted

as a pamphlet with added material,
notably on Jack Kerouac. One can only
mutter: read this and depart in peace.
Watts distills Zen’s fascination, use and
common sense in a tone of direct col-
loquialism which is the first indication
that Zen can accommodate an American
style, here and now, too. As Marianne
Moore wrote of poetry: “I, too, dislike
it — there are things that are im-

me bi ra a yo, " Ls
ry be

portant feyotl all Wie fide Recah 1
it however, with a perfect contempt for
it, one discovers 1 Jin it after all, a place
for the genuine.” Watts is a veritable
old Zen hand. In his thirty-two small
pages there is about as much as most of
us can swallow in a course of short
doses.

And I will admit that the very hul-
labaloo about Zen, even in such an
essay as this, is also fuss,—but a lit-
tle less so. Having said that, I would
like to say something for all Zen fus-
sers, beat or square. Fuss is all right,
too. If you are hung on Zen, there’s
no need to try to pretend that you
are not. If you really want to spend
some years in a Japanese monastery,
there is no earthly reason why you
shouldn’t. Or if you want to spend
your time hopping freight. cars and
digging Charlie Parker, it’s a free
country.

In the landscape of Spring there is
neither better nor worse;

The flowering branches grow
naturally, some long, some short.

Attack from the Right

THE. FAILURESSOF THE
ECONOMICS”: An Analysis of the

Keynesian Fallacies. By Henry Hazlitt.
D. Van Nostrand. 458 pp. $7.50.

Edward S. Herman

IN HIS influential book, The General
Theory of Employment Interest and
Money, published in 1936, J. M. Keynes
assured himself the undying enmity of
many conservatives by arguing that un-
restricted private enterprise does not
automatically assure full employment,
that wage reductions are an unworkable
means of eliminating unemployment, and
that systematic government intervention
is essential for the maintenance of sta-
bility under private capitalism. Although
much of Keynes’s original rough and po-
Jemical formulation has been modified
in the direction of greater rigor and con-
sistency, a substantial number of the
principal concepts and ideas of the Gen-
eral Theory have been incorporated into
the main stream of economic thought.
This process of integration has not di-
minished the antagonism of economists
and businessmen with strong emotional
and intellectual ties to the view that un-

EDWARD S. HERMAN teaches Eco-
nomics and Finance in the Wharton
School of Finance and Commerce, the
User of Pomme ers.

“NEW -

employment would take care of itself if
only government intervention were re-
duced and wages made more flexible.

Henry Hazlitt has long been known
to the economics profession as one of the
unreconstructed. The method and _per-
spective of his Economics in One Lesson,
published in 1946, recall the simpliste
anti-interventionism of the mid-nine-
teenth century popularizer of Jaissez-
faire, Frederic Bastiat (to whom Hazlitt
acknowledges his indebtedness). Hazlitt’s
position has changed little since 1946,
although there has been a notable in-
crease in venom and hardening of pre-
conceptions. In 1946 Hazlitt was. still
able to concede that in earlier years
trade unions did much to prevent ex-
ploitation. In the present volume, no
such concessions can be made: “Labor
then, as now, was getting the full amount
of its marginal contribution to the value
of the product.” (86)

The Failure of the “New Economics”
is an interesting example of a critical
work whose purpose is to score the max-
imum number of points against the sub-
ject. No attempt is made to present or
comprehend the subject matter as a
coherent whole, and Hazlitt gives every
evidence of a failure to grasp either the
Keynesian model or its key components,
What he has done is to go through the
General Theory and pick out nora

r A NATION |

q
j

-- we

_ discussion of business monopoly )— Haz-

nces mith which he @ietrecs. Where
y contain a concept that Hazlitt does
- fet understand, such as the multiplier,
“effective demand,” he reduces them
ya absurdity by sheer weight of mis-
interpretation and dogmatic assertion.
When he arrives at a point which he dis-
likes, but wishes to evade entirely, such
as the Keynesian view that spending
under conditions of heavy unemploy-
ment will increase employment rather
than prices, he simply asserts that it is
“peculiar” and another “fallacy” and
passes on to the next point (145). When
he wishes to defend a doctrine with con-
genial policy implications, but which is
refuted by every substantial decline in
national income, such as Say’s Law, he
converts it into an “ultimate truth”
which is “merely concealed” by the con-
trary facts of reality (39).

THE quality of mind at work in a
process of this sort can be illustrated by
the following example, taken from an
inexhaustible stock. Keynes stated at
one point, in explanation of the popu-
larity of the Ricardian doctrines: “That
it afforded a measure of justification to
the free activities of the individual cap-
italist, attracted to it the support of the
dominant social force behind authority.”
Hazlitt comments, “This is pure Marxi-
an demagogy, which attributes beliefs to
discreditable motives rather than to dis-
interested logic” (56-57). This is pomp-
ous nonsense, of course, but it is also
discreditable hypocrisy since Hazlitt does
not hesitate to assert that “envy and
hatred” lie behind the schemes of revolu-
tionary economic reformers (360), or
that Keynes developed his theory to
rationalize a defense of trade unions
(287). A disinterested logician might in-
fer that Hazlitt conforms exactly to his
own definition of a Marxist demagogue.
Hazlitt’s solution to the unemploy-
_ ment problem is greater wage flexibility.
He concedes that excessive wage rates
did not initiate the 1929 crisis, but once
demand and prices had collapsed “it was
necessary for wage-rates to adjust them-

selves to the reduced level of demand...

if mass unemployment was to be avert-
ed. It was the failure of this wage ad-
justment to occur that led to prolonged
mass unemployment for ten years” (19).
No mention is made of the saturation
of investment, the psychological reaction
to the crash and continued deflation,
the bank failures, the effect of deflation

on the debt burden, or the impact of in-

' flexible prices on employment (the read-
er will look in vain in this book for any

— litt’s dogma of wage inflexibility Bite:
of unemployment is another |
4 a 95 %

oe de is that it is

mate truth, endlessly asserted but never
proved. Since trade unionism was at
a very low ebb in the crucial early years
of the depression, it would be interest-
ing to see how Hazlitt would propose to
increase wage flexibility beyond the level
existing in 1929-1933,

Would wage reductions in a period of
depression actually serve to increase em-
ployment? Keynes brought home the
fact that, although this might be true
for a single firm, if wage cuts are wide-
spread the redistribution of income from
wages to profits and the general fall in
prices and incomes might easily reduce
consumer demand enough to offset the
stimulus of wage cost reductions. Keynes’s
point is reinforced by the adverse ef-
fects on expectations (and spending) of
a further decline in prices, wage rates
and incomes, and the social disorganiza-
tion that is likely to accompany severe
deflation. Suffice it to say that discus-
sions of this issue since 1936 have led
the vast majority of economists to con-
clude that emphasis on wage reductions

THEATRE

Harold Clurman

ONE OF THE pleasantest things put on
our stage this season is Hal Holbrook’s
one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight
(41st St. Theatre). The evening is
memorable because of Mark Twain’s
tonic writing and Hal Holbrook’s acting.

Mark Twain, we all say, is a true,

American classic. This, however, is a
dangerous thing to say. Because a
“classic” for most of us is something
we refer to, quote and express hap-
hazard opinions about, but which we
rarely care for. I know Mark Twain
well: did I not last read Huckleberry
Finn in 1943, and Tom Sawyer when I
was a kid? I know what Van Wyck
Brooks said about the man, and what
H. L. Mencken, Bernard De Voto, Ken-
neth Rexroth and a host of others have
said. All this means that Mark Twain

is a reputation to me—not a writer.

Having seen Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain
Tonight, the funny man of our literature
has become an intimate.

Twain’s language is a model of de--

lightfully pithy speech. His “jokes” are
refreshing because they embody a par-
ticularly American form of non-conform-—
ity, a sort of innocently caustic in-
dividualism. And what i is most notable —
about this tradition American at-
ow almost extinct.
Hal Holbrook does more than read
W Williams reads Dick-

as a primary means of combatting un-
employment is dangerously unsound.

Hazlitt’s book on Keynes has been Nd
greeted with enthusiasm by many busi- MN
ness and other publications and was
treated as a serious and important vol-
ume by Louis M. Hacker in The New
York Times. This appears to be due to
the fact that, although a travesty of
scholarship and fair-mindedness, _ its
flesh and bones of extreme right-wing
ideology are covered over with a thin
skin of learning. Here is a work of 458 a
pages, with numerous footnotes, simple
and self-assured, that “refutes” Keynes ae
and asserts that government deficits +
and cheap money are ineffective for Se!
curing unemployment, but that tight ‘eh
money and the destruction of trade A
unions can do the job. It is a wonderful
book to confirm the prejudices of the b
conservative economist and the non- ss
thinking businessman. It is somewhat ‘
less clear that the capitalist system could
long survive the passionate embraces
of many like Henry Hazlitt.

ens or Dylan Thomas: he acts the man.
His acting is shrewd and complete. The
mischievous twinkle in the eye, the

easy, preoccupied gait, the ascetic self- if
indulgence of the cigar-smoking, the a
delicate toying with the matches and

the ashtray, the handling of the frayed
books and scattered notes, not to men-
tion the make-up and the tobacco voice
—all form a first-rate miniature portrait.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
(American Shakespeare Festival: Strat-
ford, Conn.) is an agreeable production
of a peculiar play. The scenes move
lightly, the actors’ speech is distinct,
the performances are sympathetic, the
points for a literal comprehension of the

THE TWO FACES OF
RICHARD NIXON
By Guy W. Finney >

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9
surface humor of the play are neatly
made. Thus we get an affable rendition
of the play—an ostensibly cute narra-
tion out of a naughty Boccaccio tale.

In other words, the Connecticut pro-
duction takes the play at face value.
Buc Shakespeare was a strange writer.
If we are less interested in classics than
in communication we may discover that
All's Well is a deliberately nasty story
by a rather embittered man—who didn’t
always feel kindly toward loyal women,
upright kings and splendid soldiers.
Some reviewers understood this, but
thought it made the play inferior—as if
it weren’t quite proper for Shakespeare
to be acid, after all the nice things we
have said about him.

True, the play is not one of his verbal
masterpieces; what is distinctive about
it is the acid. This is diluted on the
Connecticut stage, and we are given an
evening of bland Shakespearean fun.
Tyrone Guthrie’s production of All’s
Well—now playing in Stratford-upon-
Avon—is a “distortion” which makes
the play more meaningful to a modern
viewer and less like something out of

Charles Lamb.
JULIUS CAESAR (New York Shakes-

peare Festival: Central Park) is an ironic
political melodrama. It is superbly writ-
ten, wonderfully constructed, as master-
ful a stage piece as ever came out of
the English theatre. In it—as later in
Corjolanus—Shakespeare expressed his
profound skepticism about the political
world and its great figures. {Brutus is
an idealist who balls things up for him-
self and everyone else; the others are
wily politicos who efficiently wreak
havoc. There is not much solace in this
for anyone. Besides being a supreme poet
and dramatist, Shakespeare was a great
spirit; but when he was not merry, he
was a disturbing person. Such fellows
simply have to be turned into “classics.”

The production in the park is robust
and—considering the youth of the com-
pany—well acted. Stuart Vaughn, the
director, has learned several essential
things about Shakespeare: he has to be
played with great vigor, he has to be
made larger than life (that is, unabash-
edly heroic), his points have to be
strikingly visualized, That is what makes
Vaughn’s park productions good popu-
lar shows in a vein that approaches a
living Shakespeare. The producer, Joseph
Papp, deserves our thanks.

IT ONCE heard the composer John Cage
speak of the music he and several of his
similar-minded colleagues were writing
as “non-art.” Since I have never been
primarily concerned whether any forra
of communication was “art” or not, the

Fy ie " M ;

~
*

phrase irritated me. But seeing Jack
Gelber’s The Connection (The Living
Theatre), I thought the play might fit
into the category Cage referred to.

For while The Connection may not be
“art,” is is none the less arresting. The
play, which is reportage, rumination and
reflection about something that is def-
initely going on, presents a group of
“junkies” (drug addicts) before and
after a session given over to their vice.
Some play jazz music (quite well),
others “philosophize,” explain them-
selveS to the audience, tell little stories
about their adventures. Though the
play’s form is unresolved, and some of
the writing self-conscious as well as
overlong, it is a bit of naturalism not
without point and not without talent.

I am not familiar—as some of my
friends seem to be—with the goings oa
in the haunts or “pads” of the beatniks,
but The Connection creates a distinct
sense of authenticity, even in the ter-
rible languor of pace which marks the
opening of the proceedings. The actors
seem as right for their roles as Kazan
long ago did in Waiting for Lefty
(everyone was certain that The Group
Theatre had hired a “hackie” for the
part), and the direction by Judith Ma-
lina keeps the actors’ concentration,
their minute activities and physical life,
truthful in a way that achieves intensity
and casualness at the same time.

The result will surely seem unpleasant
for spectators eager for either “art” or
entertainment, but there is a sort of
melancholy in the event, with touches
of genuine pathos and even a wretched
sort of lyricism. It is as if one had
looked for a moment into a corner of
our city to breathe the rank air of
its unacknowledged dejection. The play
reeks of human beings and if we turn
completely away from people of any
kind we can know little of anything
worth knowing.

An Autumn in a Word

Falling from above

one word stuck like a leaf

on the end of a line

fell down onto the end of the next

fluttered loose again and shipped

thru two split syllables

on down through the text

into a still of verbs

and tossed around down there

tangled in shadows of tenses

crying havoc among the small words and
lost senses

that end affairs

and the word Love
Lawrence FeRLINGHETTI

4 | ‘ i =

+ ate 2

4 i ~ fa
‘ — a7 Rs i . ‘s

r @2

Crossword Puzzle No. 830 |

By FRANK W. LEWIS

il
9

10
11

12
14

15
17

20
22
24
26
27

2
3
4
5

ACROSS:
aay the business of the assembly.
11
it “a,” for example—or just “a.”
8
Loot turns bad. (6)
Open car or open hat. (7)

Certainly not fat layers. (7)

Contends as part of peculiar guess-
work. (6)

and 25 Where the loser doesn’t get
over thing's so fast. (8, 4)

One doesn’t have to join one to use
one. (4, 4)

Burns’ Saturday Night peasant. (6)
Means, perhaps, of smoke. (7)
Put life into the team, in a way. (7)

Doll in the form of a favorite little
dog? (6)

One no longer believes in a foreign
river domain. (8)

Social group to be fated for under-
ground construction, (11)

DOWN:
Where links may be found with
credit. (2, 3, 4)
The rightful owners of 10? (7)
C.F; or"G, (4)
Corny inflorescences. (7)

A Wizard place has a number to

6
make air. (5)
7 A slice might be more imprudent.

(6)
8 Such decoration might be pretty,
for all it’s makeup. (6)
A high ball gets by bill-pushers,
perhaps. (5)
Car rug on a self-moving machine.
(9)
To pop a question shows not reflect-
ing! (6)

13
16

19 Alleviate bleach? (7)
20 In opposition to kind Albert, per-

haps. (7)
21 In the present, it yields being. (6)
23 Drive on! (5)
25 See 15 across

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 829

ACROSS: 1 Obsidian; 5 Weasel; 11
Launching; 12 Sparing; 13 and 10

Thoughtfully; 14 Divers; 15 Dreamer;
18 Unnerve; 21 Bundle; 24 Learner; 26
Troughs; 27 In the pink; 28 Llama; 29
Garish; 30 Anisette. DOWN: 1 Oafish;
2 Salvation; 3 Daytime; 4 Alleges; 6
Enclose; 7 Sling; 8 Ligature; 9 Suited;
16 Malignant; 17 Outlying; 19 Ringers;
20 Earwig; 21 Betoken; 22 Noodles;
23 Eseape; 25 and 13 Afterthought.

VACATIONS ba

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a
:

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KEYS LODGE, 120 Central Park South,
>

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Alice

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A delightful vacation resort near Tanglewood,
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N. ¥.
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Entertainment Staff, Social, Folk & Square
Dancing, Painting, Arts & Crafts, Fast Tennis
Courts, Fishing & All Sports.

= CALL DB 2-4578 — ELLENVILLE 002 =

eww SEVEN HELLS ===

INFORMAL ADULT RESORT

Eni munHN

Summer is at its prime in August —=
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CHESTERTOWN 5, N.Y.

Phones: 3830 N.Y.C. LU 65-1678

August 15, 1959

rrp pit a ae A
PA

SUMMER BOOK

ALE

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1. LINCOLN IN MARBLE AND BRONZE,
by F. Bullard. How the great sculptors have
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this fascinating account along with 60 vivid
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at $12.50. Sale: $2.98

2. FIGHTING WORDS. An anthology of
great words to live by—from the Greeks. $1.

3. SCIENCE OF CHARACTER & DESTINY.
A book written after years of occult re-
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4. THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SEXUAL
BEHAVIOR. Spiritual meaning of sexual
intercourse. $1

56. THE LOVE SEEKER: A _ Sentimental
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a Man, The Terrors of Love, etc. $1

6. THE GREAT CHAPLIN. Lively biogra-
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Dozens of ways to overcome the handicap
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by E. R. Wembridge. A clearly written psy-
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different forms of government today—World
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14. SAVOYARD LYRICS. Handsome boxed
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15. THE STORY OF SCIENCE. David
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as JUSTINE, JULIETTE, and other for-
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1%. LOVE AND MARRIAGE THRU THE
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women, buying a wife, etc. By Louis Harris.
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34. LINCOLN IN CARICATURE. A rich
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Large volume. Pub. at $7.50. $2.98

35. CENSORED MOTHER GOOSE RHYMES.
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37. SEXUAL ABERRATIONS, by Wilhelm
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40, AUTO-EROTISM. By Wilhelm Steckel,

Numerous case histories, A study on mas- |
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as half-truths concerning this sexual prac

met’

AUGUST 29, 1959 . . 25e

THE INEVITABLE FOUR-DAY
WEEK Edward W. Ziegler

‘WON'T DO’? DEMOCRATS
Robert G. Spivack

TWO FACES OF FRANCE
f | Alexander Werth

—
+

on ee ee

THE CRYSTAL PALACE

LETTERS

Atomic Waste

Dear Sirs: 1 read wich great interest
Gerald McCourt’s article, “Test Case on
Atomic Waste,” in your August 1 issue.
Since we have not yet discovered ade-
quate means for makina atomic wastes
safe in the sense that they may be
neutralized and discarded anywhere, it
is essential to welfare that their disposi-
tion be handled with every possible safe-
guard. [ believe that some of the safe-
guards should be written into law, be-
cause everyone agrees that there are
some types of disposition which would
be dangerous or potentially dangerous
to mankind. These types should be pro-
hibited by law. Congressman Clark
Thompson of Texas and I have intro-
duced legislation which sets out certain
requirements with regard to the disposi-
tion of atomic wastes in the Gulf of
Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. We are
hopeful that Congress may report these
bills, or some modification of them, to
establish minimum requirements for the
safety of mankind in the disposition of
atomic wastes.
Cuartes EF. BENNETT
Member of Congress (Florida)

Washington, D.C.

Rovere on McCarthy

Dear Sirs: Congratulations on Mr. Dan-
gerfield’s review of Rovere’s book on
McCarthy [The Nation, August 1]...-.

The writer of the review properly
describes the schizophrenic nature of
the book. I like the idea of Rovere (A)
and Rovere (B)! Mr. Rovere’s asser-
tion that McCarthy “was in many ways
the most gifted demagogue ever bred
on these shores” is preposterous. I think
I had him in perspective in a piece I
wrote for the British Fortnightly along
in 1953 or 1954.

Rovere hasn’t done all his homework.

-He is wholly inaccurate when he at-

tributes my defeat in Connecticut in
1952 to McCarthy. The most casual
review would have shown that I was
defeated only by 88,000 while Governor
Stevenson lost by 129,000—and that I
was one of only eleven Senators in the
United States, of thirty-five running

. on the Democratic ticket, who ran ahead

of Governor

; eres against me actually helped me

Stevenson. McCarthy’s

Taise a lot of money. ,
: _ Rovere had one very good phrase.
called McCarthy “a frivolous dema-
e.” This was Rovere (A). This
t of phrase ties in well with the
peta ation which Ble pape aa

* om

up with approval:
“lacked the most necessary and awe-
some of demagogic gifts—a belief in
the sacredness of his own mission. ... If
a man has no convictions, he can
scarcely draw courage from them.”

WILLIAM BENTON
Southport, Conn.

Dear Sirs: In his review, Mr. Danger-
field has utterly mistaken the widespread
public adulation of McCarthy, as pic-
tured by the author, for the author’s
own feelings. . . . Dangerfield dislikes
Rovere’s description of the Senator as
most gifted demagogue,” “surer,” “swift-
er,” “towering,” “classic.” But the fact
remains that for five years this dem-
agogue without an idea controlled our
government. He insulted both Truman
and Ike, and also Army generals. By
1952, he was personally responsible for
the defeat of such outstanding Senators
as Tydings, Scott Lucas, William Benton
and McFarland. His fellow Senators were
scared stiff of him. Only one Sen-
ator, William Fulbright of Arkansas,
voted against an appropriation for his
subcommittee in 1952.

Dangerfield believes all McCarthy’s
influence died with him. But the Sen-
ator’s influence is still imprinted on our
foreign policy. He was a godsend to
Chiang Kai-shek. Go into a_ grocery
store, and you'll find Russian tea re-
christened Bouquet of Spice Tea. Men-
tion McCarthy’s name, and you will be
alarmed to hear people say, “Old Joe
certainiy did a lot of good.” . Sen-
ator Joe McCarthy is the best ‘Arecaaee
satire In years.

Witiiam J. B. Apams
Tex,

Beaumont,

Hospital Trustees

Dear Sirs: In “Why Hospitals Exploit
Labor,” in your July 4 issue, Mr. Kir-
stein does his best to act as apologist
for a gang of union-busters and labor
exploiters. My belief is that the volun-
tary-hospital trustees—by and large the
same individuals who control our in-
dustries, banks and insurance companies
—acted in character when they fought
the organization of the hospital work-
ers.... They felt they were behind the
shield of public sympathy for the pa-
tients and they counted on this to
prevent their losing out to the workers
as they had done —_— private busi-
nesses.

Mr. Kirstein did ra ise a valid point:
that the trustees’ set-up in the volun-
pitals, by which wealthy indi-
petuate their
a \ dea ie one. There

ue 7 i f ;
ya nt a
-: cs

Pinat McCarthy?

‘ * ’ ’

o> we ; ia Le. he Pan

munity might better be served by pro-
viding for direct federal and state sub-
sidies to hospitals.
Leon J. Davis
President, Local 1199
Retail Drug Employees Union
New York City

Freedom on TY

Dear Sirs: Section 315 of the Federal
Communications Act requires that a ra-
dio or TV station which permits a po-
litical candidate to use its facilities must

(Continued on page 92)

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
81 'e
ARTICLES
83 @ “Won’t Do” Democrats
by ROBERT G. SPIVACK
85 ‘@ Two Faces of France
by ALEXANDER WERTH
87 @ The Crystal Palace Forsaken
by ALAN HARRINGTON
90 '® The Inevitable Four-Day Week
by EDWARD W. ZIEGLER
BOOKS AND THE ARTS
93 @ Apropos of Don Juan
by EMILE CAPOUYA
94 ‘@ Renoir Girl (poem)
by BARRIS MILLS
95 @ FDR: a Pragmatic Judgment
by FRANK FRBIDDL
Architecture
by WALTER McQUADH
In a Parlor Containing a Table
(poem)
by GALWAY KINNELL
Letter from Washington
by STANLEY MEISLUR
Late Last Night (poem)
by ARTHUR GREGOR
Crossword Puzzle (opp. (100)
by FRANK W. LEWIS
ANNU

George G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey MeWilliams, HWditor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Wditor
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold ‘Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M, L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, Huropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Aug. 29, 1959. Vol. 189, No. 5

The Nation, published weekly (except for omis-
sion of four summer {fssues) by The Nation

97 @

98 @

99 @

100 '@

the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue

New York 14, N, ¥, Second class postage paid:

at New York, N, Y.—

Subscription Prices Domestico—One
‘Three

Mee ste
nr a

Sry =

whether philanthrophy fies: any pooner )
role to play in hospitals. The com-—

Bys

Ma
Dut

ihe

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 5

TEE

NATION |

EDITORIALS

The Labor Myth

The most carefully cultivated American myth to
gain acceptance in the postwar years is that labor is
too powerful — more powerful than management, more
powerful even than government. Not only do 95 per
cent of the country’s editorials repeat this N.A.M. and
Chamber of Commerce refrain, but the pronounce-

ments of spokesmen for organized labor tend to lend it
credence. From local political issues to foreign policy,
labor statesmen stipulate what will and will not be
tolerated. The campaign contributions which COPE
grants to friendly legislators are widely publicized, and
the cartoonists have a field day with caricatures of
menacing labor dictators.

The vote mm the House on the Landrum-Griffin bill
should dispel that segment of the myth regarding labor’s
political power. It was not only the traditional coali-
tion of Southern Democrats and right-wing Repubili-
cans that created the majority. It was the COPE-sup-
ported deserters as well, who heard with crystal clarity
the swelling myth-chorus of their constituents and
voted for what Mr. Meany termed the “killer” bill.

And the continuing ‘steel strike in the midst of the
nation’s greatest period of prosperity should explode

- the “economic power” aspect of the myth. Anyone naive

_enough to believe that this sad strike is an example of

_ruthless labor forcing helpless management to its knees

is sadly misinformed.

; None the less, the myth will not die no matter what
new restrictive labor legislation is added to the Taft-
Hartley Act. It will be as carefully cultivated as before.

But labor spokesmen, at least, should stop swelling the
Robins chorus. Labor has less power today, economically
“and politically than it has had at any time in the last

fifteen years, and labor’s own interests would be served
be its leaders would now admit the fact.

The Munitions Probe We Haven’t Had

“From a public relations viewpoint,” writes Business
Week for August 15, “the last couple of months have
been a nightmare for the industrial giants who produce
for the Pentagon.” But while the House Armed Services
subcommittee has uncarthed considerable information
»of potential value to taxpayers and legislators, it has so

UCL ee
autos s .

far only skimmed the surface of a very lively subject.
The giants should really have more fortitude in facing
life’s inevitable ills. For example, George M. Bunker,
board chairman of the Martin Company ($800 million
in defense contracts), having revealed that his firm
flew high-ranking military officers to the Bahamas for
week-end parties, denied that this lavish hospitality
had any connection with sales. Former Secretary of the
Navy Dan A. Kimball, now president of Aerojet-Gen-
eral ($317 million in defense contracts), questioned
about the fact that twenty-six former military officers
or civil-defense officials employed by his company
gave identical answers to two questions on a Congres-
sional questionnaire, was righteously indignant. But so
were the Apalachian gangsters who similarly sought
refuge in uniformity, except that the gangsters at least
spoke with their own mouths, while most of Aerojet’s
answers were typed on the same typewriter. (One an-
swer read: “I did not charge my memory with either
the specifics of such talks [with military leaders], the
identity of the personnel nor the precise time thereof.”

The diverting features of the inquiry into individual
ex-officers being conceded, it might be well for the
Armed Forces subcommittee to investigate the doings
and spendings of industry groups and the associations
of Air Force, Army and Navy officers and. ex-officers
which are forever springing to the defense of their
respective services. These associations are no doubt
concerned with the defense of the beloved country, but
they also appear to be weighted with executives of
the companies which are making money out of that
defense. Officials and records should be subpoenaed. By
all means let the nightmares of the arms-makers con-
tinue; if they sleep well, the country will be worse off.

Atomic Togetherness

At three o'clock in the afternoon on August 18 electric
power failed in a five-square-mile area of upper Man-
hattan, and was not restored until about 11 P.M, in
some sections and 4 A.M. in others. Half a million New
Yorkers suffered the tortures of an evening without
television and worried about the food in the refrigerator.
The newspapers, however, considered that their lives
had been “disrupted” and even the unsensational Times

gave the incident an eight-column, three-line streamer,

tae rh an oe q PATE ees re -
: te. a
2 T

Typographically, it looked more like the outbreak of a
nuclear war than a power failure, except, of course, that
in the latter case the Times would not have published
and the failure might well have been permanent.
Nevertheless, the incident had its pleasant features.
With no traffic lights for dynamic motorists to jump,
there were scarcely any automobile accidents, and the
city’s muggers chivalrously refrained from their usual
garrotings and murders. Perhaps the explanation of their
restraint is that a few days earlier the whole country
had been apprised of the experiment of a heroic New
Jersey family which, under the auspices of Princeton
University and the Federal Office of Civil Defense, had
voluntarily foregone the amenities of civilization to live
for two weeks in a 72-square-foot atom-bomb shelter.
Although the place didn’t smell very good and it took
an hour and a half to heat a can of spaghetti, the
parents found the experience “very beneficial,” with the
family united as never before. It all made fine publicity
for the family-size shelters Governor Rockefeller has
been promoting, and made one wonder why the Gover-
nor let such a marvelous publicity idea get away from
him. As for the sacrificial family, it may be further re-
warded, for the father turned out to be a part-time
building contractor, Anyway, the behavior of both the
Jerseyites and the New Yorkers under stress testifies
to the unimpaired strength of the American character,
with only one reservation: they all knew they would
be returning to God’s gifts and those of the appliance
makers. In an atomic war it would be different.

The Irrelevant Mitchell Report

Secretary of Labor Mitchell’s statistical report on
wages and profits in the steel industry is bureaucratic
writing at its best: clear, complete and of a vast and
comprehensive innocuousness. It contains so much that
means so little that both steel management and labor
have been able to seize upon it gleefully as final proof
of their respective (and directly contradictory) points
of view. But the report was not only innocuous; it was
also, considering that the primary purpose of its publi-
cation was to shorten the steel strike, totally irrelevant.
For there isn’t a polished fact in the lengthy document
which hasn’t been available to both sides for months;

and if these facts have not led to a settlement up to —
now, why should a compendium of them, under the |
- government’s imprimatur, do so now? (Indeed, aside
_ from carrying out decimal points, the report adds little
_ even to the public’s knowledge. Who didn’t know that —
_ steelworkers are well paid, relative to other workers, ~
_and that steel has been making enormous profits? See
Bi “The Consumer in the Steel Vise,” by Eugene Havas, —

The Nation, Dan Py 1959.)

Wroutd re bee ay we io int th e Gnduseng’d

determination to recapture from the union the control
of working conditions — in other words, to set the
clock back on the labor movement. According to The
New York Times, at least one reporter, questioning
the Secretary after the report had been released, sensed
this:

Secretary Mitchell was asked when he would make
public the facts on the strike issue of work rules. . . . He
said: “Pll be happy to make those public the day the
strike is settled,’ asserting that they were matters for
the parties to settle among themselves.

It must have taken superhuman effort by the authors
of the report, considering the time and sweat they ex-
pended on their work, to have avoided so adroitly the
main issue. But they managed it. Just as they managed
to avoid discussion of another significant point brought
out in the Times dispatch:

|The Secretary] was asked whether the strike did not
simply consolidate the idle time that would occur piece-
meal through the year if there were no strike. He agreed
that in the past steel strikes had hardly been discernible
in the figures on total annual production, but he asserted,
“T wouldn’t say the purpose of the strike was to con-
solidate idle time.”

Whatever the purpose, that is precisely the effect.

Two-Way Ice

Reports, which a diligent sleuth could probably trace
to the Department of the Navy and one of its principal
suppliers, have to do with a wonderfully efficacious way
of dealing with the beastly Muscovites who threaten the
peace-loving nations of the West. It has been demon-
strated that American nuclear-powered submarines can
cruise under the polar ice cap. Once in open water, they
can then fire their medium-range Polaris missiles at
strategic Russian targets. The Polaris itself, although
an untested weapon, will hopefully provide the neces-
sary accuracy and kill capacity to win the war thus
envisioned, Implicit in the argument is the superiority
of the missile-firing submarine to the cognate lethal
mechanisms sponsored by the Army and Air Force. One
technical point which is emphasized is that under the
ice the submarine is radar-proof. Thus ice, thick, all-
year-round ice, becomes one of Divine Providence’s
devices for the undoing of the agents of atheistic com-
munism.

It is not quite that simple, however. From London,
under date of August 18, comes an A.P. report of a
Moscow report that “missile-bearing Soviet submarines

~ could enter Hudson Bay from under the Arctic ice and
_ bombard the industrial heart of America.” The warning
was printed in the naval newspaper Sovietsky Flot, — ‘

ich added that “those people with a taste, for age
sion should ‘remember the Arctic Bee n is not a

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Tnited States tiles lake.” Tiioreunstely. there is no

Tas cana patent convention or tribunal preventing

Sovietsky Flot from stealing American ideas. They just
turn them about and point them at us, and unhappily
their submarines will be as radar-proof under the ice as
ours, and as invisible from the skies. It is also well
known, as Sovietsky Flot would put it, that sonar, or
acoustic detection and ranging, does work under the
ice, no doubt with some allowances for reflections from
the under side. It will work as well against the Soviet
sub fleet as for it. Submarine will be pitted against
submarine, en route to Hudson Bay or the Barents
Sea, as the case may be, and if somebody should find
an urgent need to surface in consequence of such opera-
tions, it is unlikely that Providence will open a hole in
the ice.

The South That Nobody Knows

Recently the Florida House of Representatives ap-
propriated a $500,000 publicity and advertising fund
to sell the Southern way of life to the North. Whom-
ever the Florida Representatives think they represent,
clearly they don’t represent Mr. Bill Baggs, columnist
of the Miami News, who wrote in his newspaper:

There will be told in this ad crusade what is identified

s “the true story” of the progress of the Negro in the

good old Southern way... . And what is the progress of

the Negro? He is by the dictates of custom a second-class

_ citizen and in some counties of this state he is likely to

get bashed in the head if he tries to vote. Generally, his

schools are poor. He lives in a slum and the people who

own the slum will call you a Communist if you call the
-slum a slum.

How do you make this smell good?

— But, let. us cast our imagination out in the moonlight
and think that great progress has attended the Negro
down South. . . . The fact remains no matter how pro-
gressive and happy the situation is, it is also illegal. At

the moment, the spirit of the law has been declared by
the Supreme Court and we are on the other side of the law.
Do you go advertise this to the Northern states? What
do you say, “Well, folks, it ain’t exactly legal, but it sure

is nice”?
We respectfully suggest that the Florida legislators
award the $500,000 advertising account to Mr. Baggs.

The Lesson of Laos

Things are never as simple as newspaper reports are
prone to make out, and the aggression cum civil war in
the northern Laotian jungle is no exception. (For
instance: Moscow and Peking charge, and the U.S.
denies, that we have military bases in Laos. But France
has an air base there; we are allied to France through
SEATO; SEATO is pledged to the defense of Laos: if
things get really hot, does anyone imagine that the
French will keep us off their air base? Quad erat demon-
strandum, as the mistrustful Communists are undoubt-
edly thinking.) Anyway, whatever the rights and
wrongs of the immediate crisis, there is a larger issue
involved which has come up before, and will come up
again. If the billions we are spending on nuclear arma-
ments, plus the combined might of SEATO (compris-
ing seven countries with a combined population of more
than 400 million people), are insufficient as a threat
to dissuade North Vietnam (population 13,000,000)
from sending a few hundred guerrilla fighters into the
Laotian jungle, what good is the theory of deterrence
upon which so much of our foreign policy is based?

The world could do with a little less deterrence and
a little more concurrence. But in unstable, complex
Southeast Asia, there is no way of reaching meaningful
agreements except with the participation of Red China.
The lesson of Laos is that there can be no stability on
China’s borders until the United States recognizes Pek-
ing and is prepared to deal with it on realistic terms.

WON'T DO’ DEMOCRATS .. ty robert 6. Spivack

EVERY PRACTICAL American
_ politician understands that the way
the “great game” is played in this

country, each party is bound to have
its ups and downs. But the rapidity
of public disenchantment with Con-
gressional

Democrats. since the

picien? G,. SPIVACK is the
V ashington, DC. correspondent — of
Nev c York Post and authe

ae and Speaker Sam Ra

party’s impressive showing at the
polls barely a year ago ranks as some-
thing of a political phenomenon. Ex-
cept for Senator Eugene McCarthy
(Minn.),Congressman Chester Bowles

(Conn.) and one or two others, few

new Democratic members in either
house have said or gine much to
distinguish themselves
Guard, led by Senator

e tone and th

is virtually no movement and cer-
tainly no sense of direction. .

Johnson covers up his reluctance
to maintain an aggressive, critical
attitude toward the Eisenhower Ad-
ministration _ by insisting: that_
leads a “responsible” Sppods

es in Texas
; ing te ie

must ae ap

SI AM a SRAM YY a Ni YN

san leader of the entire Senate, in-
cluding the Republicans, insists he
does not want to “play politics” or
create issues where they do not ex-
ist. The Republicans, of course, are
not taken in by this. They still
speak of Johnson’s “Napoleonic re-
treat” from previously enunciated
Democratic policies. Thruston Mor-
ton, the GOP National Chairman,
has labeled the Eighty-sixth the
“won’t do” Congress. He gives the
term a double meaning: it “won’t
do” for the country because it “won’t
do” anything. One writer, compar-
ing the Eisenhower and Johnson-
Rayburn approaches to national af-
fairs, describes the present calm as
a “collision of planned drift and
masterly inactivity.”

As the Democrats look to 1960,
this legislative stand-still compounds
what, for party workers outside Con-
gress, already looks like a pretty
tough set of problems. The Demo-
cratic dilemma can be summed up
in this way: too many candidates,

too few issues and — despite the
current Nixon headlines — too much
Rockefeller.

The Democratic Congressional

leadership suffers from hardening of
the political arteries. Rayburn has
been around too long; Johnson gets
around too little (not because of his
cardiac condition, but because his
world revolves around Washington
and Texas). Aside from failure to
hold party caucuses, Johnson en-
courages no free flow of ideas. He
himself, in consultation with a few
intimates, decides at the outset what

ee ee me hee
SY re CR renee mae mee

“Look — I’m Ahead!”

“oj

Ly
the “party line” will be for the ses-
sion. He adheres to it rigidly. Like
most political bosses, both Mr. Sam
and “LBJ” are preoccupied with
problems involving special-interest
legislation. They consider it a sign
of broadmindedness that they do
not limit their favors to oil million-
aires; almost all other lobbyists are
welcome — munitions, real-estate,
aircraft, banks, insurance and broad-
casting. The “unwelcome” sign is up
only for civil-rights advocates, who
are always told to be “happy with
what you can get” and to remember
that “half a loaf is better than no
bread at all.”

IT IS this sense of anti-climax, this
failure to live up to the voters’ high
expectations, that persuaded Demo-
cratic National Chairman Paul M.
Butler to voice his mild complaints
about the way things were going.
Butler, unlike his critics, had been
traveling about the country and
what he heard did not please him.
It is his job to create a victory at-
mosphere for his party. But after
he had said his say, he received lit-
tle support from influential Dem-
ocrats in or out of Congress, None
of his associates on the Democratic
Advisory Council said a word in his
behalf and finally he felt impelled to
arrange uneasy truce terms with
Rayburn and Johnson.

In the Washington bureau of the
New York Post, we polled the entire
Democratic membership of both
houses to see how many agreed with
Butler’s gentle rebuke to the Texas
leadership and how many felt the
party was living up to its 1956 plat-
form. The response was both fierce
and defensive.

Actually Butler had only said this:

. . . | am inclined to believe that
we won in 1958 not so much because
of public satisfaction with the record
of the Democratic Congress in 1957
and 1958, the EFighty-fifth Congress,
as we won upon a negative vote
against the Administration because
of the lack of positive and aggressive
leadership. Now, I think the burden
is upon the Democratic Party, the
responsibility is upon the Democratic
Congress, to show the initiative and
positive progressive attitude towards
legislation. Unless we do, we are go-
ing to be in a tough situation in

#5)

"5 Nee |) OV eg ae f

that the leadership is going to step
up the pace of the legislative pro-
pram. .,.

In the final tally, both Johnson
and Rayburn received overwhelm-
ing votes of confidence. Butler was
rebuked by many Democrats, with
the Southerners especially censori-
ous. The pro-Johnson vote was 4 to
1 and Rayburn’s colleagues backed
him 5% to 1.

These results were not unexpected.
But there were some aspects to the
poll which revealed much more
than did the statistical breakdown
of the answers. A number of law-
makers called to say they regretted
that we had insisted that they sign
their answers. It was inexpedient,
they explained, to go on_ record
against leaders with whom they had
to live and work from day to day,
to whom they had to look for favors.
We also learned that the party
whips were urging members to an-
swer our poll so that the results
would show overwhelming support
for Rayburn and Johnson.

MOST OF the “defense” of the two
leaders took the form of an “offense”
against Butler. His job, so the argu-
ments went, was to “unite,” rather
than divide, the party; he should
have voiced his criticism within
party councils; publicly, he ought
to be attacking Republicans, Then
there were many who said the Pres-
ident had paralyzed Congress by
constantly threatening to veto legis-
lation. Others expressed amazement
that Johnson’s willingness to cooper-
ate with the White House — for
example, in watering down the hous-
ing bill — had been rejected. Sen-
ators McClellan, Russell and Byrd
made it plain they did not agree
with much of the 1956 platform, so
they had no complaints about John-
son’s failure to carry out its provi-
sions. Some Democrats said the
platform was outmoded; others said
it was never meant to be more than
a catch-all for election year votes.

In a way, the dreary, apologetic
responses to the Post’s poll help to
explain the Democrats’ decline, Lack-

ing strong liberal leadership the law- |
makers presented few compe ing

why a voter should choose
Py F Lt oe

reasons
f v re 4 ’ ,
eel MP j

1960. But I have eMehy Conidae

as a

a Democrat over a “modern” Re-
publican. They did not have much
to offer.

ASIDE from the paucity of political
acumen demonstrated by Johnson
and Rayburn there are, in my judg-
ment, at least three other reasons
why the Democrats are in deep
trouble:

1. The state of the economy. Con-
trary to the views expressed by some
liberal writers these days, there 1s
not a politician worth his salt who
does not know that bread-and-but-
ter issues take precedence over every-
thing else in an election year. The
receding of the recession permits the
Republicans once again to use that
old 1952 Democratic slogan, “You
never had it so good.” In 1960, they
expect to campaign as the party of
“peace and prosperity.” It’s hard to
throw out the “ins” when the voters
are eating regularly.

2. The loss of political initiative.
During the 1958 campaign, both
Nixon and Eisenhower campaigned
against the “radical” Democrats. The
voters would not buy that line, es-
pecially during a recession. It was
the old, too extreme, Nixonism. But
the day after the election, the Pres-
ident turned it around and said the
issue was the wild “spending” pro-
posed by the opposition. He also
said, but no one paid much atten-
tion, that the 1960 campaign was
beginning in 1958.

The Republicans seized the initi-

ative and have kept it ever since.
The Democrats, relaxed and _self-
satisfied at their lop-sided Congres-
sional majorities, became prisoners
of the “economy” issue even though
they know it was patently fraudu-
lent. Why don’t they expose it? Be-
cause all insiders know that the real
waste in government comes in spe-
cial tax privileges, excessive and in-
efficient purchasing policies at the
Pentagon, and sloppy administra-
tion of foreign military-aid funds.
Except for men like Douglas, Clark
and Proxmire, they have let the
“spending” issue go by default be-
cause too many Democrats, like Re-
publicans, have friends, relatives and
political associates on the padded
federal payrolls. The best-known
beneficiaries of tax privileges, of
course, are those who enjoy the 27%
per cent oil-depletion allowance.
The initiative was lost in other
fields, too. After all the splendid re-
search work done by the Kennedy
brothers, the Administration grab-
bed the headlines and appears to be
fighting the battle against labor
racketeering. The simple fact that
the Teamsters’ Union and James
Hoffa have fought liberal Democrats
and played ball with Republicans all
over the country is not even ex-
ploited by the drowsy Democrats.
Other popular and important issues,
from Kefauver’s investigation of ad-
ministered prices to the Patman and
Reuss exposés of commercial-bank
profiteering on the “tight money”

policy, have all been downgraded
by the party leadership.

3. The image of Nelson Rocke-
feller. Even after Nixon’s triumphal
tour of the Soviet Union, the Demo-
crats still fear him far less than they
do the Governor of New York. All
of the better-known Democratic
hopefuls, even Johnson, believe they
could knock off Nixon. But Rock-
efeller, they acknowledge in private,
could probably beat any Democrat
now in the running, especially if the
nation continues to remain prosper-
ous. Then the only “issue” would be
the personality of the nominee. Rock-
efeller, solid, warm, stable, is a re-
assuring public figure; Nixon, frenet-
ic and sharp-tongued, has an un-
settling effect on many people.

A year from now, all the anxieties
felt by Butler and the liberal Demo-
crats may have proved themselves
unreal. The Republicans may be
quarreling among themselves in a
1960 version of the old Taft-Eisen-
hower cleavage. One of the many
Democratic candidates may have
moved so far ahead that the party
will unite behind him. But if this is
all the Democrats are counting on,
if they expect the Republicans to
accommodate them by nominating
Nixon, or if Nixon does not prove
to be the political push-over they
think he is, then their chances of
recapturing the White House are not
bright. If the voters want conserva-
tive Republican policies, will they
vote Democratic to get them?

TWO FACES OF FRANCE e « by Alexander Werth

Paris
TWO FACES: one is that of the
France of everyday life, in this case,
let us say, of the life of Vignac-sur-
Vézere, a town of 2,500 people in
the lovely Dordogne country, where
I spent several weeks, off and on, in
the last couple of months. The other
is the official France of the Fifth

ALEXANDER WERTH, The Na-
tion’s European correspondent, is
the author of France: 1940-1955 and
other books...

g August 29, 1959

Republic. The two are very different.
At Vignac, the other night, my next-
door neighbor, the jovial M. Louis
Fauré, who runs the Café des Sports,
was telling me about the new Town
Council, of which he had just be-
come Deputy Mayor. “We’ve got
seventeen members — twelve Radi-
cal-Socialists, two Socialists and
three right-wing ‘Independents’; as
you know, I am a Radical, reared
in the great tradition of Herriot and
our famous Dordogne deputy, the

late Yvon Delbos.”

“What!” I said, “not a single UNR
[Union pour la Nouvelle Répub-
lique| Gaullist on your new Town
Council? One would think you were
still living under the Fourth Re-
public!”

“Fourth?” said Fauré, “you mean
Third!”

Life, indeed, seemed to be going
on at Vignac just as it had done
thirty years ago. True, many people
in the town had since been active
in the wartime Resistance, when
there were two maquis in the neigh-

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borhood. In 1944, Vignac had a
Communist Mayor, now an embit-
tered little old man, who still lives
here, working as an insurance agent;
in 1956, a lot of the local shopkeep-
ers had gone Poujadist. But funda-
mentally this was still the old Re-
publican France, even though as
many as 76 per cent had voted for
de Gaulle in last year’s referendum
— not, it is true, out of any great
enthusiasm, but because they thought
he would be “less trouble.” (A squire
in the town had tried, at the height
of the May crisis, to start a Com-
mittee of Public Safety at Vignac,
attempting to enlist the support of
the four local gendarmes; but they
told him to go and chase himself,
and he’s been a laughing stock of
the town ever since.)

IN SHORT, the Third Republic
seemed to be continuing for the
tobacco-growing and_ pig-breeding
farmers, for the makers of truffled
paté, for the shopkeepers and arti-
sans of Vignac-sur-Vézére. There’s
still among them a good deal of
respect for de Gaulle; above all,
“he’s no great bother”; and there’s
even a certain admiration for his
having “put the deputies in their
place.” “Pretty smart of him to pay
them even more than the Fourth
Republic paid them; in this way
they’ll keep quiet and give no trouble
for fear of being dissolved.” And
some will add: “This Parliament,
with its almost Fascist majority, is
such a bad lot that it’s just as well
that de Gaulle is keeping them in
order.” For all their seemingly sound
Republicanism, these people have a
fairly strong anti-parliamentary
streak and, so far, they still have a
soft spot for de Gaulle — except, of
course, the local Communist (and a
few Socialist) railroad workers, who
saw de Gaulle’s requisition threat
a month ago (as a result of which
they called off their eight-hour pro-
test strike) as a Fascist measure;
and the schoolmasters, who fear that
under the present regime the church
schools will benefit at the expense
of the state schools, just as they
did under Vichy.

And yet doubts are beginning to
spread among these ordinary peo-

ple, primarily because of Algeria.

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Many, indeed, had hoped that de
Gaulle would be able to stop the
war; and now they don’t think so
any longer. One of the local boys
had recently gone to Algeria, and
has since had both hands blown off
by a grenade. Other local boys were
out there, too; most of them were
writing about it with a good deal of
loathing. But some, with the twenty-
eight-month military service now in
force, were being gradually condi-
tioned by the army officers into

Mw.

adopting a “commando” mentality,
and were glorying in military ex-
ploits, brutality and medals. “A
dangerous new generation of thugs
is being brought up there,” one of
the schoolmasters remarked.

On the whole, however, people
tend to shrug off even Algeria, as
much as to say: “It’s horrible; but
what can we do about it?” And, gen-
erally, they hate the Algerians, and
many have been filled with prop-
aganda by radio and the Bordeaux
papers about the “tremendous oil
wealth of the Sahara which will make
us independent of America.”

With all this goes the gentle, easy-
going life of the Third Republic. A
curiously mixed and muddled men-
tality, but one which still assumes
(and there’s very little in everyday
life to show that it isn’t true) that
French democracy is going on just
as before...

PARIS JIS MUCH less healthy.
Here people are much more con-
scious than the good people of
Vignac-sur-Vézére of ugly things
that are going on below the surface.
The immensely abort and highly
expensive celebrations of the féte

Snr

nationale of July 14_

everybody by their jarring falsity
and artificiality. Somebody remarked
that you could have given every child
in France a free anti-polio shot for
the price of the féte. Two notes
dominated the celebrations: gran-
deur and military glory, as exempli-
fied by the troops, planes and tanks,
and (this was André Malraux’s pet
idea) the inept attempt, with the
help of choirs, orchestras, brass
bands, flags and Phrygian bonnets
galore, to represent the de Gaulle
regime as the heir of “Notre Gr-r-
rande Révolution” of 1789. Among
the crowds (mostly middle-class) in
the Champs-Elysées and the Con-
corde (the East End crowds stayed
in the East End, and merely did a
little dancing at night in the café
round the corner) a brief glimpse of
de Gaulle caused a slight emotional
stir; but the rest was all wrong —
all the way from the chanting of
Revolutionary songs of 1790 to the
grim touch of the tail-end of the
military parade — a tail-end which
was composed (heaven knows whose
macabre or tongue-in-cheek idea
that was) of a dozen Black Maria
police cars with barred windows.

The “anti-France” press (for that
has now become an almost official
term; doesn’t it remind you of some-
thing? ) — the press of the liberals,
the left-wing intellectuals, the let’s-
end-the-war-in-Algeria people — has
been pretty savage about it, The
Canard Enchainé said you didn’t
celebrate the capture of the Bastille
when all of the small and large Bas-
tilles of France were bursting with
political prisoners, and one didn’t
celebrate the Franco-African Com-
munity, with de Gaulle’s Napoleon-
like distribution of banners to vari-
ous Negro prime ministers, when
French Frenchmen and North Af-
rican “Frenchmen” were continuing
to murder and massacre each other.
It was indecent. And L’ Express com-
mented on the “decay” of the Fifth
Republic, a decay which had proved
much more rapid than anyone could
have expected a year ago.

No doubt, having been fathered
by the Algiers colonels, the regime
could scarcely be anything but rot-
ten; yet there had been illusions:
about de Gaulle. Many had believed,

hd’ "hi
—

struck almost

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|
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many still believe, that his author-
ity is supreme; and yet facts were
showing that this was not so. In
Madagascar he had promised that
Raseta, the veteran Nationalist lead-
er, who had been in prison in France
for over ten years (ever since the in-
iquitous Tananarive trial of 1947)
would be free to return to his home-
land; on his way there, a few days
later, he was taken off the plane by
the French military at Jibuti and
sent back to France, whether de
Gaulle liked it or not. De Gaulle
was against torture, yet torture con-
tinued to be practiced both in Al-
geria and in France itself, as could be
seen from the famous La Gangréne
case (described in The Nation, July
18). And whoever disbelieves De-
bré’s story that the La Gangréne
charges are a tissue of lies and Com-
munist fabrications is treated as
“anti-France.” And, of course, the
Red Hand — “red with the blood of
the enemies of France” — who killed
the Algerian lawyer for the tortured
Algerian students is no nearer detec-
tion than were the Red Hand as-
sassins in Tunisia and Morocco a few
years ago.

Even if de Gaulle still had some
illusions that he could make peace
in Algeria (and a confidential gov-
ernment opinion poll has shown that

two-thirds of France are for immedi-
ate negotiations with the FLN), he
probably hasn’t any more. For one
thing, the French officers like it out
there. The risk of being killed is
small, and the pay stupendous, ac-
cording to French (or any other)
standards. A captain or major with
a large family at home is getting
as much as 350,000 frs, (over $700)
a month.

ON THE FACE of it, life in France
goes on pleasantly and sweetly. I
don’t want to make the obvious
crack that tourists in Nazi Germany
also found that the place was charm-
ing. There is a difference: here the
government may be partly Fascist,
but fundamentally people are whol-
ly attached to democracy, and the
regime is still hesitant to go too far,
angrily denies atrocities, and claims
to be in the great tradition of 1789.
But ordinary people are full of lit-
tle suspicions; and sometimes these
come to the surface. Although the
party congress last week again feeb-
ly re-elected Guy Mollet secretary-
general of the Socialist Party, the
delegates were very worried by the
apparent helplessness of de Gaulle
(from whom Mollet had expected
wonders), by the gradual “fasciza-
tion” of the country, by tortures, by

the gleichschaltung of the press and
radio, by the perpetuation of the Al-
gerian war. All that Mollet’s three-
hour speech really amounted to was
that he felt disappointed, that he
distrusted Debré and_ Soustelle,
but that the General must still be
given a chance. But in private, Mol-
let would add: “Now there’s only
one chance in ten that de Gaulle
will succeed — but he must be given
at least that small chance.”

Even inside the Gaullist UNR,
with its vast over-representation at
the National Assembly, something
of a conflict has broken out between
the relatively “liberal” and Big Busi-
ness wing, led by M. Albin Chala-
don, and the ultra wing, led by M.
Soustelle and, ominously enough,
supported by Premier Debré, whose
“dog-like faithfulness” to the Presi-
dent is no longer taken as much for
granted as it was a few months ago.

Can de Gaulle still break through
this vicious circle surrounding him
by dissolving the present National
Assembly? Will the Army allow him
to do it? For the Army knows that
a much more left-wing parliament
that a new election would inevitably
produce would advocate peace in
Algeria—and that the Army does not
want. It would, among other things,
ruin the chances of fascism in France.

The Crystal Palace Forsaken. . by Alan Harrington

Alan Harrington’s description of the white-collar worker in the
Elysian fields provided by the Big Corporation first appeared in
The Nation of January 11, 1958, under the title, “Life in the Crystal
Palace.” The article attracted attention in many quarters, including
the editorial offices of publisher Knopf, and as a result it has grown
into a full-size book, bearing the same title, which is scheduled to ap-
pear September 14 under the Knopf imprint.

With the permission of author and publisher, The Nation here-
with presents the penultimate chapter of the book.—Editors.

AFTER MORE than three years
with the company, I decided to
leave the Crystal Palace. There was
nothing particularly new in this. I
had made the grand decision hun-

dreds of times, and so do a great

many corporation men. Our reasons

_ for wanting to leave are an old story.

| August 29, 1959

4 5
ees

We incomplete rebels feel trapped
in a labyrinth of benevolence. We
feel that somehow we are not ful-
filling ourselves. The labyrinth is
comfortable, with a row of easy
chairs along the way. Music by
Muzak comes out of the walls. Every
year a gong rings and we advance

one stage more toward retirement.
Within the maze, accepting the maze,
we are never in doubt which way to
turn. Clearly defined arrows mark
the corporate route that has been
laid out for us by our superiors and
by the Executive Development Com-
mittee, One has only to follow the
arrows and trust to the company
that what lies around the corner will
be rewarding.

But these pleasing corridors are
still a labyrinth in that each of us
cannot find his own way. We can’t
see around corners. The arrows are
company arrows, the soft chairs are
company chairs, the music is com-
pany music. From time to time as
we move along we come upon ticker-

rr
Pit

tape machines that reveal to us the
impressive evidence of our net worth
— in the form of savings, stock hold-
ings and paid-up life insurance. En
route we also encounter wayside
zombies who have gone as far as
they can go, performing the same
duties over and over again. On each
prematurely old face there is a pa-
tient smile. We salute them hur-
riedly and move on. Somewhere
ahead is the room where we will
come to a stop, the place without
arrows where each of us meets his
blank wall.

YET THE Crystal Palace labyrinth
may by no stretch of the imagina-
tion be considered a prison. We see
Exit signs everywhere. At any time
we may open a door and leave. No
barriers will be placed in our way.
Are you unhappy? Just wash up,
collect your savings in a Jump sum,
and say good-by.

Timorously the incomplete rebel
thinks the matter over. He reviews
his lost dreams. He vaguely regrets
that he has not become the man he
hoped to be. He thinks wistfully of
what a pleasure it would be some
day to make a decision on his own.
He senses, especially if he has not
progressed beyond the middle ranks,
that a loss of manhood is involved
here. True, he will not be blamed for
it. Everyone is perfectly satisfied
with him. Still, in his semi-rebel-
lious heart he knows that he is no
longer a self-directed man, and that
he has abdicated a free man’s estate.
For he has a choice, and dares not
leave the Crystal Palace.

A corporate public-relations man
nods wisely to me in the press club. .
With an easy shrug of his shoulders,
he advises: “Forget it. I felt the
same way for a while, but after three
years you’re hooked, Believe me.”

I am looking at an advertisement
in a national magazine. It pictures
an earnest and rather neurotic look-
ing young man of about twenty-
seven in his shirt sleeves. He sits

at his desk before a pile of bills. In

front of him is a book titled: House-
is hol Budget & Expenses. Behind

his left shoulder is an artist’s balloon

: sd which shows the young man’s wife

shoveling food into an enormously

‘ - fat baby while. another little one

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TNL

#
looks on. The fedaline husband’s
collar has been torn open; his tie is
loose. Clearly he is worried, and in
the headline this young American
cries out: “I Want Security —
Right Now!”

Such a young man, it seems to
me, ought to be ashamed of himself.
But perhaps he is sick — afflicted
with a strange new illness that at-
tacks mainly the young. It is a
degeneration of nerve, a polio of the
spirit. “Security — Right Now.”
At the age of twenty-seven? Fabu-
lous. He must think that old age is
an awful thing, which it can be, but
have you noticed that the old men
are the bold men nowadays? Cranky
octogenarians speak their minds,
and their naive originality makes us
smile.

I remember a great old man, the
art connoisseur J, B. Neumann, in
the neighborhood of seventy, speak-
ing out to a young audience at a
party, and telling them passionately:
“People save money against sick-
ness, and already they are made sick
by saving the money! ... We al-
ready have as much fear as we can
carry! What are we afraid of? Say to
yourself: ‘Nothing must be,’ and
then you can live.”

Words from an old man — the
young smile and regard him coolly.
But I am boring our twenty-seven-
year-old friend who wants security
now. All he asks is: “Kindly take
me to your Crystal Palace.” Very
well then, take my hand and I'll
conduct you there. But don’t pay
too much attention to what I say,
because I have made up my mind
to leave. Yes, really.

The Crystal Palace’s new Sugges-
tion Box program had something to
do with my decision. Most com-
panies have programs of this kind.
Perhaps because we were a_head-
quarters unit — not a plant or labor-
atory — we were late in the game.
The sound theory behind the Sug-
gestion Box is that employees will
frequently come up with workable
cost-cutting ideas, means of achiev-
ing greater efficiency, etc., if they
are given a proper outlet. The Sug-
gestion Box enables them to get
around _stand-patt ers and _ pigeon-

holers who sit astride the usual chan-—

nels and react to any net, aston

sonal affront. The Suggestion Box
committee pays money for the ideas
accepted by the company—although
the department head involved must
be consulted sooner or later, and he

retains the power of rejection. (The

difference is that he must place his
rejection on record, in the open.)
Still and all, the boxes stationed at
the end of the corridors serve a good
purpose,

What depressed me was that, sit-
ting down as I did with countless
annoyances and frustrations buz-

zing around in my head, I couldn’t ~

think of any suggestions that would
have a chance of being accepted.
Checking over my helpful propos-
als, I realized that they were all
aimed in one way or another at
blowing up our labyrinth. I was
nothing more than a non-practicing
assassin. I had missed the point of
our program. The idea was to im-
prove the administrative system in
its present form, not to change the
form.

SINCE ANY large recommendation
would be unthinkable, I confined
myself to a few small ones. Not
that these were thinkable either:

I. Require that all letters (and
memorandums calling for a comment
or reply) be answered within a cer-
tain time limit.

2. Require that action be taken on
any project within a certain time
limit. Or if no move has been made,
administrators should explain why,
and signify on what date they intend
to begin acting on the matter.

3. Require that each member of a
committee working on a project be
identified. Also let his specific area of
responsibility be defined. If a mem-
ber of the committee has initiated
an idea or policy, name him. Also
name those who have been charged
with carrying out programs. Name
those who have succeeded; name
those who have failed. Do not permit
the group to spread responsibility.
Let the committee function in time-

honored fashion as a group, but at —

all times cite individual performance
within the group. This may be done
without editorializing. Simply say:

“Smith was in charge of this. It has.

been completed with the following
results.” Or; “Jones was in eens oe
this, It has not been com evel

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“from Bale as though SE Were: a per-

4. Establish the equivalent of the
Army’s Inspector General (IG) sys-
tem, with proper civilian restraints
and modifications. Let an_ outside
board of auditors (paid by the com-
pany but not members of the com-
pany) sit in judgment of the Crystal
Palace’s administrative practices. This
outside board would receive copies
of all major correspondence. It would
evaluate performance on the basis of
correspondence and whatever other
information the company chose to
provide.

Members of this board would serve
for a stated period of one, two, or
three years, not longer. They would
have the function of shareholders’
representatives, but they would not
have a vested interest in the palace.
That is, they would never join the
company or hold shares in it. These
inspectors would report annually to
management and to shareholders on
the state of our corporate adminis-
tration. In addition, upon retiring
the members would file a farewell
report. Their faedings would be purely
advisory (but on the record); they
would have no power of decision.

I showed this four-point dream to
a number of my colleagues who
found much to approve in it. They
assumed, of course, that I wasn’t
serious. That’s right, I thought, I’m
not. I brooded at my desk, a thor-
oughly tamed playboy. Spiritually,
my net worth was zero. A corporate
version of the village atheist, the in-
complete palace rebel is a cracker-
barrel failure who drinks martinis
instead of cider. The Exit doors
opening out of our labyrinth were
unlocked. Not quite, quite yet, dar-
ing to open them, I determined that
the next best thing to do would be
to toss a note over the wall in the
hope that some passer-by might
pick it up and report me.

The note took the form of an ar-
ticle in a magazine, the first chapter
of this book, and it was called “Life
in the Crystal Palace.” It is not even
possible to claim that the incomplete
rebel initiated this, for a_ friend,
novelist Herbert Gold, suggested to
Carey McWilliams, editor of The
Nation, who was interested in such
an article, that I might write it for
him.

The circumstances surrounding
the publication of a magazine piece
are of no great importance, I realize.

August 29, 1959

They are noted here simply to in-
dicate how a man who thinks of
himself, hurrah, as an individualist,
and lets it go at that for a number
of years, can shilly-shally and ration-
alize when he is faced with a small,
very small challenge. True, few of us
in America write and sign articles
containing critical references to our
employers while we are still on the
payroll — even if the company isn’t
identified. No one, after all, really
wants to be fired unless he can af-
ford it. On the other hand, in the
past two decades people all over the
world have risked immediate death
in order to print newspapers and

handbills.

THE PROBLEM of the incomplete
rebel in the United States is, there-
fore, schoolboyish in comparison.
How can you begin to compare pos-
sibly being fired in a plentiful econ-
omy and being killed? We haven’t
lived through that. Since we haven’t,
our context is different. Our reference
point, small as it may be, is that of
losing one’s job, and the rebel’s fear
of it.

Prolonged association with the
Crystal Palace tends to make men
sluggish and fearful of the outside.
Then there are the convenient and
permissible excuses not to speak up.
We have obligations to wives, ex-
wives, children and all that. “Well, if
I were on my own I wouldn’t hesi-
tate, but...” I am ashamed of the

way I backed and filled for several
weeks before letting the article be
published.

I thought: “If you claim to be
unhappy on a job, you should either
get out or try to change things.
Above all, if you feel like doing
something about it, and you back
down because of timidity, that’s fine
— people will understand — but
thereafter don’t pretend to be a free
spirit, because you’re not.” (I also
felt, naively as it turned out, that
no one in the Crystal Palace would
be reading this particular magazine
anyhow. )

There was timidity, and something
else — a feeling of guilt, that the
writer might be doing an injury to
the corporation which has always,
to the best of its ability, treated him
well. It may seem strange that a
person can feel guilty toward a cor-
poration, but he can. Although (ra-
tionalization again) the article would
give the magazine’s readers a far
more favorable picture of the com-
pany than they might have antic-
ipated, still it was inconsistent, it
was perhaps disloyal, to say a word
against the Crystal Palace while one
was accepting its benefits. This mole-
hill of a problem will seem pretty
stupid to most people, I am afraid,
unless they have worked for years
in a palace. But I felt impotent, in-
tellectually and morally smothered,
and kept from the truth, by the or-
ganization’s decency to me.

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In the small context of this ad-
venture it was exciting to observe
the penetration of The Word into
the Crystal Palace. The invasion of
these few pages of print into our
building could have been plotted with
pins, like the movement of troops on
a military map. The printed word
has such a fascinating, runaway
force behind it when it breaks loose
within closed-off surroundings. Print
something that relates to a group
of people who read about their ac-
tivities only in the mealy columns
of house organs like the Palace Voice,
and The Word runs wild. After the
initial penetration all bets are off.
The outlaw pages spread like the
plague. Whether the message is good
or bad, friendly or unfriendly, if it
purports to be the truth it will be
read.

So far as I know one reader started
it. He was curiously enough not one
of our employees. By chance he was
an influential figure outside the
palace whose opinions are greatly
respected by management. He was
closely associated with the company
and thought he recognized in the
text a certain resemblance. He found
the article interesting, and passed it,
you might say, diagonally down to
our board of directors with a com-
ment that was not unfavorable.
Meanwhile it also came into the
possession of another executive at
the palace, his secretary read it, and
the news started on its way.

Within a few days, with the aid

of duplicating machines, copies were
all over the building. The reception
was so good (from my point of view)
and given with such a full heart,
that I wanted to sing above the
Muzak, not only for, myself but for
everybody. Friends remained friends,
and were not reluctant to pound the
writer on the back and congratulate
him. Dozens of people phoned, and
many more, some of whom I ‘barely
knew by sight, stopped me in the
corridor to say hello and thank you.
One surprising older lady, whom
everyone assumes to be the most
orthodox of company girls, actually
took me in her arms in a corner. Her
eyes were flashing and she said:
“Oh, Lordy, if I could be young
again how differently I’d arrange
my life!”

IN GENERAL, the reaction to the
piece was strongly favorable in the
lower and middle ranks, and less so
upward through the higher echelons.
But a number of high-level execu-
tives, too, communicated to me their
restrained and limited approval. In
all honesty, and without vanity, I
must say that there was a feeling of
something like gratitude in the air.
It is so easy to underestimate peo-
ple and generalize about them in
airy fashion, to say that they are
hiding from life, and that their souls
are dead. Perhaps we are hiding from
life at the Crystal Palace, but I
don’t think we want to. I think we
have been hoaxed into it, and en-

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, ee ie et

“ Ad é fa lh Pee “eI
tered, slipped without rez
we were doing, into a: boring para-

dise. Even so, in many of us, the

lively spirit is not dead but drowsing.
I know from this one small ex-
perience with an article that when
the intruder comes, the itinerant
newsboy with doubt for sale, we
gather around him; we are excited,
and interested in what he has to
say. Not all the party-line mush
we read in the Palace Voice can
change that.

Also it would seem from this in-
cident, although it can’t be proved,
that something is wrong with the
way our lives are arranged at the
palace. Otherwise the reaction to a
relatively obscure magazine piece
would not have been as strong as it
was. People don’t fake an explosive
response like that.

Deep within many of us, I imagine,
lies the desire to enjoy a slight
martyrdom — one that does not hurt
too much, and is not too permanent.
Perhaps for this reason I was quite
annoyed with management for not
firing me. This was carrying decency
and liberalism too far. I would have
fired me, out of hand. But manage-
ment was correct, I see now, in per-
mitting the malcontent to go of his
own accord. His position was clearly
untenable. He would rightly never
be trusted again, and have not the
slightest reason to expect advance-
ment. Several months later I applied
for and received a writing followship
and handed in my resignation.

The Inevitable Four-Day Week « « by Edward W. Ziegler

A NATION rich beyond all prece-
dent comes to a fork in the gold-
paved road: will Americans grasp
for more money or more leisure? In
a land where everything seems pos-
sible, it is likely that we'll grasp for
both—higher wages and a shorter
work week.

The forces that today enable
200,000 miners to produce more coal

EDWARD W. ZIEGLER, a former

newspaperman, is now an editor at

McGraw-Hill.

than 700,000 used to produce make
the four-day week a fast-approach-
ing certainty. Vice President Nixon,
in the 1956 campaign, prophesied
that all Americans would be
working the four-day week in the
“not too distant future.” Coming
from him, the idea immediately be-
came respectable.” In response to
Nixon, U.A.W. president Walter
Reuther said 1958 would see the
“first . . . step toward achievement
of the four-day wee nave gput 1958
was a dismal time 0 auto manufac-

LA
ne a
GD edt

turers and workers. It was not to be
the year. When then?

Management consultant Eugene
Benge of Asheville, N.C., has said:
“The four-day week will become a
reality, for millions of workers in
automated industries, probably by
1962.” He added that other work-
ers — notably in the service and re-
tail trades — “may not see the four-
day week until 1970.”

Almost no one will say flatly that
the shorter work week will never
come, The steady increase in Amer-

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ican productivity provides testimony
too persuasive to ignore. Yet even
productivity isn’t the whole story.
There are two other major aspects
to the problem: technological un-
employment, which makes the short-
er work week desirable; and rising
manufacturing costs, which make
it unattractive to industry. In the
long run, a reluctant industry, un-
willing to spread the work, will soon
find that its own best interests will
be served by shortening the work
week. And then may come a revo-
lution as far-reaching as that caused
by the automobile.

Productivity is usually defined as
the total value added to raw ma-
terials by manufacture, divided by
the total man-hours (with dollar
figures corrected for inflation). De-
spite this standard definition, the
people who talk most about produc-
tivity are forever tampering with
the figures. Both management and
labor use the figures to prove what-

ever suits their purposes. For ex-
ample:

| Wages have risen faster than
productivity.

| Wages have lagged behind
productivity.

| Rising productivity is creating
new demands for labor.

| Rising productivity is shrink-
ing the demand for labor.

Each of these conclusions is ad-
duced in any discussion of the four-
day week by both labor and manage-
ment, Supporting evidence for every
one has been dredged up, but the
evidence proves nothing, really, ex-
cept that management has made off
with the fruits of increased produc-
tivity in some years, labor in others.

The National Bureau of Economic
Research recently published an anal-
ysis of productivity changes. Among
the most significant conclusions was
that output per man-hour has been
rising at a high rate. For the twelve-
year period 1945-57, the rate was
3.3 per cent a year, compared with
2.4 per cent annually for the past
sixty years. Every worker today
produces five times more’ than his
grandfather did in 1880. But it is
only since World War II that per-
fected statistics have made available
the output-per-man-hour figures that
today go to the heart of the four-

August 29, 1959

a
a eo
a -

day week controversy. The figures
indicate that productivity and wages
tend to seesaw from year to year:
productivity improves more than
wages in bad years; wages improve
more than productivity in good
years.

Industry feels increasing pressure
to refine and specialize its production
facilities to increase productivity. In
the process, low-skill jobs vanish and
high-skill jobs tend to increase. Ma-
chinists, toolmakers, engineers of all
kinds — men with training — can
usually find jobs. This is of no com-
fort to unskilled workers like the
300,000 who have dropped off the
U.A.W. roll in recent years. Without
a skill you just can’t be an auto
worker any more. The spectacle of
Kentucky miners going to work at
non-union mines armed with shot-
guns to fight the union that made
them dispensable is another symptom
of the shrinking job market for the
unskilled.

Part of the solution lies in the
rapidly expanding service industries,
which have been taking up the la-
bor slack for forty years. According
to Department of Labor figures, in
1919 there were twenty-five million
“goods producing” workers in this
country; today, the figure is just
about the same. On the other hand,
service employees have grown in
number from only fifteen million in
1919 to over thirty million today.
Today’s factory hand is a member
of a rapidly shrinking minority of
about 16.5 million workers.

GIVEN THE rapid rise in produc-
tivity and the changing nature of
the labor force, the four-day week

seems inevitable if only to give con-
sumers another eight hours in which
to consume, and to spur the service
industries onward by the same meas-
ure. Our increasing capacity to
produce goods of all kinds threatens
to run away from markets rich
enough to buy the goods. American
steel mills can produce a year’s sup-
ply of steel in nine months. Industry
can disgorge such a flood of goods
that there is a possibility of produc-
ing ourselves right into the poor-
house.

Under these conditions, it would
seem reasonable to expect industry
to grant the four-day week. But to
boost productivity, industry has to
increase capital outlay for better ma-
chines. To recover the investment
quickly, management will often run
the new machines more hours than
the old. To reduce the work week
while running the machines more
hours would mean increased recruit-
ment and training of labor, greater
fringe benefits, more overtime (or
second-shift) costs. All add up to a
higher labor bill, and that is just
where industrial cost-reduction activ-
ity is concentrated. Labor already
accounts for from 35 to 55 cents of
the cost dollar, and management will
oppose any move that will tend to
increase the percentage.

FROM HERE on, the story becomes
still more complex. Excessive manu-
facturing costs, expensive labor and
“moonlighting” are just three of the
problems.

Manufacturing costs have been
under “cost push” pressure ever since
the pent-up demands of the early
postwar years were satisfied. Rising
costs in those days were the result
of too much money chasing too few
goods. That explanation no longer
holds, yet the “cost push” persists,
and some economists now argue that
it is inherent in an expanding econ-
omy. The “cost push” seems to have
abated only during the 1949-50 and
1953-54 recessions. (As economist
Gardiner Means has pointed out,
the 1957-58 recession marked the re-
peal of the law of supply and de-
mand, The “cost push” continued
right on through it.)

At any rate, it has become fear-
fully expensive to equip and main-

eve PCS. Se Rana ta a oa +h (Ate

tain a factory. The National In-
dustrial Conference Board estimates
that industry has invested $16,000
in capital equipment for each work-
er it employs. A single room full
of computers costing $1,000,000
may require the full-time services of
three resident engineers to pamper,
console and adjust them. The com-
puters control production, schedul-
ing, inventory, accounts receivable,
quality — just about everything ex-
cept the engineers themselves. They
are controlled by a diffident vice
president.

Men, like machines, are becoming
more carefully utilized as a conse-
quence of their rising dollar value.
Happily, economic necessity has led
industry to honor the humanitarian
values that have now nearly effaced
the “dark, satanic mills” of the
eighteenth, nineteenth and_ early
twentieth centuries. Typical of in-
dustry’s new attitude is the widely
admired approach of Rensis Likert
of the University of Michigan. Likert
holds that human resources must be
maintained and operated with as
much diligence as the most intricate
tape-controlled milling machine. A
further example: General Electric
lumped all its “relations” staff serv-
ices into a separate department last
May, with a new vice president to
oversee its operations. Said G. E.:
“The department will concentrate
on ‘one of the most demanding and
potentially productive frontiers in
the business world.’ ” Falling into its
jurisdiction are behavioral research,
public affairs, union relations, em-
ployee relations and personnel devel-
opment and education. G. E.’s main
purpose in reorganizing its human
relations is to find out “what it is
that motivates people ... to do a
better job.”

It hasn’t always been a calamity if
a low-paid man failed to produce at
top efficiency. But today it is in-
tolerably expensive to have low ef-
ficiency from men who are now high-

; ly paid workers.

But paradoxically, the more high-
i ' ly skilled workers (as well as most
_ managers) can get away with doing
- far less than five days’ work in five
_ days’ time. For that reason, one
ean argue that the four-day week is
already here for many Americans.

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There is widespread overstaffing,
talent-hoarding and duplication of
functions among skilled workers and
managers. One explanation, of course,
is that this is one way for a com-
pany to keep its competitors from
getting richer in skilled manpower.
Another interesting argument runs
like this: Industry is defensive about
its exorbitant profits, and feels stig-
matized when it returns a high net
profit. Therefore there is padding of
personnel, particularly on high-skill
levels, These additional, expensive
workers and managers absorb most
of the excess profit. In the most
prosperous industries, managerial
costs are rarely trimmed except in
the most abysmal of depressions. The
argument catches at least the outside
corner of truth.

What it seems to boil down to is
this: today the skilled are aligned
against the unskilled. The four-day
week could come tomorrow. But it
won’t. Industry does not willingly
surrender its prerogatives. It took
the Great Depression to bring the
five-day week. But the cold realities
may soon change the attitude of the
skilled oligarchs in labor and in man-
agement,

ONE MORE problem must still be
skirted. It is the growing practice
of “moonlighting” — holding two
jobs at the same time. At a con-
ference of the New York School of
Industrial and Labor Relations in
April of 1958, a discussion of a
shorter work week drifted into talk
about dual job-holding. It was re-
ported that among Akron’s tire
workers (who now work a thirty-
six-hour week), 10 per cent have
second jobs, and another 30 per cent
have part-time jobs [see “Less Work
— Less Leisure,” by Harvey Swados,
The Nation, Feb. 22, 1958]. A Na-
tional Industrial Conference Board
survey has revealed that 25 per
cent of production workers ané 50
per cent of highly skilled workers in
heavy industry have two jobs. In
the absence of any tradition or firm
policy, there is little being done
about “moonlighting” — except oc-
casional breast-beall Hing and viewing
with alarm.

So what do youl do if you give a

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him turn around and get another
job for the other three days? That
is one problem so knotty that no
one has suggested anything more
specific than to “educate the work-
ers as to the uses of leisure.” There
was a day when such a suggestion
would have raised a tidal wave of
guffaws. But no more.

THE FOUR-DAY week is coming,
despite the many problems and ob-
stacles. It makes good economic
sense in a nation where the classic
condition of excess labor and scarce
goods is reversed. Here we are long
on goods and short on skilled labor.
And here we will soon find our-
selves spending more time consum-
ing and less time producing. There
does not seem to be any logical
alternative — barring a comprehen-
sive, long-term foreign-aid program.

The extra day of leisure for Amer-
icans will have an effect as pro-
found as that produced by the au-
tomobile in the first quarter of this
century. The nature of these effects
will depend, of course, on what we
do with the leisure afforded us. But
the potential for a better life is there.
Although the president of the Rock-
well Manufacturing Company once
called the four-day week “dangerous
socialism,” others will hail it as proof
that our economic system, despite
its faults, in the long run adapts it-
self well to the needs of the people.

(Continued from inside cover)

provide “equal opportunities to all other
candidates for the same office.” A Sen-
ate subcommittee has approved a bill
that would virtually ban the Socialist
Labor Party and all other minority
parties from the use of radio and TV.
What are some of the possible ob-
jectives of those who wish to amend
Section 315? First, it could be a good
start toward suppressing minority par-
ties and minority opinion. Second, it
will provide more revenue for the radio
and TV networks by eliminating the
free time for minority parties. Third,
it will avoid embarrassment for the
Republican and Democratic parties
with their almost identical programs.
And fourth, it will weaken the protec-
tion that is given to all the people un-
der Article V of the Constitution,
Henry R. Korman
Longview, Wash. by
Ni an ) [

silk oe rt

7, To , i

BOOKS and the ARTS

Apropos of Don Juan

Emile Capouya

NO DOUBT every age has the parables
it deserves. But it should be our study
to deserve better parables than those we
have. I am thinking of how we
choose to construe some of our familiar
legends, what light the bias of our time
leads us to throw upon the worthies, the
heroes, the villains of tradition. And it
seems to me that our notion of Don Juan
is an instructive case in point.

I suppose we must expect that as the
scientific and analytic habit of mind be-
comes general, it will encourage a shal-
low reductivism. In this regard, the
well-known religious and metaphysical
bent of some of our distinguished men
of science is anomalous, for it runs
counter to the current of contemporary
thought. The reductive tendency is the
dominant one with us.

That is our situation even with regard
to legendary figures, like that of Don
Juan; it is an unfortunate state of af-
fairs, and one that is far from having
no consequences. The imaginative realm
is the only area of conduct in which we
enjoy a relative freedom, and the strat-
egy we adopt in dealing with the crea-
tures of our imagination has a very real
influence on the shape of our world. We
are injured in our human essence when-
ever a fool asserts that Shakespeare was
really Francis Bacon, that Van Gogh’s
and Gauguin’s styles are the outward
and visible forms of, respectively, par-
esis and leprosy, that the explanation
for Blake and Yeats is that they were
cuckoo, that Hamlet is a_ walking
Oedipus complex, that Goethe was over-
sexed. Of these assertions, some are ar-
rant nonsense, some have the color of a
meager kind of truth. But none is in-
teresting, because none has any useful-
ness. Explanations of this kind are not
meant to explain but to explain away.
They are the expression of crude level-
ing impulses. They reverse the ethic of
mhil hwmanum, and proclaim instead:
Since he was a man like me, he can’t
have been very much.

It cannot be denied that there is a
homely comfort in the notion that the
most eminent men are as mean, corrupt
and cowardly as ourselves — or else
mad and diseased. It excuses us from

EMILE CAPOUYA is an editor with
a New York publishing house.

August 29, 1959

ik’

attempting to emulate them, and no
doubt there is a conservative force, an
instinctive social wisdom at work here,
protecting us from the dangers to which
courage might expose us. But the end
result of the reductive habit is to con-
firm us in apathy, to insure that we re-
main moral helots, indifferent to our
own vital interests and incapable of serv-
ing them.

THE POPULAR versions of some ideas
derived from Marx and Freud are good
examples of the fatal simplification that
can overtake useful doctrines in this era
of mass-culture. According to the vulgar
Marxism of the salon and magazine, a
given form of social organization is the
inevitable outgrowth of the reigning sys-
tem of economic production. And since,
in this view, social organization can be
wholly accounted for by reference to
something else, one is led to feel that
that something else exhausts all the pos-
sible senses of the notion of social or-
ganization. The form assumed by any
society comes to seem not merely in-
evitable (given the substructure of pre-
vailing conditions of production) but ir-
relevant. The superstructure is felt to be
somehow less real than the substructure.
It is not so much a product as a by-
product. Governments, laws and parties
play no creative role in human affairs,
since history is the direct result of the
action of economic forces, unmediated
by social forms and usages. Of course,
on the level of common sense we may
understand that churches and country
clubs are fully as real as mines and
mills, but that understanding forsakes
us when we examine the social structure
through the quizzing-glass of popular
Marxism,

A similar schema disposes of human
personality, according to the salon and
magazine version of Freudian theory.
Personality in the individual is conceived
to be essentially a quantum of fluid
energy, around which society throws
containing dykes. The system can best
be understood on the analogy of hydraul-
ics; it lends itself to illustration by
metaphors of pressure and spatial con-
finement. Seen in these terms, conduct
is the outward manifestation of psychic
energy under pressure; in the last anal-
ysis, it is interesting or significant only

because of its symptomatic character, in
that it points to an underlying reality.
From that assumption, it is not very
far to a medical practice that tacitly
considers mental health to be adjust-
ment, almost without reference to the
moral status of whatever canons or con-
ditions are to be adjusted to.

These sad instances of intellectual
entropy, of ideas running out in sands
and shallows, are peculiarly character-
istic of the mental climate of our time.
Some few notions are esoteric enough
to resist popular re-interpretation; not
much has been done in the way of dilut-
ing the special theory of relativity, for
example — if we except those great con-
versation stoppers, “Well, everything is
relative,” and, “Of course, it all depends
on your point of view.” But almost any
useful general idea can be so abused that
it befogs the subject it was designed to
illuminate. To take a familiar case, the
pedagogical theories of John Dewey are
revolutionary in their common. sense,
humanity and unique concern for the
proper ends of education, and yet they
have been debased, in the hands of
shallow practitioners, to the point where
one must sympathize with the outraged
Neanderthals who cry scorn on Progres-
sive Education. Here again, the same
unhappy mechanism is at work. The
original insight is held to exhaust its
subject, and eventually supersedes that
subject as the focus of attention. Final-
ly, the doctrine degenerates into a verbal
expedient for avoiding further thought
on the matter. In a reductive age, all
things great and small are brought down
to the same scale of uselessness.

AS A counter of popular speech, Don
Juan represents a man who is inordin-
ately successful with the ladies. He has
dash, charm and enough of the trap-
pings of gallantry to make him an ac-
complished seducer. His specialty is
sweeping women off their feet. The art
or good fortune that might enable him
to make them happy is not among his
attributes; indeed, once the women have
been swept off their feet, our imagina-
tion leaves them in that posture, not
troubling to inquire how and in what
condition they find themselves once
more in contact with terra firma. Don
Juan’s personality (still in terms of
popular speech) has the effect of an-
nihilating the personalities of his mis-
tresses. Oddly enough, he is not much
resented for it. Men consider him a
nuisance, but that is chiefly professional

jealousy. Women deplore him in prin-
ciple, but, unless they happen to be his
victims, deplore him only in that tone
of caressing deprecation in which one
says, “a handsome devil,” “a gay dog.”

All this does not add up to a character.
a In the popular mind Don Juan is not
Pe even the sketch of a personality, but
: simply the symbol for a fairly abstract
notion: lust. Lust so uncomplicated by
the traditional pieties, and so free of
competing impulses directed toward tra-
i" ditional ambitions — for money, status,
affection, security — that it has tremen-
dous impetus and efficiency. It is so
sincere that it is bound to be successful;

ee
‘

oe the woman who resists or even hesitates
bs incurs a certain onus as calling into
oe question the principles ef cosmic balance.

There is, finally, a kind of beauty in the
; action of the naked impulse that is
x proper to Don Juan, the beauty as it
5 were of a natural jorce — for of course
c beauty has no necessary connection with
a anything we may approve on moral
grounds. The beautiful is more nearly
what is direct, spontaneous — in Ham-
a let’s phrase, “express in action” — so
that artists struggle to achieve the ap-
i) pearance of directness and spontancity
; in their works, actors in their persons,

and athletes in their play, all by a con-

centrated labor of practice and forget-
7 ting. In Pe, it is not his airs and
graces but the beauty of express action
i that is seductive about Don Juan.

: BUT THIS Don Juan a l'état pur, the
Don Juan who is lust made animate and
. nothing more, is a far cry from the
: literary portraits that keep his name
re alive. He is very different from the Don
Juan Tenorio conceived by Tirso de
Molina, who is part picaro, the rogue
and adventurer of Spanish tradition. He
is only a distant relative of Mozart’s Don
Giovanni, or Moliére’s or Byron’s’ or
Shaw’s Don Juan. Stendhal suggests that
the tendencies incarnated in the literary
Don Juan could only arise in an atmos-
phere of Counter Reformation; Stendhal
worshipped strength of character, which
he defined as the strength that allows
a man to dispense with hypocrisy, and
his portrait of Don Juan is basically that
of a radical contemner of convention,
_ extended to include all sanctions human
and divine. It is with this hint that an
7 peaeerranding of the composite literary
re begins.
Don Juan was the character whom
ea Counter Reformation endowed with
= it particularly feared. An iron
odoxy and conservatism was_ its
al. In morals, ethics, and social and
litical philosophy it opposed from
first vague adumbrations the

At)
tendencies that were to become the
dominant themes of modern civilization:
rationalism, romanticism, secularism, na-
tionalism, democracy. Ribadeneira, who
preached the Spanish crusade against
England, particularly affected two terms
of opprobrium. One was “heretic,” the
other novedades, or “novelties.” Heresy
and novelty were to the Counter Refor-
mation what “agitator” and “anarchist”
were to the era of the Palmer Raids, or
“red” and “creeping socialism” today.
The Don Juan of Moliére and Mozart is
more than an obsessed womanizer; he is
an esprit fort, a freethirker, a rationalist,
an agnostic, an atheist, a freemason —
and, for all I know, an anabaptist, a
single-taxer, and a follower of Silvio
Gesell. Far from being in league with
the devil, as was his predecessor, Faust,
Don Juan is a man who does not believe
in the devil — the appropriate punish-
ment for such perversity is, of course,
hellfire. What horrified and enthralled
the audiences for whom Don Juan was
first created was his openly proclaimed
credo, Ni Diew ni maitre. The delicious
terror of his revolt was rounded with a
consummation in fire, representing with
great dramatic effect those aspects of
Hell that the spiritual exercises pre-
scribed by Saint Ignatius Loyola com-
mend to our attention in all physi-
cal immediacy — flame, heat, the brim-
stone stench, appalling noise.

DON JUAN without the added dimen-
sions of full-blown iconoclasm would be
no fit instrument for the Counter Refor-
mation morality play, even though it
is his restless lust that supplies the chief
impetus for the drama. Reduced to the
bare principle of amatory conquest, he
would be as skeletal as the idea of Don
Juan that survives in popular speech.
Indeed, whenever our attention is di-
rected specifically to his priapic raison
d’étre in, say, Mozart’s Don Giovanni,
he immediately becomes mere caricature,
and his mistresses puppets. His exploits
with women are reduced to a comic
statistic — in Ispagna mila e tre. Nor
can our imagination make the sum come
alive and represent a procession of rav-
ished maids and deceived wives. If these
women were real, we should be horrified
by their fate, but we can no more take
seriously the injury done them than we
can believe in the tremendous blows
dealt out in a Punch and Judy show,
In his role of comic energumen, Don
Juan destroys the idea of womankind,
because in that role he is himself no
man. It is for this fason that, when
Donna Elvira, in Mouart’s opera, belies
her statistical past an

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pire of comedy, ane we are itt at ease
until familiarity at last persuades us that
she is a wronged woman rather than a
misplaced integer.

The Counter Reformation was wise in
refusing to entertain the notion of a
Don Juan reduced to a single principle.
When all is said and done, lust alone is
not an adequate object of contemplation
for an adult audience. For one thing,
unbridled desire, shown in unending
pursuit and abandonment, is not very
interesting. Faust accomplishes all that
in one move by choosing Helen for his
paramour. The quest, after all, is for
the woman who will confer ineffable
satisfactions — “Sweet Helen, make me
immortal with a kiss”; with a melan-
choly persistence, the Don goes from one
woman to the next, but Faust demands
at once the face that launched a thou-
sand ships.

It is significant, nevertheless, that the
search for some supreme sexual fulfill-
ment is common to the legends of Faust
and Don Juan. It is of a piece with their
colossal self-assurance that both heroes
pretend to a license and satisfaction that
cannot be reconciled with the facts of
our conditional world. The Counter
Reformation did not choose to believe
that this fierce claim could be restricted
to a single human concern. Instinct or
logic suggested rather that a preoccupa-
tion with sexual conquest, in defiance of
convention, implied further dangerous
novedades that were inimical to the
health of the established order. At the
very least, it implied a sexual partner
who was fully human, ie., a woman,
and not a parcel of real estate, a ward,
a servant, a domestic animal, or any
of the other sub-human avatars of
womankind before the nineteenth cen-

Renoir Girl

Breasts high and open, with
the curving belly, to the sun—
legs and arms nervelessly
sprawled on the knoll.

Eyelids lightly closed,

lips relaxed in enigmatic smiling
at whatever daydream itches
slowly in her mind.

It doesn’t matter that the frame
couples her with desultory clouds,
a frond of bush curving

above the round thigh like a never
quite caressing hand.

No touch can break

the budding flesh’s perpetual

summer, nor wake -

death from this sunshiny dream. o
hi gall -Barniss NV >

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’

tury. Don Juan’s womanizing may de-

stroy Shadow-women on the stage,
and in quantities that run to four
figures, but, offstage, an obsession

with women admits them to de facto
membership in the human race. Sostegno
e gloria d'umanita (“the support and
glory of mankind”), says Don Giovanni
of woman, and there is a wicked pos-
sibility that he means it. Sexual license
in Don Juan is part of a larger con-
figuration of penchants, appetites and
presuppositions that is bound to con-
flict at many points with the canons of
a society that deliberately cleaves to a
radical orthodoxy. Moreover, in the
light of Freud’s suggestion that the sex-
ual instincts are ambivalently disruptive
or cementing forces of great significance
to society, it may seem particularly ap-
propriate for a figure who threatens the
social order with his advanced opinions
and general cynicism and exuberance, to
threaten it also by a display of out-
rageous libertinism. Individualism, the
fragmentation of society into egotistic
atoms, the modern sense of self, and the
ground it provides for splendid in-
dependence or sordid irresponsibility —
all these weighty consequences can fol-
low in the train of a late-renaissance
nobleman who sets no bounds to his
carnal appetites. The Counter Reforma-
tion saw fit to make Don Juan carry
that full weight of meaning. Our own
age has chosen to devalue him — for
characteristic reasons.

In a now-famous essay, Gregorio
Maranon identifies a human prototype
of the Don Juan of legend, and makes
use of biographical evidence to support
a general theory about compulsive
libertinism. In brief, Marafion asserts
that Don Juan’s promiscuity is a mask
for homosexuality and impotence. As
psychological doctrine, some such thesis
has long been current in countries that
have been influenced by Freud’s theories.
To this day, however, Latin countries
have been little affected by Freud, and
Spain least of all; in this regard, Mara-
fion must be something of a pioneer,
and can probably lay claim to original-
ity. In any case, the philosopher Unamu-
no is quoted, in a recent number of the
New York magazine [bérica, as agreeing
with Maranon that Don Juan shows
signs of “deficient virility.” (Incidental-
ly, Unamuno’s historical prototype dif-
fered from Marafion’s. Unamuno held
that the best scholarship had established
that Don Juan’s name was not Tenorio
but Tenoiro, and that, far from being a
native of Seville, he had come originally
from Galicia — in other words, that he
was no aristocrat but the Spanish equiv-
alent of a Yankee peddler.)

August 29, 1959

The question of whether or not pro-
miscuity is connected with homosexual-
ity and/or impotence is a technical one
and, within the limits of definition, one
of fact. It may be true, as a matter of
clinical observation, or it may not. De-
bate on this point is the prerogative of
the initiate, I take it, and the extent
to which the idea has become a received
truth of amateur psychology 1s neither
here nor there. But I think that our

strategy blunders badly
apply the notion, whether
clinical principle or popular cliché, to a
legendary figure, to Don Juan.

imaginative
when we

Marafion deprecates promiscuous be-
havior — and I think we must all agree
that in the present state of society it is
plainly not a good thing, since its human
consequences are so unpleasant — but
then he goes on to say: Moreover, it is
nothing but misdirected pederasty, or
else impotence, or else both. Libertinism
is bad, on this showing, because it is
really something worse. It is a pity, in
a way, that Maranon does not tell us
for what realer, remoter horrors homo-
sexuality and impotence are front-organ-
izations.

APPLYING such human measures to
the Don Juan of literature has the ef-
fect of devaluing what else is useful in
the legend. It has the effect of denigrat-
ing and neutralizing the qualities that
Shaw perceived in the character, and
that led him to incarnate them in the
revolutionist, John Tanner, in Man and
Superman. In the last analysis, Marafion
is out to geld Don Juan, and that his
attempt should find favor in our eyes
is a commentary on our times. The
Counter Reformation dressed Don Juan

in the gaudy robes of its most pressing
fears. Our own age, so much more timid
and tacit, undercuts the entire question
of the necessity for revolution by declar-
ing that the revolutionary is a defective.
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini — our
era has suffered so much from the ac-
tions of outsize personalities that it 1s
ready to condemn out of hand any un-
orthodoxy, any originality, any exuber-
ance, any protest. A homosexual and
impotent age accuses its creative spirits
of perversity and barrenness, even as it
lays its frustrations at the door of
woman (the castrating female — save
the mark, we even have a technical term
for the chimera that represents our ex-
cuse for not trying to change our cas-
trating society). We like to be told that
men are being molded to an innocuous,
uncombative, asexual pattern, as Or-
ganization Men and members of the
Lonely Crowd. It is easy to see why the
notion that Don Juan is merely sick,
sick, sick is congenial to a society that
is made up of gelded men and altered
women,

The shallow profundities that are the
intellectual coin of our day are more
dangerous than they seem. Conceived
in fear, and bearing no relation to our
real situation — which is that our polit-
ical life is in a bad way and getting
steadily worse — they reduce thought to
the level of gossip. It will take a very
different spirit to get us out of the
woods; it is no help at all to look on
artists as infants, statesmen as people
with power drives. That way lies a mad-
ness for which theré is as yet no name,
but which informs the parables of our
time, and shapes us all in its unlovely
image.

FDR: a Pragmatic Judgment

THE ROOSEVELT REVOLUTION.
By Mario Einaudi. Harcourt, Brace
& Co. 372 pp. $5.95.

Frank Freidel

AMERICANS lecturing in other coun-
tries are frequently shocked by the
prevalence among even well-educated
people of crude, doctrinaire misconcep-
tions about the United States. The
spreading abroad of lavish evidence of

FRANK FREIDEL is at present en-
gaged in a biography of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, of which the first three
volumes—‘The Apprenticeship,’ “The
Ordeal” and “The Triumph”—have been
published. Mr. Freidel is a professor of
history at Harvard University.

American material prosperity has ob-
scured the most important fact, that
this abundance is being widely enjoyed
under a political and economic system
which if anything has become more,
rather than less, democratic. Too often
the people of other nations view the
United States through a distorted Holly-
wood and slick-magazine image, aug-
mented by the extravagances of the
McCarthys and the Fatibises. Such
impressions, jammed into Marxian and
Freudian molds, create the dogma that
this nation is dominated by materialism,
illiberalism and conformity. They
scure much that is significant in Amefi-
can values.

Professon Einaudi began work upon
this book in order to correct false images

Vpn: EE Ot ee a ce ar
t s a5 ae ; 7 ea et ay
‘ \ “ i Nae oe Me '

of America. among Europeans; but as
he progressed he came to feel, quite
correctly, that Americans might profit
from what he has to say. He has aimed
his book, therefore, at both European
and American readers. Einaudi is ex-
ceptionally qualified for his undertaking,
since he is the son of a former President
of Italy, and is the Goldwin Smith Pro-
fessor of Government at Cornell Uni-
versity. To readers abroad he can bring
the fruits of years of study and teaching
in the United States; for Americans he
provides the perspective of centuries of
European civilization.

THERE are three Cistinct parts to this
unusual book: a brief analysis of the
present-day European image of America,
a lengthy and lucid survey of the revolu-
tion the United States has undergone
since it plunged into the Great Depres-
sion a generation ago, and an epilogue
measuring Tocqueville’s observations
during the age of Jackson against con-
temporary American society. Well-in-
formed American readers will profit most
from the prologue and epilogue; Euro-
peans, from the heart of the book.
Europeans, distracted by depression,
dictatorship and the imminence of war,
failed to grasp the significance of the

Not fiction ..

. but a realistic exposition of

the “‘crientation” of the Soviet physician—

“NOTES of a

A “grand old man” of Russian medicine, Dr. Pon-
doey wrote this exposition of wedical conduet and
ethics
into Mnglish, this volume is a fascinating book
for the western reader.

BOOK DIVISION \

CONSULTANTS BUREAR,
227 W. 17th St. NEW YORK 41, N.Y.

New Deal; for many it carried over-
tones of totalitarianism. Then, the re-
turn of the Republicans to the White
House in 1953 restored the old image:

America was not only the country
of industrial monopolies, dedicated to
the realization of a materialistic and
soulless prosperity. It . . . was now
the seat of the mightiest industrial
empire, ready to exploit its unique
strength in a world rendered weaker
and poorer as a result of a catastrophe
America had not felt and had not
shared.

Along with this went frequently “a be-
lef in the all-powerful reach of American
business and diplomatic agents and in
the pervasively corrupting power of the
American dollar.”

Obviously this black image, which
Einaudi fills in with depressing detail,
is still all too prevalent in Europe. But
it does not prevail entirely. The New
Deal and its leader, Roosevelt, are not
completely forgotten. In Italy, for ex-
ample, there persists, especially among
poorer people, a rather startling rever-
ence for Roosevelt. But even among
those favorably disposed, the lack of
factual knowledge of the modern United
States is so great that one can only
wish Einaudi’s disquisition could be

—yjust published:

SOVIET DOCTOR”

by G. S. PONDOEV

with an introduction by
Iago Galdston, M.D., F.A.P.A.

...“A work of many dimensions...
should prove of value to all who seek
to understand the ‘orientation’ of the
Soviet intellectual’. The extraordinary
experience of Dr. Pondoevy—who prac-
ticed medicine under both the Czarist
and Communist regimes — will prove
to be of absorbing interest and great
value not only to doctors and medical
students, but the general public as well.

for Soviet consumption, Now—translated

1959, cloth, 6’x9”, 246 pages, $4.95

INC.

x ‘

h i oe

te Ree
translated into a score of languages and

spread widely through other countries.

In brief, what he has to tell Europeans,
and Americans who have forgotten, is
how basically unsound the American
economy had become by 1929, and how
ill prepared the government was to
undertake decisive intervention to right
it. His approach and conclusions are
similar to those of J. K. Galbraith in
The Great Crash. Next he analyzes the
leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
rejecting with equal firmness the criti-
cisms from the Right of E. E. Robinson
in The Roosevelt Leadership, and from
the Keynesian Left of James MacGregor
Burns in Roosevelt: The Lion and the
Fox. Einaudi, making his own original,
logical interpretation of Roosevelt’s
leadership, based upon the speeches in
the Public Papers and Addresses and
the changes effected by the New Deal,
concludes:

The test of democratic leadership
is to be found in the sum total of
effective achievements secured in a
climate of freedom. The leader has
failed if at the end of his tenure
democracy has been lost and consti-
tutionalism has been abolished, if the
crisis has not been solved and no
measures are on the statute books
that will make it possible to cast a
reassured look at the future. By this
pragmatic test, Roosevelt has been a
great leader. By 1952, America was
in many decisive ways a new country,
yet one still cherishing many of the
traditions of the past and living under
the protecting shelter of an ancient
Constitution.

A simple, clear statement of these
achievements fills the largest part of
the book: changes in the government
in Washington, the revolution in consti-
tutional law, the new tax system, TVA
and extension of civil rights. All this
is comparable to the short, friendly out-
line of the New Deal by Dennis Brogan,
and like Brogan’s, it is enriched by its
transatlantic viewpoint. The interpreta-
tion is similar, also, to that in the far
more lengthy and richly detailed open-
ing volumes of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s
Age of Roosevelt. A most instructive
chapter on the contemporary United
States, “The New Landscape of Ameri-
can Society: Lights and Shadows,”
indicates the degree to which the changes
of the “Roosevelt Revolution” have be-
come widely accepted in the fifties, even
while Roosevelt himself has been for-
gotten.

The epilogue, “Reflections on Tocque-
ville,” is a refreshing evaluation of both
the prescience and shortcomings of the
young French aristocrat’s examination

NATION

rr id ie eee a el ke

‘
be

¢ =
7 va
t+

of Jacksonian America. Tocqueville,

perhaps because his Whig acquaintances

‘ in the United States reinforced his mis-

givings about democracy, was more

fearful of the future than developments

warranted. A growing aristocracy of

industry did not negate the democratic
system:

What we have seen in the United

States has been the systematic and

inventive search for solutions to the

difficulties of industrial mass democ-

racy, a search intended to realize

the ideals of community without
collectivism, the ideal of freedom
without anarchy, the advantages of
technology without the loss of hu-
manism. The managers have had their
day in the United States. But they
have been kept in check and have
not taken over the country.

What the Roosevelt Revolution
has done has been to keep the door
open so as to permit to our genera-
tion a chance to decide in liberty
what we must do,

ARCHITECTURE

Walter McQuade

THEY are still ripping down middle-
aged buildings in New York and plant-
ing new ones, and this fall will see a
full architectural harvest. Even the
rocky terrain of Wall Street has been
taken over by the scientific farmers of
modern architecture.
Among the heavyweights, Frank
Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum
| will be opening—the master’s only build-
ing on Manhattan, and a perplexing one.
Among the other projects going up are
_ the gigantic Union Carbide Building,
the Pepsi-Cola Building, and the Chase
Bank tower by architects Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill; and the formidable
| new Time and Life Building by Harri-
son and Abramovitz, the same firm
} — which recently completed the Corning
Glass Building at 56th and Fifth Avenue.
The road ahead is crowded too; all the
big architectural offices are crammed
with work.
1 The buildings named above can be
called serious architecture, as contrasted
with the folk art of the city’s commercial
office builders, who buy their standard
walls by the acre, bloat their buildings’
shapes to fit the maximum envelope per-
mitted by the zoning regulations, and
_ rest their architectural pretensions on
murals in the lobbies. The owners of
} ___ buildings like Corning Glass are willing
to spend money to try, architecturally.

{yee

WALTER McQUADE is an architect
_ whose interests have developed princi-
pally in the area of journalism. He is
on the staff of a leading architectural
magazine and is the author of School-
house, a study of contemporary school
construction (he also writes fiction and
has published one novel). The present
column is the first of a new department
in which ‘Mr. M eu will ae ar-

this deceptive materi

ern the

They pay perhaps double what it would
cost them to build standard office space;
this extra cost includes their own higher
standard of construction plus the space
they give to the city — space which
they could have built around, air-con-
ditioned, and rented out at $8 per square
foot.

FOR no one architect will it be a bigger
year than for Wallace K. Harrison, the
main force behind Harrison and Abram-
ovitz, Corning’s designer, and an_all-
American architectural enigma. He has
participated in, or directed, the erection
of some of our best city buildings; he
has also put up some of the most pre-
tentious. He is one architect whom even
some taxi drivers are aware of; they
admire him for the noble gleam of the
United Nations Secretariat; they groan
at the dense ugliness of the mammoth
Socony Mobil Building across 42nd
Street from Grand Central — the one
with the Victorian pattern of facets
stamped grimly into its stainless steel
wall panels. His new Corning Building
has something of each quality, for better
and for worse.

Corning is a small skyscraper, twenty-
eight stories high, whose base is nestled
in among the porous facades of Fifth
Avenue’s old commercial buildings. From
the second story up it is the glassiest
and probably the most delicately de-
signed of New York’s towers. Each wall
of this tower seems like a single piece
of glass streaking up toward the sky,
with only the slimmest metal framing
visible outside the glass. In an era of
careless architectural

arrison proper-
e thinness of facade
he eae of glass.

Saar tower

“ has emphasized th
ich can be one of
e has hung the rn

MN,

cl Harn with — author and pu

“pre New Yor

r
i

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pie

clean, uplifting office work, wrapped
tautly in cellophane.

The city needed this example of a
fine glass building, for today the tide of
public and professional feeling seems to
be turning against glass as an urban
building material. It has become a criti-
cal cliché to point out that walls of glass
are satisfactory in a city neighborhood
only as a novelty, that as soon as all
the buildings wear glass walls, the glory
is gone. This is undeniably true on much
of Park Avenue, where. whole block
fronts of strip-glazed office space stare
unblinkingly across the street at each
other. The atmosphere is depressing,
rather massively reptilian.

This limitation is not in the nature of
the material, however, but in its mis-
use. Most of the glass-filled blocks on
Park Avenue simply were not designed
to be glass; their designers put the walls
on like a chic bathrobe, to cover their
buildings’ dull shapes. Surely -a solid, un-
broken face of glass is unpleasant, if
poorly designed — or, as on most of
Park Avenue, not really designed at all.
Glass should not be used to cover cliffs;
cliffs are much better. in’ stone.

What glass needs is space around it.
You should be able to stand back from
it, as you stand back from a full-length
mirror. It also needs shape, achieved
> either by strong framing, as architects
< L. Mies van der Rohe and Philip John-
son used on the Seagram Tower, or a
sense of direction, as architects Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill used on Lever House
— slim, tall proportions rather than
simple, formidable, massive — frontage.
Any city avenue lined with structures

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AND

MAIL EARLY IN THE DAY —
rs THE BETTER Wari

like Seagram, Lever and Corning, with
their independent personalities and in-
terplay of shapes and open spaces, would
immediately redeem glass as a building
wall. It would be enchanting, an ice
palace.

SO, AS ONE OF the two major glass
producers, Corning picked the right man
in Harrison to dramatize its product.
A few years ago the Aluminum Com-
pany of America did the same thing,
choosing him for its Pittsburgh head-
quarters tower, whose walls are stamped
sheet aluminum — another much abused
material, but very handsome as Harri-
son need it there. He gave it depth and
— unusual in median architecture —
shadowing. It is a valuable man who
can show a manufacturer, and the rest
of the architectural profession, how to
use the client’s own material.

But Harrison, for all his talents and
opportunities, remains the great spoiler,
and no building reveals this better than
Corning. At the base of his new shining
tower he is at his architectural worst.
He has made it so grimly graceless
at street level that the tower seems to
lunge upward to escape its origin, in the
grand old American social tradition.

For instance, the wall of the Fifth
Avenue front consists of large sheets of
clear glass. But its transparency is just
a lure. Your eye advances, then, a few
inches beyond the glass, is slapped by
large panels of marble, green in color,
florid in veining, and matched, of course,
like so many Rorschach tests. The
marble isn’t even left flat; at its edges
it folds into columns. It looks, in fact,
like wallpaper, not stone. Through it, a
heavy stainless steel showcase is canti-
levered out at the pedestrian.

Next to this, uptown, protrudes a
little white entrance pavilion to the
Steuben Glass showroom. This is de-
signed at about the level of sophistica-
tion of a fake French menu. Then, at
the corner, is a shallow pool of water. Its
form is one of those weary Hollywood
clichés of modern architecture — not
the kidney, but a sort of sharpened

curve. Except on windy days, when it
ripples nicely, it is simply water, not a
lively architectural use of water. At
knee height, it reciaims sidewalk space

originally donated to the passing
pedestrian. Next, two flagpoles are set
in the pavement. East, on 56th Street,
the design continues, calming somewhat
on this less important exposure.

So there you have it, Harrison in
halves: up off the street he builds a
sleek, beautiful, delicate tower with un-
mistakable dignity and character, At
street level, he seems bent on trying to
shake hands with every pedestrian, and
doing it with a dozen fingers. It is true
of course that the glass company’s own
product-personality also is somewhat
split between street level and tower;
the plain industrial glassware displayed
on the upstairs walls is delicate and
beautiful; downstairs, the art glass on
sale in the Steuben shop is laughable, a
salon of gravely illuminated, lumpish
wedding presents attended by refined
salesladies. This kind of graceless glass-
ware, incidentally, now seems to be the
national gift of United States Presi-
dents to foreign dignitaries. Totem poles
were better.

LOOKING to the future, Harrison’s
most important commission to date may
be Lincoln Center for the Performing
Arts, for which he is serving as design
coordinator. He is also designing the
new Metropolitan Opera House, and his
partner, Max Abramovitz, is responsible
for the concert hall. Other buildings will
include a theatre for the dance by Philip
Johnson, the new Juilliard School by
Pietro Belluschi, a repertory theatre
by Eero Saarinen, and a library-museum
by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

As this is written, relatively little is
known of the design of any of these
buildings except the opera house, which
has been shown in sketches, and the
concert hall, whose final design was
published recently, Sadly, the opera
house is not one of Harrison’s best be-
ginnings. Big, high, attention-getting, it
also seems frail and forceless., It looks

In a Parlor Containing a Table “a

In a parlor containing a table
And three chairs, three men confided
Their inmost thoughts to one another.
J, said the first, am. miserable.
I am miserable, the second said.
I think that for me the correct word
Is miserable, asserted the third.
Well, they said at last, it’s quarter to two,

_ Good night. Cheer up. Sleep well.
a too, You too, You too.

Gatway KINNELL

=a ff, se =

‘M's ‘

ratl e old lobby of the Roxy
Theatre, turned inside out and done
modern, shorn of its innocence.

Yet it was published by coordinator
Harrison even as his committee of archi-
tects was being gathered to design the
rest of Lincoln Center, and the task it
presents them is immense. At best this
kind of cramped collaboration by a
group of distinctly diverse architects
seems more bureaucratic than creative.
But given the deal, and the opera house,
should the other architects subdue their
own buildings, make them mute, and let
the opera house carry the conversation,
or should they simply ignore this ex-

hibitionistic structure and say what they
wish separately in their own designs?
The design of the new home for the
Philharmonic is said to be good techni-
cally, but architecturally it follows the
lead of the opera house. It is commerci-
al jazz.

If this were a world’s fair, the an-
swer to this problem of “coordination”
would be easy. Each architect would do
his damndest, gleefully; each building
would rival the next. It would be a de-
sign carnival. But world’s fairs are
designed to disappear, and even at that,
world’s fairs are not crowded into the
narrow confines of Lincoln Square.

LETTER from WASHINGTON

Stanley Meisler

A POTFUL of hot water gurgled down
on us as we waited, caught in a giggling,
shoving crowd, outside Washington’s
Coffee *n Confusion Club, a_ beatnik
haven marking its first Saturday night
of business in the nation’s capital. An
irate neighbor in an upstairs apartment
had tossed out the hot but not boiling
water. The sprinkles from above alight-
ing on the sprinkle of beards in the
crowd symbolized one of the oddest
clashes in the history of this clash-ridden
federal town. For several months now,
the prudery of Washington has been at
war with the rebellion of its youth.

The war started when a 24-year-old
self-styled poet, William A. Walker, de-
cided to open his club. Following the
style of shops in San Francisco’s North
Beach, it would sell coffee, pastries, bis-
cuits, cream cheese, bagels and poetry.
But Walker and his wife, Ruth, a 22-
year-old graduate of Vassar, erred stra-
tegically in their first attempt by fail-
ing to consult officialdom before open-
ing. Zoning laws promptly descended
upon them, and police shut down the
shop. In their second attempt, the Walk-
ers, moving gingerly, followed every step
of the law. They found an abandoned
cellar restaurant at 945 K Street, North-
west, rented it, decorated it, and applied
for a license. And then the smug tradi-
tions of Washington, sensing that the
venture might succeed, began to stir
and swat at this pesky, tiny threat of
non-conformity.

Police officials of the second precinct
announced that they would do every-
thing within the law to prevent the

STANLEY MEISLER is a Washington
tor to critical

and political journals.

newspaper man and occasional contribu-

coffee shop from opening. Residents of
K Street rushed a petition to the offices
of the Board of Licenses and Inspections,
demanding that the Walkers be pre-
vented from marring the neighborhood
with beatniks. One neighbor, a fortune
teller, made his disapproval clear by
firing four pistol shots through the
plate-glass window of the shop while
Mrs. Walker was tidying the place.
The board, after listening to argu-
ments that the coffee shop might at-
tract trouble, decided that the law could
not prevent the Walkers from operating
their Coffee ’n Confusion Club if they
followed regulations. The second pre-
cinct police, however, promised to keep
a constant watch on the activities of
the establishment and at the slightest

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sign of trouble, to shut it down. Mean-
while, several complaints of disorderly
behavior by patrons of the shop reached
the board in the first weeks of activity,
and the board is helding hearings to
decide whether to revoke the license.

Washington’s antics at finding beat-
niks bubbling in its midst follow the
pattern of its social history. A hundred
years ago, Lord Lyons, the round-cheek-
ed, slightly-bearded, youngish British
ambassador, wrote home that Washing-
ton was “a terrible place for young men,
nothing whatever in the shape of amuse-
ment for them. .. .” And to this day
Washington after dark remains one of
the quietest, dreariest and most lifeless
capitals of the world.

There simply is no public place where
youth may sit and mope into the morn-
ing hours, hoarsely settling the tense
issues of the day. Bars are forbidden
to serve drinks after 2 A.M. on week-
days and midnight on Saturdays. Even
before curfew time, Washington’s bars
lack the friendly, congenial spirit of bars

THE TWO FACES OF

RICHARD NIXON
By Guy W. Finney

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in New York's Greenwich Village, New
Orieans’ French Quarter or San Fran-
cisco’s North Beach. Sidewalk cafés
also are forbidden. And so is the
practice of drinking anything but beer
while sitting on a bar stool; liquor
must be ordered at a table. No one
may stand with a drink of any kind
in his hand. If you want to rush across
a room filled with merriment to join
some friends, you must first beg a
Waitress to carry your drink there.

THE CHIEF aim of these laws no doubt
is to restrict the appeal of bars. But
they have tended, in addition, to deaden
all aspects of night life, for the appeal
of coffee shops and all-night bakeries
and sandwich counters is as last stops
of a night on the town. With most
people having their night on the town
at home, these shops: and bakeries and
counters tend to shut well before mid-
night. This has suited most of the city
just fine; Washington, a capital that
mirrors stants of the nation, would rather

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es Che NATION

338 Sixth Ave. New York 14, N.Y,
CHelsea (2-8400

ee -

ing like a bearded e

he like Middletown, Ohio, than Paris,
France. But the situation has left a
void for the city’s anxious, intellectual,
cosmopolitan youth. It is this void that

the Coffee ’n Confusion Shop is trying
to fill.

My friends and I had just been chased
from a rathskeller by the curfew on the
night that
beatnik establishment, which remains
open almost until sunrise. Not far from
the downtown business district, it is
in a once-fashionable residential area
that has declined steadily in the last
thirty years. The coffee shop fills the
cellar of a three-story building. A real
estate office is on the first floor, apart-
ments above. A shaggy lawn separates
the building far from the street, giving
ample room for the 150 to 200 persons
we found milling about and trying to
get into the packed, noisy shop.

Although some sported beards and
jeans, most had pipes and ivy slacks,
and a few, like myself, blatantly showed
up with ties. A huge bearded fellow,
looking more like a butcher than a
poet in his smeared apron, faced the
crowd, stretched out his arms and shout-
ed that no one else could fit inside.
A light shining above the door made
the pimples on his forehead blaze. He
urged everyone to disperse and return
in two hours. But the crowd only mur-
mured, smiled and glared back. It took
that potful of hot water, tossed by some
unseen upstairs neighbor, to move the
crowd back.

MY GROUP of four approached the
bearded, pimpled giant and_ confided
that we were two reporters and their
young lady friends, all curious to see
his coffee shop, perhaps for a story.
Talk of the press impressed him, and
he allowed us to slip in, at a cost of a
dollar a head.

Walker, also thickly-bearded, was
standing on a podium at the far end of
the shop. “I told you not to let anyone
else in,” he shouted. The giant, waving
the money, replied, “But this is bread,
man,” and Walker quieted. Seats were
found for three of us, and I stood against
the door, next to a college co-ed perched
on the top rung of a painter’s ladder.
Low-watted, unadorned bulbs hung from
the ceiling, revealing a_black-painted,
small room with a décor of foreign news-
papers pasted on some walls. About
eighty customers stood or sat around
clothless, coffee-mugged tables in the
unfanned heat.

A poetry reading
Walker, not receiving
he needed, waved his

as on tap, but

absolute quiet
ms wildly, look-
Seen,

“Will you i quiet, a Will you

we decided to visit the

in
4

shut up?” But the jumbled patter of
voices continued. “Will you shut the
f--- up?” an exasperated Walker finally
shrieked at his customers, “Do I have
to shock you into silence?” His last
plea had an effect and the room quieted
enough for Walker and several colleagues
to begin reading round after round of
poetry.

WITH toms-toms beating behind them,
the soft, intense voices of the young men
fascmated their audience, who applauded
lustily and chanted “Yeah, man” after
each rendition. For the most part, the
poems beat out a dreary, trite sameness,
mainly because the authors took them-
selves too seriously. One ode to Modigli-
ani, for example, praised the painter for
bringing the musky odor of passion to
his canvases. Walker liked to talk of
“God in his pad” or people who’ve “been
reaching for the moon too long, man,”
as if the mere juxtaposition of jive talk
and community values could fashion the
power and brilliance of irreverence. But
one poet, Dick Dabney, offered a wit
and gaiéty lacking in his dreary friends,
and I couldn’t help smiling as he read
his twinkling “Charlie Starkweather
Blues.” Dabney, however, also reached
a height of bad taste when, just a few
weeks after the funeral, he talkéd of
the “golden abdomen of John’ Foster
Dulles” in a poem describing the images
of Washington.

The heat, noise and poetry finally
proved too much, and we escaped into
the street. I had not seen anything to
justify the police moving in and closing
the place. Nor had I seen anything that
might justify academicians of — the
twenty-first century uncovering and ex-
plicating any verses from the Washington
beat school. The only thing I had seen
was further proof that our nation’s
capital can use more all-night spots
where the city’s sensitive youth, like
youth in all other great cities of the
world, may wrestle with the bleary
problems of the mind in the excitement
of coffee and the dawn.

Late Last Night

Late last night we drove through fog:
nothing but a vague onslaught at
the window: vapors, or was it breath?

the clouds of the earth coming at us
all along the road. In the watery
substance all turned the same:

lights around corners, dreams behind
rooms, the country wide as oceans:
the singleness in every name,

ARTHUR

OREGOR

Crossword Puzzle No. 831 |

By FRANK W. LEWIS

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Country Club. Dancing. En-

ACROSS: 5 Get superior candidates out of sort?

tertainment. Superb cuisine.
6 Fireproof Bldg. Elevator sery-
( ) ice. In N.Y.C. call at local

8 Those who get in deep, if I and 3 ;
Tom get something positive in the 6 Leave a ten-gallon hat, but not with

way of broad investment. (15) part of the family! (4) . “ST 5-7227
Gee eedieen make this, Can a short Certainly doesn’t take a beatnik to
line? (6) r survey the opening, with me placed ORE

on a roster! (15)
12 Victorian, perhaps, but obviously wamems LAKE ah N. Y. >

rate.
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10 Of course it’s a free choice! (8)

11 Eager to find a wise man’s father ,
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deeapitated? (4) : : Saeu8 tsuan
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15 This month is extremely 13, (7) 18 Villa and attached retinue? (7)
16 ae way to keep an operation clean. 20 Shut up again? You’ll be sorry if
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19 A | ir i : 3
aC nee line should be non 25 It might portend no males, but

21 The force of good intentions? (4) cat don't stariiw@ih: it,ceikeer,

22 Finally won a car with a colorful ew
eetedine! (8) 25 Farewell to the canyon? (4)
24 Gets even? (6)

‘ ; SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 330
26 (aes belief of the talisman pursuer ?

ACROSS: 1 Convocation; 9 Particle;
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DOWN: Argues; 15 and 25 Obstacle race; 17

1 Gives out a sad and confused ap- Goleucluby 20. Cotter. 22, Makines, 24 WINDY HILL :. el 1 Newburgh 1
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SESS
i heed 29, 1959 SS os Printed in the U. 8. 4. by ROR Publication Printers Corp, BM. %. G _

a ye i . an bal a)

tee me ae LGN Bie te

CRITICS

Nelson Algren
Walter Allen
Harold Clurman
Edwin Denby
Francis Fergusson
Bed: Albert Guerard
= Richard Hoggart
a. Irving Howe
Lincoln Kirstein
a Frank O’Connor
e, M. L. Rosenthal
Edmund Wilson

JOURNALISTS

Carleton Beals
Walter Davenport
Irving Dilliard

, Carl Dreher

o> Mark Gayn

Harry Golden

En, Kingsley Martin
ae Raymond Postgate
ial Edgar Snow

Guy Wint

NOVELISTS
Kingsley Amis
James Baldwin
Paul Bowles
Kay Boyle
George P. Elliott
Waldo Frank
David Garnett
Herbert Gold
Paul Goodman
William Goyen
Alan Harrington
Mark Harris

who reviews books

im © oe oe yal
i oa eT a
at) q

for THE NATION?

Iris Murdoch
Harvey Swados
Gore Vidal
Bernard Wolfe
Richard Wright

ESSAYISTS

Robert Cantwell
Mina Curtiss
James R. Newman
Ernest J. Simmons

POETS

Louis S. Coxe

Richard Eberhart
Horace Gregory
Katherine Hoskins
Lawrence Lipton
Howard Nemerov
Kenneth Rexroth

May Sarton

May Swenson

William Carlos Williams

HISTORIANS

Geoffrey Barraclough
Harold J. Berman

George Dangerfield

Isaac Deutscher

John K. Fairbank

David Thomson

William Appleman Williams
C. Vann Woodward

ECONOMIC AND
POLITICAL SCIENTISTS
Alan Barth

Matthew ‘Josephson
Robert S, Lynd

PADDR BSS crvmiiminlnitrecingnianisinn hnmennsieleesame soil nrnsatayinieyrieermnerateniomes

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-— ------------- = ——

Herbert Marcuse
David Spitz
Raymond Williams

PHILOSOPHERS
Norwood Russell Hanson

Albert William Levi
Ernest Nagel

LAWYERS

Mark de Wolfe Howe
Earl Latham
David L. Weissman

SCIENTISTS

J. Bronowski
Melville J. Herskovits
Kirtley F. Mather

The Nation’s book reviews are dis-
tinguished for two things which are
seldom found in combination elsewhere
—authority and liveliness.

Its reviewers are selected from the
best minds and the best pens in the
country and rigorously exercise their
right to accept for review only those
books which they consider important.
They are not extravagant in their praise
—rather the contrary—so that when a
book is praised in The Nation it may be
assumed to have unquestioned quality.
Books praised elsewhere are often re-
duced to their proper proportion by
The Nation review.

But the authority is not synonymous
with dullness. Nation reviews “glow,”
as one subscriber has it. They are read
and enjoyed because they are in them-
selves literature.

THE NATION, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York 14
Please send THE NATION

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(Canadian and Foreign Postage $1 a year extra)

san eetane wet one ng “0 2. prate
N a

—

bal P

BURLINGAME.
PUBLIC LIBRARY

8urlingame, Calif.

ANTI-LABOR
DAY: 195

B. J. Widick

POISONING THE SAHARA

Ira V. Morris

CADE OF THE EX-R

Sidney Lens

LETTERS

Mr. Nixon’s ‘Spontaneous’
Welcome Home

Dear Sirs: Apropos of your editorial
“President Nixon?” in the August 15 is-
sue, I have come across a curious tale
that helps explain what a redoubtable
gent Mr. Nixon is.

The great hoop-la attending the Vice
President’s recent Polish tour made much
of the contrast between the spontaneous
welcome accorded him and the frosty
and arranged welcome accorded Mr.
Khrushchev on his visit to Poland the
month previous. This brought to mind
the spontaneous welcome Washington,
D.C., students gave the Vice President
on his return from the South American
fiasco. It wasn’t until just this week
that I learned from a man who was at
National Airport that day just what
really went on. My informant was at-
tached to a university public-relations
office at the time and was in a position
to see it all. His story goes like this:

Word came that students at his uni-
versity were going to the airport to meet
Nixon — as a fitting rejoinder to the
spit with which South American stu-
dents had greeted the Vice President.
Hoping to get the greatest publicity
value out of the demonstration for his
university, the public-relations man in-
jected himself into the center of the ac-
tivity. Almost at once he saw symptoms
of a master hand at work.

Buses appeared to take the students
out to the airport. They converged on
the Jefferson Memorial with two dozen
other buses — and lo! the other
buses carried students from the Univer-
sity of Maryland, Catholic University,
George Washington, American University,
and Georgetown University. A_ police
escort then emerged. Park police, capital
police, metropolitan police — all sorts
of police — led the procession across
the 14th Street Bridge and out Mt.
Vernon Pike to the airport. When the
students got there, professional-looking
“welcome home Dick” signs appeared.
They were not spur-of-the-moment
signs.

The public-relations man smelled a
rat. He asked a few of the student
leaders who was behind the demonstra-
tion. They admitted, when pressed, that
the State Department had called them
to suggest that they meet the Vice
President. Who was paying for the
buses? The students didn’t know. And
the signs? They just appeared, as if by
magic.

I don’t know whether it was the State

Department, the GOP or one of Nixon’s
friends who picked up the tab. In any
case, the United States is in no position
to chide Russia (or Cuba) for “rigging”
demonstrations in. behalf of public
figures. Remetnber that “spontaneous”
demonstration which once made Willkie
a candidate for the Presidency?

Epwarp ZIEGLER
New York City

Of ‘Time’ and Fiction

Dear Sirs: Cheers for your timely story
on “Time: the Weekly Fiction Maga-
zine,” in your August 15 issue: Jigs
Gardner struck with all the clarity of a
mantelpiece time-teller.

A. L. Harrison
Washington, D.C.

Smearing the Canvas

Dear Sirs: As a member of the commit-
tee of selection for the art exhibition in
Moscow, may I congratulate you on
publishing Wade Thompson’s hilarious
dialogue with Representative Walter
[The Nation, August 1]. It demon-
strates the mental confusion that un-
derlies the attacks on the exhibition
made by certain politicians, by a large
part of the press, and by ultra-con-
servative artists who, having been re-
cipients of most governmental commis-
sions, have a vested interest in main-
taining their monopoly, and who have
instigated the current attacks.

The best corrective to such attacks
is the simple proposition that it is the
work of art, not the artist, which is
being exhibited; and the work of art
must be judged on its merits. Let us
hope that this common-sense policy may
become officially adopted, so that future
controversies (which are inevitable) can
be argued on the basis of artistic merit,
and not on whether artist X allowed the
New Masses to publish a drawing in
19333

Lioyp Goopricu
Director, Whitney Museum

New York City

McCarthyism at Montana?

Dear Sirs: This concerns the smear on
me in The Nation of August 15. [In an
editorial entitled “Belated Smear,” in
that issue, Mr. Bowen is mentioned as
the author of a dossier on Leslie Fiedler,
the distinguished member of Montana
State University’s English Department.
The purport of the editorial was that
it was Mr. Fiedler who was “smeared.”
— Editors.) What you should know

about your facts is that they are in some
instances utterly untrue, and in others
near perversions of the truth. As for my
ambition, as you style it, the implica-
tion of McCarthyism is an old one at
Montana, where all enemies of the
Fiedler falange are, it appears, equally
McCarthyites, anti-Semites and insane.

In the face of such lucid, liberal judg-
ment, I will not generalize farther than
to deny your implied charge... .

Rosert O. Bowen
University of Washington

Seattle, Wash.

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
101 @

ARTICLES

108 'e Anti-Labor Day: 1959
by B. J. WIDICK

105 @ Decade of the Ex-Reds

by SIDNEY LENS
108 'e The Kyrie Plan

by MICHABKL O’CONNDLL
110 @ Poisoning the Sahara

by IRA V. MORRIS

111 ‘e Our Marshmallow Society
by WILLIAM WALSH

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

114 @ The Policy That Failed
by WILLIAM CLARK

Beatniks Then and Now
by GENE BARO

Doubt as Corollary to Faith
by GABRIEL VAHANIAN

Forged or True?
by DONAT O'DONNELL

Second Impressions
by ROBERT M. WALLACE

115 'e
117 @
119 'e
120 @

Crossword Puzzle (ap. 120)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

UVMNN NATTA

George G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, Hditor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Pdlitor
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts ;

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art

M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Musie

Alexander Werth, Huropean
‘Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Sept. 5, 1959. Vol, 189, No. 6

The Nation, published weekly (except for omis~
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A. by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
New York 14, N. Y. Second class postage paid
at New York, N. Y.

Subscription Prices Domestic—One year $8, Tw!
years $14, Three years $20, Additional postaas
per year, Foreign and Canadian $1,

Change of Address: Three weeks’ notice Is re-
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made without the old address as well as the new,

Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed

in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book

Review Digest, Index to Labor Articles, Publio
tion Service, tie Index,

CBU At

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 6

THe

NATION

EDITORIALS

The Risks of Leadership

The President has departed on what may well be the
most important mission of his life. It is impossible to
question the sincerity of his purpose or the determina-
tion with which he has set forth on this “mission for
peace.” For a young man, the mission would be grueling
enough; for the President, it must represent the cruelest
of ordeals.

Mr. Eisenhower has been widely criticized for spend-
ing too much time on the golf links, for leaning too
heavily on his advisers, for not showing Presidential
initiative; in short, for not having what might be called
a Presidential mentality. In all these indictments, and
in the corollaries which flow from them, there is con-
siderable truth. But whatever may have been wrong
with him, and whatever errors and deficiencies may be
his future lot, there is also something very wrong with
his detractors — specifically with the publicity media
which watch his every move and conjecture on his
every motive. By deciding to exchange visits with Mr.
Khrushchev, he shook off the Dulles incubus (which
Dulles himself was trying to escape toward the end);
he was finally exercising the prerogatives of leadership,
and taking its risks. Did he get a good press? Far from
it; the mood might be described as one of reluctant
acquiescence.

A strange pessimism pervades the traditional land of
optimism. It is compounded of economic fears, the sor-
did political claptrap of Congressmen wooing the votes
of hyphenated Americans, the conjurations of aging
labor leaders, and much else that fails to jibe with the
country’s proud image of itself. The President has re-
ceived little of the encouragement which is his due
when he acts with sanity, resolution and courage.

Yet he has support, unorganized, inarticulate, but
not to be ignored in the long run, because it happens to

come from the people who elected him and who will

elect the next President. Mr. Eisenhower has had his

_ share of bogus publicity, but his reputation as a media-
- tor and conciliator is deserved. To the average Amer-
ican he is the image of the moderate man, the more so

because he is the rare professional soldier who can be

relied on to do nothing reckless in a tight and danger-

ous international situation. This average American,

even before the President invited Mr. Khrushchev, was
on the whole in favor of the move: a July Gallup poll
gave a 50 per cent vote in favor, 36 per cent opposed.
With this much support, the President can afford to
continue to speak his own mind and formulate his own
policies. He need not give too much thought to the
syndicated doubts of his predecessor in office, nor to
display advertisements of organizations which have com-
pletely reversed their views of a decade and a half ago.
Most of us wish him luck. He will need it, and so will we.

Candidates and Issues

These are issues which cannot be avoided even by
lowly politicians interested only in re-election, and
much less so by men who accept a share of responsibility
for their country’s welfare. Thus, as the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch said editorially on August 4, “the need to face
realities in world affairs transcends party lines.” This is
something quite different from the bipartisanship which
has been piously urged on Americans in foreign affairs,
and which is based on the postulate that we are always
right and, what is even more preposterous, that we have
the power to enforce our views on the whole world.
Neither being true, the facts obtrude themselves on
members of both parties. Some try to deal with them
rationally, while others seem to be unable to shake off
policies which have already gone down to defeat. Dean
Acheson is an example of a sapient and moral individual
who just can’t accept the fact that his policies as
Secretary of State were mostly wrong in their heyday
and, in the context of present events, border on the
absurd. In contrast, Senator Humphrey telephoned Mr.
Nixon to congratulate him on his volte face in Moscow
(Mr. Nixon has since swung back about forty-five
degrees), while Senator Kefauver forwarded to the
President an eloquent prayer received from a constituent
for Mr. Eisenhower’s success in Europe. The issues of
war and peace simply cannot be evaded. Mr. Eisenhower
humself summed it up better than many a literary figure
has been able to do it: “We are talking about the human
race, and what’s going to happen to it.” All the Presi-
dential candidates would do well to repeat these words

as they greet the morning beam and again as they lay
themselves down to dream,

ob a

Dunee’s

Cap

With rare exceptions, the politician who addresses a
national convention of the American Legion acts as
though he were wearing a dunce’s cap. Speaking to the
annual Legion convention at Minneapolis last week,
Vice President Nixon automatically assumed the role
of the political moron, presumably on the theory —
probably correct — that his audience preferred it that
way. Mr. Nixon resorted to the sure-fire technique of
commiseration with the captive peoples of Eastern Eu-
rope and assurances that we would never, never abandon
them. True, he hastened to add that we would not help
them, either, since “a so-called war of liberation would
liberate only dead bodies and ruined cities.” But what
he said boiled down to this: that if the captives cared
to pit Molotov cocktails of their own making against
Soviet tanks, we would send Leo Cherne to cheer them
on from some neighboring country.

This went over big with the delegates, who were later
to cheer proposals to investigate the American Civil
Liberties Union and the Fund for the Republic, to take
the United States out of UNESCO, and to place the
Supreme Court of the United States under close sur-
veillance. Politicians are, of course, supposed to please
a majority of the people at least part of the time, in-

cluding a majority of every audience they address. But
addressing the jaded supernumeraries who show up
nowadays at Legion conventions on the assumption that
they represent anything or any body of opinion more
substantial than those present, has become, we suspect,
politically hazardous. To induce Legion delegates to
cheer, a speaker must make the nation groan.

Sense and Nonsense About Space

The title has been taken from Dr. Lee A. DuBridge’s
article in the August Harper's, which everyone con-
cerned with the problems of interplanetary travel
should read. Dr. DuBridge, president of the California
Institute of Technology, is all for the space adventure

_ but, unlike most of the journalists who have invaded the
field, he does not gloss over the immense engineering
difficulties. For example, a man with the necessary sup-

. eeliee and instruments might be packed into a vehicle

with a total weight of 2,000 pounds. A rocket with a

erect of 300,000 pounds could project such a vehicle

; pS hrust of 2 ,700,000 pounds. The man, or men, however,

- into a near-moon orbit. Fine — an Atlas will do it. But

then it develops that to make a soft landing on the moon
will require at least two pounds of fuel for each pound
of the original payload: we now need a rocket with a

- won’t want to stay on the moon: therefore sige on
4 re million pounds thrust.

tise sober considerations are in marked conta st to

Nal

ing por appropriati ons. Ate Air Fore arg’ ues that s
its mission is to operate in the atmosphere, tiie’ ee M4
space above the atmosphere belongs to it by simple
extension, The Army director of guided missiles counters
that with “our long experience in seizing and holding
land and defending land areas, this capability will un-
questionably have its application on other land areas
not on earth.” It will be some time before either of
them gets anybody up there. In the meantime, let’s
get back to earth, boys.

Uses of Villainy

It would be difficult to imagine three less likely
nominees for labor canonization than John Llewellyn
Lewis, Harry Renton Bridges and James Riddle Hoffa.
All three are strong-willed, hard-bitten men of whom
none is known for tact, delicacy of perception or lofty
idealism. Yet the first two have proved to be immensely
effective labor leaders, and the third may end up in the
same category. Should this happen, Hoffa will owe a
vote of thanks to the editors of Time, to the American
press generally and to Senator McClellan (and the ©
Senator’s staff) for having elected to make him the
prime target of the current anti-labor drive. This drive
bids fair (see article by B. J. Widick, p. 103, this is-
sue) to succeed “anti-communism” as the major dem-
agoguery of the 1960s.

Lewis was once such a target; for years on end the
press attacked him as the arch villain of American labor.
On one occasion Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced him
as a “traitor.” Yet Lewis’ position in the American la-
bor movement could not be more secure than it is today.
Knowing well the uses of villainy, he not merely suffered
the earlier attacks with good grace; he even encouraged ~
them. For three decades Harry Bridges has been de-
nounced by virtually the entire American press as a
“treasonable,” sinister, conspiratorial figure; indeed,
Bridges, with his long nose, succeeded Lewis, with his
bushy eyebrows, in the star role of labor villain. Gov-
ernment agencies hounded him; he was investigated and
reinvestigated; lawyers grew rich defending him. But he
survived and his union flourished.

Currently Hoffa is the chief beneficiary of this same —
insistent, tiresome, promiscuous vilification. It has en-
abled him to survive scandals, exposures, prosecutions,
court actions and skillful attempts to subvert his leader-
ship. And it is difficult to see how his position can be ©
challenged as long as he is the fortunate victim of such
“colorful” journalism as the lurid cover and still more
lurid article devoted to him in Time (August 31). As

: though attempting to substantiate the thesis of Jigs —
Gardner's recent Nation article (August 15), Time’ Sh
elodramatists of the news Hage i in one of their |

erformances in this effort: —

Phas Pe

won! ? ‘
James Riddle Hoffa. His cold, hard eyes swept across
the well-groomed grounds of the Greenbrier Hotel at
White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. He spat on the lawn.
“We are paying the bill,” he said, “but those intellectuals,
those lawyers, picked out this place. This is their kind
of place. They like to play golf and that stuff.”
It is itonic that a man should be sustained in power
by his enemies, but it is still more ironic that his
enemies should enable him to turn even their victories
to his account and advantage. For the ultimate irony,
of course, is that the harsh labor bill now being shaped
in Congress will in all probability have fewer adverse
effects on the Teamsters than on any other significant
_ segment of American labor. Unions that adhere to the
letter of the law will be penalized by the new legislation,
but unions that are not averse to the use of extra-legal
pressures or which — as in the case of the Teamsters —
are so powerfully situated that they do not need to use
such crude forms of pressure as picketing, will not suffer
similar consequences. As long as Hoffa’s hand is upheld
by the enemies who beset him, his future looks bright.

Return of the Black Sheep

Closely related to the uses of villainy is the folly of
disowning black sheep. After six years of impenitent

exile, the International Longshoremen’s Association —_

the first union in three-quarters of a century to be ex-
pelled from either labor federation on charges of domin-
ation by corrupt elements — is being received back
into the folds of the AFL-CIO. The Nation has con-
sistently questioned both the wisdom and the efficacy

of expulsion as a remedy for dealing with corrupt trade
unions. Some of our readers did not share these views

and have condemned us roundly for them. But today,

ee? <n

7 a + oe ae wow aT,
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reports A. H. Raskin in The New York Times, there is
“a growing disenchantment within the federation on the
efficacy of expulsion as a means of compelling unions
to adhere to high moral standards”; federation officials,
he reports, feel that the time has come to acknowledge
that labor should “not disown its black sheep by driv-
ing them out of the fold.”

The events of the last six years lend strong support
to this conclusion. Messrs. Landrum and Griffin were
not moved by the expulsion of the I.L.A. Quite the
contrary, its guilt was attributed to the entire labor
movement — a predictable consequence of expulsion.
Nor did expulsion really result in a “clean up”; the
Jatest report of the New York Waterfront Commission

’ strongly indicates that hoodlums are still a power in the
gly p

union. The I.L.A. returns to the fold a stronger body
than when it was expelled; during the years of exile it
had to fight its own battles. This added strength is a
by-product of expulsion in another way, too: having
expelled the Longshoremen, the AFL-CIO tried to de-~
stroy it by chartering a rival union, which only made
the I.L.A. officials fight the harder for survival.

If the officials of the AFL-CIO have finally recognized
the folly of disowning black sheep, a net gain in valuable
experience can be noted; unfortunately, there is reason
to believe that fear of the I.L.A.’s joining the Team-
sters and the West Coast Longshoremen was largely
responsible for the decision to readmit the union to the
federation. It is one thing to expel an erring brother
under strong external pressure; when the erring brother
begins to flirt with a rival organization, however, it is
time to sheathe the avenging sword and beckon the
black sheep home. Under such circumstances, what
cannot be forgiven can be easily forgotten.

‘

| ANTI-LABOR DAY: 1959 . . oy a. J. wiaics

labor relations in this country.

No-

power, and forced upon them a hold-
the-line that forestalled

4 AY «

day in tribute to American labor,

next week’s celebration could hardly
k have come at a more embarrassing
moment. What happened recently
_ in Congress in the field of labor legis-
lation does not lend itself to inter-
i pretation as a tribute to the trade-
k union movement, nor does the steel
f strike promise much for the organ-
| ized worker, Indeed, the strike
_ marks a dangerous tutding point in

¥
4}
| SINCE LABOR DAY is a legal holi-

B. J. WIDICK, who has written ex-
tensively on labor problems, is co-
author, with Irving Howe, of The
aa and Walter Reuther.

, 1959

.
« a
\

where do labor developments furnish
palatable material for the usual
Labor Day oratory.

If the trade unions did not have
such deep and permanent roots in
our society, and a book membership
numbering close to 18,000,000, one
would be tempted to compare the
current anti-labor mood in the na-
tion with the beginning of the “anti-
Communist” wave of the early post-
war years that culminated in the
reign of McCarthyism.

Last year began unpleasantly for
the unions. The recession hurt mem-

bership, rm bi. baneeiing

strategy
progress. Dreams of campaigns for
a shorter work week to cope with
the effects of automation faded. La-
bor endured an increasing number of
attacks by its enemies on almost all
fronts.

The mood of frustration and defeat
lasted until the November elections, _
won handily by the Democrats,
promised to introduce a fresh libera
trend on the political scene. Labor a
leaders felt that the results assure
them of adequate protection against
the legislative drive of conservative |
Republicans and Southern Dem

ay
at

tot
Rhy. fe. 288 hy Laces

crats to cripple labor under the
guise of curing corruption.

True, there was growing evidence
that labor relations in many indus-
tries were going sour. In some cases,
this was attributed to a hangover
from recession conflicts; in others,
to the vindictiveness of conservative
business interests who were unwilling
to accept November’s decision, par-
ticularly on the “right-to-work”
laws. However, top labor leaders
felt generally that the basic pattern
of 1959 contracts would be set in
steel, where a relatively long history
of amiable union-management rela-
tions offered hope of solid labor
progress, even though the pattern
of past steel settlements—that is,
higher wages followed by even higher
prices—was not likely to be dupli-
cated. But what followed has alarmed
the trade-union movement.

AN IMPORTANT symptom of the
changing mood of the nation was the
brutal smashing of the textile work-
ers’ strike in Henderson, N.C., a la
1934’s famed textile strike in Gas-
tonia. But at Gastonia the use of the
National Guard evoked much pub-
lic sympathy for the embattled strik-
ers, while the Henderson defeat oc-
curred without a murmur of indig-
nation outside the labor movement.
What this signified to organizing
campaigns and union progress in the
South was illustrated shortly there-
after when the Great Lakes Carbon
Company of Morgantown, N.C.,
wrote its own ticket to end a ten-
week strike; before the threat of an-
other Henderson, the union capitu-
lated.

Meanwhile, an important struc-
tural change was taking place in the
management of such industries as
steel, auto, rubber, electric and oil.
This was the gradual replacement of
old-line labor-relations men and indus-
trial leaders by a new type of organ-
ization man, usually with a legal or
business background. Gone were the
days when C. E. Wilson of General
Motors would fly to Pittsburgh to
try to sell recalcitrant steel barons
the idea that labor was entitled to a
yearly raise in pay based on im-
provement in productivity, that an
“escalator clause” afforded employees
some protection against inflation.
Gone from the ranks of steel leaders

was Benjamin Fairless, president of

U.S. Steel, who was proud of his
friendship with David McDonald,
Steelworkers’ president,

The prototype of the new indus-
trial-relations man was Lemuel R.
Boulware, the tough veteran of Gen-
eral Electric, who had been viewed
as a vestigial remnant of the pre-
union days by sophisticated labor-
relations experts. Boulware was re-
placed by another man last year, but
his philosophy not only continues to
dominate at G.E., but has become
standard in big business. This 1s
what has upset old patterns and
ushered in a new and dangerous
period in labor relations. Fortune
magazine, last December, summa-
rized the philosophy. of “Boulware-
ism,” which provides a clue to under-
standing what has happened in steel
and—according to the Wall Street
Journal of August 18—is happening
in other industries:

At many big corporations, labor
relations have been characterized in
recent years by what Parker [Boul-
ware’s successor] and Boulware con-
sider a kind of opportunism, by a
willingness to succumb to union
pressure rather than hazard a strike,
by a willingness to let unions take
the credit for all contractual gains,
and by an eagerness to preserve good
labor relations at all costs. G. E., on
the contrary, prides itself on_ its
“principled” position. Its spokesmen
insist that if G.E. has to choose
between principles and profits, it will
accept a costly strike rather than
surrender, for example on such an
issue as the union shop. The cor-
poration has vigorously supported
right-to-work laws and has indicated
that it prefers to locate new plants
in right-to-work states. . . . Where
most corporations turn a deaf ear to
union propaganda, except at bargain-
ing time, G.E. carries on a steady
propaganda effort of its own to win
workers’ support for its labor poli-
cies—and for its conservative po-
litical position.

This is the new philosophy that
David McDonald faces at the steel
bargaining table, and it is a new and
frustrating experience. Fortunately
for the union, R. Conrad Cooper and
the other steel spokesmen have over-
reached themselves. The Steelwork-
ers had not expected a strike; their
ranks were somewhat befuddled on

the wage-price problem, and the
union had scaled down its demands
enormously 1n an effort to obtain a
peaceful settlement. But the steel
interests were adamant in their “no
progress” program, and when they
added demands affecting long-estab-
lished working rules and chiseling on
working conditions at a time of
fabulous profit-making, they did the
one thing guaranteed to solidify all
steel workers behind their union. At
this writing, difficulty in ending the
strike does not involve wages—a ten-
cent package still remains the likely
outcome—but principle. Involved is
“Boulwareism” versus a labor move-
ment which is now fighting not for
progress, but for the status quo.

FOR LABOR to be placed in such
a position at a time of unparalleled
prosperity and industry-profits sug-
gests a need for re-evaluation of the
concept that labor loses in depres-
sions and gains in periods of prosper-
ity. At a national conference this
summer of the Industrial Union De-
partment of the AFL-CIO, Walter
P. Reuther described the develop-
ment thus: “The National Associa-
tion of Manufacturers and Big Busi-
ness are waging a class struggle in
America as Karl Marx wrote it would
he waged. They are working over-
time to prove Karl Marx was right.”
This somber prognosis has been given
additional weight not only by the
duration of the steel strike, but by
the political disaster labor suffered
when the Landrum-Griffin bill passed
the House of Representatives, and
whetted the appetite of Big Business
to take after the hide of labor on

all fronts. .
How labor will react generally to
this new situation may be revealed
Th _INATION

nat, © i aT

—
SS

yan

‘ai
wer

hd ae rss, a.

at the AFL-CIO convention this
month. Its leaders, now meeting at
Unity House, are engaged in working
out some answers. They know that
on both the economic and legislative
fronts, a period of bitter struggle lies
ahead,

George Meany certainly is Ameri-
ca’s angriest man at the moment,
and he has ample reason to be. La-
bor’s political victory of last fall has
evaporated. Meany expelled the
Teamsters Union to placate public
opinion and Congress; the AFL-CIO
cooperated with the McClellan com-
mittee; the federation, furthermore,
adopted a code of ethical practices.
The result of all this “appeasement”
has been the Landrum-Griffin bill,
or something close to it.

Quite obviously, labor leaders mis-
judged public opinion and the senti-
ment in their own ranks in the criti-
cal legislative fight that has just
taken place in Washington. Expel-
ling Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters,
far from solving anything, appears
to have aggravated the issue, since
Hoffa went on a free-wheeling fight
against the McClellan committee

(even some AFL-CIO men felt Hoffa

bested Counsel Robert Kennedy in

their exchanges). The committee’s
exposures failed to dent Hoffa’s hold
on his union—though of course the
reaction outside the labor movement
was quite different. The chance ap-

DECADE of the

THESE ARE lean days for Amer-
ica’s Left, leaner than any time in
history. The Communist Party is
still the largest group on the distaff
side, but even if one adds its 4,000
members to those of the Socialist
Party and the Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party, the total is less than
7,000. Yet for the ex-Communists,
ex-Trotskyists, ex-Socialists—for con-
venience, I ‘group them all under
the label “exes” — this is probably
the most bountiful period of all.

SE I TE ET

SIDNEY LENS, author of A World
in Revolution. (Frederick A. ie
5 ieago umon official.

business pu

on the
Jack Paar program created enor-
mous public support for the cam-
paign which business interests, reac-

pearance of young Kennedy

tionary politicians and anti-labor
forces generally had kept up on the
issue of corruption.

The climax came in the unprece-
dented—and to labor, shocking—in-
tervention of President Eisenhower,
who used his personal popularity
and the vast prestige of his office to
advocate a tougher law than the
Kennedy-Ervin bill, which had been
accepted overwhelmingly in the Sen-
ate. A tidal wave of public opinion
hit Washington that no counter-
efforts of labor leaders could roll

back.

OF COURSE, the immediate emo-
tional reaction of labor leaders to
what occurred in Congress was bound
to cool off. An illustration of the
mood of some leaders was expressed
by David McDonald when he arrived
at the AFL-CIO Council meeting.
“I’m all through with the Democrats
and I’m all through with COPE.
From now on I’m sticking to my
friend, Dick Nixon.” Jimmy Hoffa
announced at a Teamster lawyers’
conference in Virginia that his union
plans a vast political organization
and campaign to punish the legis-
lators who voted for the Landrum-

Griffin bill. The AFL-CIO Council

EX-REDS e « by Sidney Lens

One of the strange features of post-
war America is the number of exes
who have risen to positions of status
and influence. The literary and
diplomatic worlds, the relief organi-
zations, the trade unions, the staffs
of scores of institutions from the
Fund for the Republic to B’nai
B'rith, are filled by them to an amaz-
ing extent. Exism has become a veri-
table profession.

One of the Trotskyist factions of
a generation ago — at its peak, it
numbered no more than 200 mem-
bers — has provided two senior edi-
tors for Ameo S most prominent

ay he 4

an editor-in- rope

declared its intentions of going more
deeply and more thoroughly into
politics with an expanded program.
Behind labor’s political debacle: is
a phenomenon that now needs wider
attention. In reality, most unions -
are run by a small minority of ac-
tivists. The leaders acted, for better
or worse, in behalf of the ranks. This
kind of bureaucrat functioning has
worked in the past. It may continue
to do so in many unions, although it
is clear that in some, like the Steel-
workers, a major strike struggle is
bound to have some internal reper- Y
cussions. In politics, a labor vote is si
only a labor vote if the worker him-
self comes out to the polls. Effective
political action depends on direct
and active participation of the ranks.
Three years ago, Jimmy Hoffa ae
sneered at COPE and other political- G
action efforts of unions. “Politics?
You can play it two ways. You spend %
money or you make speeches. We
spend dough.” In the bush leagues
of Michigan, this was sufficient for f<
a long time. In the big leagues of ‘e
Washington, it is merely a sign of 2
political primitiveness. Big Business =
has the real dough. Now we find all a
unions converging on the political
front, united cn many issues, despite
their deep organizational and ideo-
logical differences. The involvement
of labor on the political front has
only begun.

chief of another slick magazine, an
internationally known writer, and at
least two moderately well-publicized
union officials. Two former Trotsky-
ists are prominent contributors to
The New Yorker. The former
labor editor of Business Week — a
confidante of Tom Dewey — is an _
ex-radical. One of Eric Johnston’s —
former assistants, one-time adviser te o

the Teamsters’ Union, Was an ex-
munist. Innumerable labor
around the world, executive assis
ants to Gangecsamen and Senat
researchers for the RAND Corpora

tion, executives of Radio Free Eu-
and hundreds of others rn

.
|
|

holding positions of influence and
respectability were the rebels of
yesteryear. The roster of present un-
ion leaders who were radicals in the
1930s reads like a Who's Who of the
labor movement.

What unites the exes is the simple
theorem that capitalism at its worst
is better than communism at _ its
best. Most of them still bristle
against imperialism, still flush with
anger over Jim Crow, still itemize —
in off-moments — the evils of the
profit system; but in the face of
what they consider the greater
danger, they have come to terms
with the lesser. Their rationale is
sometimes good-humored and _nihil-
istic, sometimes it drips with venom.
Many a former Communist — Louis
Budenz, to list one — is as fervidly
anti-Communist today as he was
anti-capitalist yesterday.

Most of the exes, of course, are
now simple folk, living in suburbia,
whose most radical recent acts have
been to vote twice in a row for
Adlai Stevenson or to kick up a fuss
at the parent-teacher association.
The professional exes number only
a few thousand; but their influence
on life runs deep and wide. Indeed,
they are a necessity in today’s Amer-
ica. Who could have fed the fires
of McCarthyism so well as the ex-
Communist Louis Budenz? And who
knows more about communism than
the former general secretary of the
Communist Party, Jay Lovestone,
or the former Lovestoneite, Irving
Brown?

EXISM IS A uniquely American
phenomenon. Leftists in Europe,
Asia, Africa and Latin America may
perambulate from the Communist to
the Socialist movement, or vice
versa, or they may become moder-
ate rather than left-wing Socialists,
but they seldom leave the Left.
Aneuran Bevan currently is accused
by British radicals of having “moved
to the Right.” Another British M.P.,
Richard Crossman, changes political
wings so often one never knows
where he stands at a particular mo-
ment, But it is rare indeed to hear
of a Labor Party leader who has
joined the Tories. The European
leftist parties are big enough to of-
fer shelter to their members for their

106 ‘

ie — SS CU mj a> Wt a
Hi a Se ae ee ee ore
\ veh Nye ae rv ye r Th ny |
i ie li ie

whole lives; there are thousands of
secure jobs for them in workers’
clubs, unions, publishing societies
and co-operatives.

Here, however, the situation 1s
somewhat different. True, for about
fifteen years, the Communist Party
offered a material as well as an emo-
tional haven for thousands of mem-
bers and fellow-travelers. A writer
who was close to the party had a
built-in audience of considerable
size; there were publishing houses
and book stores ready to give his
book a necessary push. Communist
unionists in the mid-thirties found
themselves suddenly with a _ few
thousand jobs at their disposal as
the party and its fellow-travelers
penetrated at least eleven C.I.O.
unions and part of the top C.I.O.
structure. But since 1948, the party
has been in steady decline, a decline
aggravated by the Khrushchev reve-
lations at the Twentieth Communist
Congress and the Hungarian revolu-
tion, Today it has so few members
it can hardly be considered a haven
for any but a few functionaries; it
has almost no influence and no jobs.

As for the other Left groups, the
Socialist Party at one time had
many friends in the trade-union
movement. The first president of
the U.A.W. was Homer Martin, a
Socialist. His administrative as-
sistant—now an educational director
for another large union — was a
member of a right-wing Communist
group popularly known as the “Love-
stoneites,” after the name of its
leader, Jay Lovestone. The three
Reuther brothers were then in the
Socialist Party.

The list of writers and intellec-
tuals who endorsed Socialist Norman
Thomas in 1932 is imposing: Paul
Douglas (now Senator Douglas),
John Dewey, Elmer Davis, Henry
Hazlitt, Lewis Gannett, Stuart Chase,
Joseph Wood Krutch, Stephen Vin-
cent Benet, Van Wyck Brooks,
Franklin P. Adams, Ordway Tead,
Deems Taylor, George Gershwin,
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Morris
Cohen, Reinhold Niebuhr, Oswald
Garrison Villard and scores more.

Four years later most of these
individuals had turned to Franklin
Roosevelt as their political lodestar.
By 1937, the Socialist Party was in

severe decline, never to be resuscitat-
ed. By the mid-fifties it had less
than a thousand members. Its trade
unionists and intellectuals had de-
serted it for the New Deal, the
Democratic Party and Americans
for Democratic Action.

BUT WHILE the Left was disap-
pearing, America suddenly found
itself in need of men who knew some-
thing about leftism. When Germany,
Japan and Italy were conquered, the
United States had to find men who
could speak to radical trade union-
ists emerging from illegality. Almost
in toto these were leftists—Socialists,
Communists, Left Catholics — who
spoke the language of Marxism,
Christian Socialism, syndicalism. The
Labor Party took the reigns of gov-
ernment in Britain. Socialist gov-
ernments were formed in France
periodically —the one before de-
Gaulle, for instance, by Socialist Guy
Mollet. Socialists were in power in
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Austral-
ia, New Zealand, sometimes in Bel-
gium and Holland. They have been
the big opposition party in Germany
and Japan. Moreover, every one of
the twenty-one non-Communist na-
tions that sprang up after the war
were led by men who considered
themselves Socialists of one kind or
another.

America needed diplomats, union-
ists, relief-agency officials who could
talk with such people in their own
political language. Unfortunately,
our old diplomatic corps was a
striped-pants force which spoke little
more than the language of Standard
Oil. It was definitely not at home
with revolutionaries like Bourguiba,
Nkrumah, Nehru, Ba Swe, Hata,
Tito, Fidel Castro. After 1947, the
United States found itself in a cold
war with yesterday’s ally, Russia,
but it had almost no one in impor-
tant positions who had ever read
Marx or Lenin, let alone understood
them. On one occasion, when I was
in Yugoslavia, I asked the Embassy
staff whether there was anyone who
had ever read Das Kapital. Only
one had.

And so a new profession was born:
the profession of exism. The men
who entered it didn’t give up their
radicalism at one fell blow; they ar-
rived at their new rationale slowly.

i Th e N. TION

In their own mirror they could still
see themselves as fighters, but it
was a new kind of fight. The evils
of capitalism receded towards minor-
ity status in their Weltanschauung,
and there emerged in their mind’s
eye the towering evil of communism
which became the single, immediate
and all-inclusive enemy. Fortunately
for them, this rationale ran parallel
to the country’s new mood on for-
eign policy. The rationalizers thus
became sought after not only by the
diplomatic corps, but by the mass
media and innumerable institutions
involved in relief, civil rights, cul-
tural, research and other activities.

Probably the most successful ex
of them all is a man who is almost
unknown to the public, Jay Love-
stone. Next time you read a state-
ment by George Meany or the AFL-
CIO charging that neutralist Nehru
objectively serves communism, it is
almost certain that Lovestone wrote
it. And next time you read of an
American labor attaché in a Latin
American country who is called down
for distributing anti-Communist lit-
erature inside the unions there, it is
a good guess that Lovestone helped
him get his job. Lovestone receives
no fancy salaries—he is now on the
staff of the AFL-CIO International
Affairs Committee — but his new
power is immense.

He was one of the founders of the
Communist Party after the Russian
Revolution. For a time, prior to
1929, he was its general secretary,
but he picked the wrong horse in the
three-way fight among Stalin, Bu-
kharin and Trotsky (he picked Bu-
kharin), and Stalin relegated him to
perdition. He was expelled in 1929
even though 90 per cent of the dele-
gates at a Communist’ convention
supported him. None the less, until
the mid-thirties he continued to con-
sider Stalin’s general policies correct.
His big differences with communism
were on the American scene; he op-
posed the policies of William Z.
Foster and Earl Browder.

On expulsion, Lovestone formed
his own group which was still in
existence in 1941, when it had per-
haps 1,000 members. With him at
the time were such men as Irving
Brown, now AFL-CIO representa-
tive in Europe and listed by Look as
one of the hundred most powerful

mem on earth; Harry Goldberg, an-
other AFL-CIO representative; Ber-
tram D. Wolfe, biographer of the
Russian revolutionary leaders, who
has served with U.S. Government
propaganda agencies; Charles Zim-
merman, head of Local 22 of the In-
ternational Ladies’ Garment Work-
ers’ Union; and many others who
have since risen to high status in
American labor and government
circles. Through his connection with
Zimmerman, Loyvestone was chosen
in 1944 as the head of the Interna-
tional Relations Department of the
ILGWU, and through this post he
became a major force in American
foreign-policy fields.

HAVING clearly foreseen the key
role of overseas labor in the postwar
world, and having staked his claim
early, Lovestone was able to place
old associates and a host of new ones
in strategic spots within the U.S.
Government and in various agencies
overseas. Irving Brown, who had
never been abroad before, was sent
to Europe as A. F. of L. representa-
tive. Brown now became a figure to
be reckoned with, dealing with heads
of government and heads of unions
like a veritable potentate. Harry
Goldberg made forages to Indonesia
and Italy. In India, the Lovestone
apparatus picked up a young man
named Mohan Das. Men with pri-
mary allegiance to Lovestone were
picked up in, or sent to, Turkey,

Israel, Algeria, Indonesia, Latin
America. Through former members
of his political group, Lovestone

helped form and run the Interna-
tional Rescue Committee and other
relief agencies.

Here at home the influence of this
formerly isolated Communist grew
steadily. Representative Clardy of
Michigan alludes to a 113-page se-
cret document of the U.S. Air Force
dealing with Lovestone’s relations

with government officials, in which

it is stated that labor attaché posts,
and other government jobs, were
frequently “cleared” with him. It is
noteworthy that despite his past, he
has seldom been bothered by Con-
gressional inquiry committees. He
has never had passport trouble. Ed
Lahey, correspondent for the Knight
newspapers, calls him “a real mys-
tery man” who “insists rather sheep-

ishly that there is no formal connec-
tion between him and the Central
Intelligence Agency, nor between
him and the Department of State
| but} it can be stated without quali-
fication that the CIA headed by
Allen Dulles...has in recent years
obtained much of its primary infor-
mation about international com-
munism from Lovestone.”

One of the great bones of conten-
tion between Walter Reuther and
George Meany is what to do about
Lovestone. Reuther wants him fired;
Meany leans on him heavily.

THE WORLD for the Lovestoneites
is still a black and white one. A
generation ago, they could see no
evil in communism; today they see
evil in anyone who does not agree
with their way of fighting com-
munism. Most of the other exes are
not as single-tracked. They view
their own past as something of a
peccadillo, and the present often with
good-humored equanimity. Some are
“foundation foundlings” who receive
periodic grants from Ford, Rocke-
feller and other foundations to make
trips around the world, to study and
explain communism in various uni-
versities, to participate in pleasant
Latulleseaal conferences in Vienna,
Paris, Tokyo or Stanford. They
write light-hearted pieces for The
New Yorker, or heavy, objective ar-
ticles for Encounter. They are the
sophisticated nihilists of the twen-
tieth century.

Dwight MacDonald, editor with
his former wife, Nancy, of the left-
wing Politics, has written a_ series
of biographical articles for Encoun-~
ter which typifies the philosophy of
this type of intellectual ex. MacDon-
ald graduated from Yale, became a
writer and joined the Trotskyists.
What disturbs him, in retrospect,
was the endless discussion on the
Left as to whether Russia was or
was not a “workers” state.” He con-
cludes that the Left made no impact
on the 1930s, since it did little else
but jabber.

This, of course, is a synthetic view.
The polemics of the assorted Left of
the 1930s may seem puerile from
the vantage point of the 1950s. But
the Left did more than talk. Two
or three Communists in a union, or
two or three Socialists, were the

107

catalytic agents that galvanized hun-
dreds of thousands into sit-down
strikes, unemployment demonstra-
tions and bonus marches on Wash-
ington. The Left mdisputably made
a considerable contribution in brains
to the New Deal, particularly to its
secondary echelons. But downgrading
the Left of the 1930s is a necessary
posture for the ex-radical; it is as
if to say: “I took it too seriously,
but I was young then.”

IN MANY ways, the professional ex
is the most powerful influence in
today’s tendency to conform. Be-
cause of his past, he is even more

fearful ¢

than the arch-conservative. Few
liberals and no prominent exes were
willing to speak out openly against
the antics of the late Senator from
Wisconsin; it was conservatives like
Senator Harry Cain who stood up
to be counted in opposition.

As Granville Hicks has pointed
out, the intellectuals of the 1920s
and, of course, the 1930s believed
that “What is, is wrong.” Leftism
of that era was a small force, but
the individual leftist often had con-
siderable influence. The literati, the
political writers, were more apt than
not to be of the broad, amorphous

yey wo

“sticking his neck out”

ri we

Left, and eit bible and” peed

had wide acceptance. Today’s. gen-
eration of intellectuals, by and large,
is an apathetic, resigned and fear-
ful one. Despite the beatniks, its
basic theme is that ‘What is, is
right.” It is afraid to challenge the
established order of things. The pro-
fessional ex, with his own rationale
for accepting the status quo, rein-
forces this conformity. He is, in ef-
fect, the older generation telling the
newer one: “I was a rebel in my
youth, but I learned my lesson; don’t
you fall into the same trap.”

In our day and age this rationale
is a marketable commodity,

THE KYRIE PLAN e by Michael O’Connell

THE KYRIE Plan was introduced
on a small TV station in the Mid-
west which, investigating the com-
mercial value of shock, had turned
the last quarter hour before the
late movies into a forum for wild
ideas. The program was called “Soap-
box Corner.” On this particular night
the camera closed on an unremark-
able face, squarish, a bit soft around
the edges, with rimless glasses—the
kind of man Hollywood might cast
as a professor of economics.

Light flashed off the glasses as he
looked down at some notes and be-
gan. “It is no longer debatable,” he
said matter-of-factly, “that you and
I and our equivalents in certain
other countries have decided on sui-
cide. Whether we have done this
from desire, apathy, stupidity or in-
telligence does not matter. We have
decided even if we are not aware
of it.”

“Uh, oh,” said one of the station
engineers, watching a monitor screen.

“Bet they give this one the hook.”

“However, while the vector of
events which we permit, or insist
_ on, makes this as certain as though
we each put a gun in his mouth and
cere the trigger, it may be that,

of ICHAEL O'CONNELL describes

mself as “a painter who writes ie

_casionally because some things 1

want to say need words,”

even now, we do not clearly under-
stand what this means. Therefore”
—and for the first time the ordinary
face lifted and the eyes looked direct-
ly into the camera—“I offer to you a
reasonable proposal.”

In thousands of homes, unfinished
cans of beer were put down slowly
or skeins of knitting yarn fell to the
floor, and relaxing bodies began to
tense, as the methodical voice con-
tinued. The idea it offered was
simple. Within each nation possessing
nuclear weapons certain smaller
cities, two in each country, would
be designated as targets. Identities
of the cities would be kept secret.
At a certain date, also secret, these
cities would be nuclear-bombed.

“In this way,” said the voice, “we
can thus commit a little suicide at
a time and discover if this is what
we actually want.”

There was another point: the air
force of each country would bomb
its own cities.

“This is logical.” The voice paused,
and went on. “Consider a_ rather
large group within all the nations
involved, which has no power re-
garding the course of events. Chil-
dren. We are aware that in a nuclear
war the Russians will kill our chil-
dren. We know that we will kill
their children. Eack 1 accepts his as
the: act oe i . But since the

p for the €a h of
se i

Russian children will be with the
Russians and the true responsibility
for the death of our children will
be with us, we must commit the
act ourselves, It may be that, facing
the fact on a small scale, we shall
choose to prevent it on a larger.”

The speaker added details, Govern-
ments without nuclear weapons, but
anxious to possess them, would be
supplied by the nuclear powers con-
tingent upon participation in the
plan. Radioactive fallout over other
non-nuclear nations to be arranged
as fairly as possible. If after the first
test results were indecisive, pro-
gressively larger cities and weapons
could be utilized. The entire agree-
ment was to be worked out secretly
by governments of nuclear powers,
immediately.

The speaker stopped. Carefully
he folded his notes, put them away
and again faced the camera. “I call
this idea the Kyrie Plan,” he said
slowly, “from the ancient liturgical
cry, Kyrie eleison.” ,

USUALLY, after “Soapbox Corner,”
the station received a fair number
of phone calls. This night there were
none. All evening the telephones
were mute until, at 1 A.M., the chan-
nel went blank with a_ scratchy
playing of the Star-Spangled Banner.

But next morning at dawn calls
started rn in so tucguay ie

ee ie ee ei

; yee iA

the switchboard was swamped. The
two local newspapers gave the story
considerable space and the wire
services picked it up. Across the
country the plan was dismissed as
crackpot ranting or some kind of
sick humor, and cited as a disgusting
example of the abuse of free speech.

The furor was dying down when,
two days later, Pravda devoted an
entire column, page one, to the story.
It was a straightforward account
stating that a stalking horse of the
U.S. Government had proposed an
appalling action, the nuclear bomb-
ing of the Soviet Union, with its own
permission. This was both criminal
and inadmissible, the story continued,
and a further proof of the insane
lengths to which fear of Soviet ac-
complishments was driving the West.

THE KYRIE Plan became world
news.

At his weekly news conference the
President said that he would not
comment until all the facts were
available. The State Department
acquired a tape recording of the
television program and began serious
study to determine why the Russians
had reacted so negatively,

At a missile base in the. Ural
Mountains an officer of rank, whose
jovial manner had neyer attempted
to conceal the machine within, read
an exact translation of one of the
wire-service stories and speculated.
Although this was unmistakably
some kind of capitalist trap, the idea
itself had possibilities. There was
much to be learned about various
defensive missiles under actual attack
conditions. If the cities were not
really important industrially. . . .
And a one-star General in Colorado
whose handsomeness and_ incisive
mind had never prevented a peculiar
uneasiness in his peers, looked down
into a bowl of guppies, his only
friends, and whispered, “An insane
idea, of course. But from the purely
technical standpoint, intriguing.”
Another person of authority, in Eng-
land, perceived instantly that—just
for the sake of conjecture—adjust-
ment would have to be made for
the relative size of countries, else
the entire thing would be grossly
unfair.

In Congress, an intransigent Sena-
Se mbet 5, 1959

fae

Fg Fp tart ar.

N
«
»
va

tor from the West Coast made a
short, bitter speech. “The notion is
crazy,” he said, “and so is anyone
who takes it seriously.” His col-
leagues, long accustomed to his at-
tacks on majority attitudes, and
shocked to find themselves on his
side, began to re-examine their own
positions. It was pointed out that
his stand was strikingly close to that
of the Communists.

A high Civil Defense spokesman,
pressed by reporters, somewhat re-
luctantly agreed that, yes, such an
attack on two smaller cities would
yield valuable data on the effects
of blast and fallout, and clarify many
post-raid medical problems.

One of the national news maga-
zines ran an item cautioning its
readers not to dismiss the Kyrie Plan
too quickly. Although the United
States planned no unilateral action,
some foreign affairs experts felt the
idea merited further study. The
Communists were known to oppose
it violently. «© |

Around the world the currents of

opinion grew choppy. The Kyrie

Plan became the subject of angry
discussion everywhere.

An extremist leader of African
nationalism was quoted widely when
he said, “Any plan which brings the
dominant powers to their senses be-
fore it is too late, is good!” And a
Polish intellectual journal conjec-
tured cautiously that to utilize a
minority for the majority welfare
was not an anti-party action.

Then Radio Moscow, in an Arabic
language broadcast, declared that
the Soviet Union had always wel-
comed any plan which offered a hope
of peace. Capitalist lies to the con-
trary would be proved wrong for
all the world to see. Next day, the
Soviet press and radio launched a
full-scale campaign calling upon the
West to confer immediately with the
Soviet Union on aspects of the so-
called Kyrie Plan. The necessity for
secret negotiations was emphasized.

In answer to a storm of inquiries
the State Department announced
merely that a memorandum had been
received from the Soviet Union and
that it was being given careful study.
It added that U.S. policy had always
been to consider seriously any plan
which offered a hope of peace.

DAYS passed without further news
and people began to flinch at the
whistling scream of their military
jets taking off. And in cities like
Coventry, Vitebsk or Youngstown,
they looked up at jet trails clawing
across the sky and wondered.

The man who had started it all
was located. He had disappeared
after the television program in spite
of an intensive search by swarms
of reporters and the neat, reticent
men working for some government
agency. A free-lance photographer
traced him to a city on the East
Coast where he had been sentenced
to thirty days in jail for refusing
to take shelter during a practice air-
raid alert. He was in the psychiatric
ward. The photographer managed to
talk with the prison psychiatrist.

“How bad is he, Doctor?” he
asked. “Can you arrange an inter-
view?”

The doctor shook his head. “There
must have been some mistake at the
desk. That man was never trans-
ferred to the prison hospital, which

109

1% ss “| i sate Noe

was overcrowded. Three days after
arrival he hanged himself in his cell.”

The photographer arranged _per-
mission to look at the cell and there
took a picture which was circulated
around the world. It showed a steel
bunk, a bucket, a high window with
bars and a wall blackened by years
of contact with hands, shoulders and

heads. Into it was scratched the
stark, sprawling letters: Kyrie elei-
SON.

That picture was the catalyst.
First, the letters started, letters to
the world’s leaders from their own
countrymen, but also letters from
what seemed all other peoples of the
globe. The letters said, in literally a
million different ways, Stop the Kyrie
Plan. It ts madness. A volume of
mail that to begin with was startling
quickly grew overwhelming until the

7. hae 2
; hoe Ws Meee ¢

hostalll ‘systems of the ‘world were
totally bogged down, and still the
letters continued.

After that the crowds. In Wash-
ington, London and Moscow, in
Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Bonn, Belgrade
and Buenos Aires, in Peking, Dublin,
Bagdad, Jakarta, New Delhi and
Ottawa, in all the capitals of the
world multitudes gathered before the
government buildings, At the be-
ginning they carried placards or
stretched banners, but soon these
disappeared. Their governments knew
why they were there. They stood
and looked at the government
buildings in crowds vaster than any
the cities had ever known.

If the police dispersed them, they
returned. In those places where they
were assaulted brutally they with-
drew, and returned. In many places

watched, They meant business.
Everything stopped.

Five days later an extraordinary
plenary session of the General As-
sembly was convened at the United
Nations in New York. Cars carrying
the delegates passed through un-
imaginable crowds, quiet, implacable,
watching them.

Seven days later a World Treaty
was signed by all member states of
the United Nations, a treaty hailed
as a giant step forward for mankind.
Its salient clause provided that from
that time forward no signatory na-
tion for whatsoever reason (internal
revolt or dissension excepted) should
have the power to explode against
its own people a nuclear weapon.

The crowds dispersed.

POISONING THE SAHARA « « by Ira V. Morris

Fie Paris
IN THE LAST few years, a con-
certed effort has been made to
reinforce the idea that the Sahara is
a bleak desert, unpopulated as the
moon. The object of this campaign
became apparent about the end of
last year. Articles began to appear
in various French publications de-
scribing France’s military installa-
tions at Colomb-Bechar and Beni
Abbes, where an area of some 300
square miles has been set aside as
a robot-plane and teleguided-missile
base. Finally, it was announced in
April that the first French nuclear
bomb would be exploded experi-
mentally “in the Tanezrouft.” How
convenient to have a desert avail-
able in which to set off such lovely
fireworks!

Unfortunately, the desert is not
uninhabited, and the spot picked for
the blast is not in the bleak Tanez-

IRA MORRIS and his wife Edita
(author of The Flowers of Hiroshima,
Viking) are American residents of
Paris who have taken a leading role
in French organizations opposing
nuclear warfare. This article was
adapted from the French of Onsiy
du Pwugqeaudeau.

rouft, but, at the southern end of
Touat—middle point of a great arc of
valleys between Morocco and Mzab,
one of the most fertile oasis regions
of the Sahara. On both sides of these
valleys, the Gourara, Touat and Ti-
dikelt, are palm groves, kasbas and
ancient monasteries. To the east, it
is watered by streams flowing from
the Tademait, to the south by
streams from the outlying peaks of
the Hoggar and the Atlas mountains
of Morocco. Subterranean rivers
also bring water from the Ksour
mountain chain.

THANKS to the copious irrigation,
there are 125 miles of practically
continuous palm groves, with 17,000
inhabitants and seventy-five villages
in the Touat alone. This region was
the historic halting spot for the
Sudan caravans, which once were
the solitary medium of trade and cul-
tural communication between Black

‘Africa and the northern areas. Along

this so-called date-highway are some
two million magnificent trees bear-
ing 200,000 hundredweight of dates.
A Frenchman of my acquaintance
owns 130,000 date palms in the Reg-
ganne. He cannot feel very happy at

the sight of the launching pylons,
of

~ vam
' Ahad i
on Bi

standing in readiness for the famous
bomb.

Apart from the dates, there is
barley, tobacco, henna, pimento
and vegetable cultivation, as well as
pasturage for camels, sheep and
goats. The prosperity of these oases
is due not only to their unique posi-
tion in the hollow of a huge basin,
watered each spring by great tor-
rents from the Moroccan Atlas
Mountains and the Tademait; for
centuries, peasants have planted
these palm groves and cultivated
them, irrigating them at the cost of
tremendous labor, toiling with pick
and basket, working like ants in the
cubeenead foggaras which, the
geographer E. F. Gautier tells us,
are almost as complicated as a
metropolitan subway system,

In the geographical system of the
Touat, Gourara and Tidikelt live
200,000 Arabs, Berbers, Jews and
Negroes whose means of livelihood
are agriculture, basket-work, weav-
ing and trading by camel between
the Sudan and the North. About
sixty of their villages, called ksours,
lie in the Gourara, seventy-five in the
Touat and forty in the ‘Tidikelt;
many of them have Chorfa or Koun-

ta mosques, for since eer

i
ots The Le NATION

a # 4
aia’ , yi ple

the police or soldiers. joined: -them. 4
‘They were peaceful. They stood and

|
]

"" >
th Westilednente have been religious
and cultural centers. Defended by
walled fortifications, the villages pro-
tected the oasis from marauding
tribes from the desert.

: ONE MAY BE permitted a feeling
of astonishment and shock that the
atomic blasts are to take place in
this green belt which, we are told by
M. Augustin Bernard of the Acadé-
mie des Sciences, is unique in the
whole Sahara. We have learned
something of the effects of stron-
tium-90 on sheep in Wales—sheep
which were infinitely farther from
the scene of atomic explosions than
will be these oases from the blast of

. France’s bomb. The natural food
_ of the Saharan people—milk, cereals
F and dates—will at once be contami-
nated by radioactive fallout, which

no doubt will be carried from well

to well by the subterranean water-
ways. The wind, blowing generally
from the northeast, will carry off the
contaminated sand to let it fall like

_ death-bearing rain on Mauretania.

And in Mauretania live not only the

| defenseless Saharans, whom some

| ~—= may choose to disregard, but also
| French oil and mineral prospectors;
and there are the French mines at

Tindouf and Fort-Gouraud. We

know that the wind has carried great

sand dunes from Africa to the Ca-

IN MODERN SOCIETY, whether
in the arts or in the sciences or in
education, and particularly in high-
er education, there has been an
enormous growth in technical com-
petence, a huge elaboration of pro-
fessional expertise. But there is no
_ necessary connection between this
vast increase in means and the suc-
cessful bringing about of the end
they exist to serve: an educated so-
ciety. A good education persists, not
as a collection of information, an ar-

WILLIAM WALSH, whose latest
book, The Use of Imagination (Chat-
to, London, 1959) has received high
praise, holds the chair of ee
i Ummuarsity of Leeds.

it is in the soure

PORROG. 2

¥ OLOMB-
wee BEN ABBES

FRENCH
WEST AFRICA

naries. It would be foolish to con-
sider metropolitan France immune,
for when the northeast wind sub-
sides, the south wind will take its
place and very possibly carry the
red dust over the Mediterranean.
All these facts are recognized. Yet
the Sahara experts have issued not

OUR MARSHMALLOW SOCIETY e « by William Walsh

rangement of intellectual bric-a-brac,
but as a certain unity of self, more
or less coherent, more or less rich,
and as a certain method of thinking
and feeling, more or less complex,
more or less sensitive. What lasts
(since the criterion here is not the
permanence of memory but the per-
manence of being and power), what
enters into our being as a result of
school and college, is a blend of value,
attitude and assumption, a certain
moral tone, a special quality of
imagination, a particular flavor of
sensibility—the things that consti-
tuted the soul of our education. And
s of these that
in the modern world,

- tension of tech-

there has been

f ALGERIA

TOVAT

EGANNE . i
°F TIDEKELT

TANEZROUFT

‘live in the present. Must it also die

faith. As D. H. Lawrence said, “e)
‘is useless to think that we can get
along without a conception of what
‘man is, and without a belief in ou ur
selves, and without the morality
‘support this belief.” ‘"

‘sions” of this order which flow in
‘civilization and inform edu
activity. They are the springs of
education when they are, to some »
esas to ont sp gy ty of

GOURARAY

FRENCH
WEST AFRIGA

one word of warning, nor has support
been given to the few scattered pro-
tests. Whatever the consequences,
the French want their bomb. Prestige
is involved, it seems, and the nation
has been told sternly that it must

in the present? :

nique, a severe contraction and en-
feeblement. There has been an im-
poverishment in those systems of
tacit assumptions on which man
must base his character and conduct. _
Human life depends on a metaphysic —
and incorporates a morality and a_

It is “beliefs and foregone conclu

the world they offer to interpret,
consonant with one another, and
held with some degree of passion.
They must be proportioned to re-
ality, undisturbed by patent contra-
dictions and braced by feeling. Be-
liefs capable of fostering good edu-
cation must be sane, consistent and
sincere. And it is here, at the source
of action, where the ultimate triumph
and disaster are prepared, that there
has been in the modern world so
notable a falling off in energy. We
suffer in the blood of our beliefs from
an anemia of principle, a debility
of assumption.

THIS STATE of affairs could not
but reflect itself in the sensibility of
our time and—we hardly need to re-
mind ourselvyes—it is out of this
sensibility, in it, through it and for
it that we live and teach. For by
sensibility I mean that special com-
bination of thought, feeling, value
and assumption, that particular
flavor of taste and sentiment, that
characteristic mode of action which
reveal the nuance and crystallize the
tone and temper of a period. What
first strikes an observer about our
contemporary sensibility is the dis-
crepancy between its overt behavior
and its inward condition. Outside we
see toughness, realism, even ruth-
lessness; inside we see weakness, soft-
ness, an absence of any firmness and
robustness of conviction: brutality
without and a mushiness within, a
hard casing and a marshmallow cen-
ter. And since sensibility concretely
represents the mind of an age and
since the mind constitutes the world
it lives in, we can say that we live
in a marshmallow world. Or that we
are characters in a novel written in
collaboration by Ella Wheeler Wil-
cox and Mickey Spillane.

Nothing gives more intimate, more
accurate testimony to the quality of
feeling in a society, to its sense for
truth in being, to its capacity for
true relations, than its use of Jan-
guage. It is hardly surprising, there-
fore, that so many have noted in
our time a degeneration in language,
a corruption in the essential means
of thought and feeling. Naturally
there is in language, as in every other
form of human vitality, a tendency
towards decline. But the life of lan-
guage has in the past been recur-

Ale

rently refreshed by poets and by the
people. For most of us, however,
poets are rather weird outsiders,
loping somewhat frantically around
the boundaries of civilization. As for
the people huddled. in enormous
urban areas, they seem to have lost
their taste for the flavor of colloquial
salt, they seem no longer able to pro-
duce that verve and variety of dia-
lect or that energy of phrase and
image with which they used to re-
plenish the potency of the word.
Language as it is used today exhibits
a progressive dehumanization, We
see this medium bleached of human-
ity in every sphere. We see it in the
language of politics and administra-
tion, in the language of the social
sciences and education, a Martian
discourse, lethargic with passives and
numb with the impersonal, emptied
of contrasts, periphrastic and as mu-
sical as the shutting of a filing
cabinet.

HERE IS AN example of that de-
humanized discourse, taken from a
distinguished American psychologist,
in which we now attempt to describe
even the most personal and human
experience:

It is clear, then, that the optimum
total situation implied in the baby’s
readiness to get what is given is his
mutual regulation with a mother who
will permit him to develop and co-
ordinate his means of getting as she
develops and co-ordinates her means
of giving. There is a high premium
of libidinal pleasure in this co-ordi-
nation—a libidinal pleasure which
one feels is only insufficiently formu-

lated by the term “oral.”*

We find this dehumanization, also,
in the language designed to be read
by the people and increasingly used
by them. This is a language run up

*To get the measure of what is meant
by the dehumanization of language, it
might be a good thing to contrast this,
as was suggested by Professor John
Pilley of the University of Edinburgh,
with these lines of Wordsworth which
deal | ‘Spncanayy with the same ‘sub-
ject’

. blest the Babe,

Nurs’d in ‘his. Mother’s arms, the

Babe who sleeps
Upon his Mother’s breast, who, when

his soul
Claims zap faa kindred with an
earthly sou

Doth et er " passion ie his
Mother's ey@.... |

. 7 ‘ae a

aut of a.rag’ bag of clichés and wo

tine catchwords. It blanks out what-
ever is discriminating, serious or re-
flective. It is too gross to make dis-
tinctions, too mechanized to express
feeling, too fabricated to correspond
to what is real and important. It is
hardly a language at all and much
more a set of stimuli. The following
is taken from a popular London
daily:

A goldmine-and-glitter night for
the stars. Excitement in the night
air... the hubbub of crowds and
the rustle of satins and minks fight-
ing their way through .. . a razzle-
dazzle of emeralds, rubies . . . and
then—BANG! Showland’s all-time
greatest and most glittering goldmine
exploded in London last night.

Implicit in this language is a con-
ception of man as half-animal, half-
machine. A more sophisticated, and
therefore more sinister, species of de-
generation shows itself in that habit
of expression which deceives us into
applying to one sphere of life terms
and discourse totally, madly, inap-
propriate to it. It is the ultimate evi-
dence of the marshmallow mind, for
it betrays not only confusion in
kinds, not only a disorder in stand-
ards, but a dreadful indifference to
both. The differences of kind and
order are amid the whole vocabulary
of value pulped into one undis-
tinguishable stuff. Thus the training
of athletes is talked of as though it
were an exercise in the spiritual life,
the difficulties of racing drivers as
seriously as the problems of scien-
tists, the perplexities of actors, in-
terior decorators and dress designers
as though they were serious and
moving concerns. We hear of the
Dostoevsky of the hem-line and the
Paseal of the half-petticoat. Here is
an example from a respected London
weekly:

An aura of mystery envelops the
artists at this time of gestation... .
His [Balenciaga’s] work is based on
eternal rules; even his fantasy is
built on the classic . . . by his elu-
siveness he is vouchsafed an atmos-
phere of mystery. . .. Here is a man
of such deep intensity of feeling that
suffering is something he cannot
escgpe. . . >

And if we regret this, it is not
from any dated notions of correct-
ness or from gny aspirations after

The Nati

is because language is

elegance. It
the supremely humanizing influence.
Through it there is instituted in man

a second and better nature. Lan-
guage is the means by which the
setting of the human being is im-
mensely enlarged and the context of
his action made immeasurably more
complex. Through language the bio-
logical unit becomes the historic per-
son. The sentence patterns we use,
the idioms, the words and the images,
and the categories of thinking, feel-
ing and valuing which they imply
come to us ripened by time and en-
riched by the insight, imagination
and effort of many generations.
Through language we receive not
just the education provided by our
teachers and our own lives but that
offered by history and “the tongues
of the dead.”

Wherever, therefore, there occurs
any Bectneration in language,
there is a distraction of human ca-
pacity and a contraction of human
possibility. The essential agency of
civilization is mutilated in _ its
sources.

IF THE STATE of language is the
most delicately exact index of the
health of our civilization, then in
any effort towards recovery we must
turn to where language is used most
powerfully, subtly and _ inclusively:
we must turn to literature. No source
of wisdom could be more appropri-
ate for the Americans and the Brit-
ish, since their literatures are the
supreme human achievements of
both nations. In their literature we
find embodied, concretely and in-
sistently present, not “a philosophy,”
not some abstract doctrine or par-
tial metaphysic, but a rich complex
of “beliefs,” “the picked experience
of the finest minds,” the great
writer’s intricate apprehension of re-
ality—“the idea,’ as Henry James
said, “which deeply lurks in any
vision prompted by life.” We have
no right to suppose, however, that
there can be in any age more than
a minority capable of responding in
any degree adequately to literature.
But it is about this minority that
we have to be most particularly
concerned; and not primarily for
their sake, but for the sanity and
health of the whole. We have to
‘resurrect and realize the conception
Septemb: SF 1959

as an essential

of a “learned class”
element in a civilized society.

A learned order, a national clerisy
[said Coleridge] is an essential ele-
ment of a rightly constituted nation,
without which it lacks the best
security alike for its permanence and
its progress. . . . The clerisy of a
nation, that is its learned men,
whether poets, philosophers or schol-
ars, are the points of relative rest:
there could be no order or harmony
of the whole without them. ... The
objects and final intention of the
order are these—to preserve the
stores and guard the treasures of past
culture, and thus to bind the present
with the past; to perfect and add to
the same, and thus to connect the
present with the future.

The one modern institution ca-
pable of producing an intellectual
elite—not a clique—is the Univer-
sity. In spite of Coleridge’s dismis-
sal of it as “a lecture-bazaar ab-
surdly called a university,” it is one
of the few of the traditional organs
of consciousness remaining in the
modern world.

WITHIN the University there is one
discipline peculiarly concerned to
encourage a finer awareness of the
tradition, a discipline which engages
with the living, growing tissue of the
tradition where it is most vividly
and insistently present. This is the
critical study of the tradition alive
m literature, “the most intimate
kind of study, that is of a concrete
tradition.” Proposals are sometimes
made in university circles suggest-
ing that our disunity could be as-

suaged by the provision of “general”

courses designed to impart a num-

ber of agreed opinions, or even an
agreed number of opinions. But the
critical study of literature is neither
an ideological crusade nor a plan to
enlarge a common stock of refer-
ence. Its purpose is to train a cer-
tain kind of mind, and through a
community of such minds to estab-
lish a center of intelligence and com-
munication,

IN AN AGE of illiberal technicians
and technical humanists, we have to
develop a central intelligence to
train the accomplished non-specialist
mind. For two reasons, literary criti-
cism is eminently qualified to be the
discipline by which this mind is per-
fected. It is of course an integral
study, informed by its own ends,
possessed of its own methods, ex-
pressed in its own idiom. But the
complexity of its undertaking is
such that it is bound to take a rang-
ing view of its function and to re-
ject any rigid limitation of its sphere
of interest. It is impelled at all times
to go beyond its own frontiers into
the provinces of other disciplines.
The other characteristic of literary
criticism which fits it so admirably
to be the appropriate discipline for
educating the free intelligence is that
the powers it appeals to, the capaci-
ties it exercises, are those deeply in-
volved in the serious conduct of life.
Penetration of mind, tact of address,
subtlety of response, concern to re-
fer to a mature standard, delibera-
tion in judgment and responsibility
in decision—these are the qualities
essential in literary criticism as they
are those most required in the im-
portant commitments and refusals,
elections and acceptances of humane
living. “The more advanced the
work,” writes F. R. Leavis with re-
lation to the literary critical student,
“the more unmistakable is the judg-

. . 7
ment that is concerned inseparable

from that profound sense of relative
value which determines, or should

determine, the important choices of

actual life.” And bringing the whole
argument to its climax, he concludes:

“It is an intelligence so trained that

is best fitted to develop into the —
central kind of mind, the. co-ordinat-
ing consciousness, cap of per- —

forming the functions assigned to

see

the class of the educated.”

DREAM AND REALITY. By Louis J.
Halle. Harper & Bros. 327 pp. $5.

i) WHAT’S WRONG WITH US. FOR-
a EIGN POLICY. By C. L. Sulzberger.
x Harcourt, Brace and Co. 255pp. $4.50.
‘am THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN
iM DIPLOMACY. By William Apple-

, man Williams. World Publishing Co.
| 219 pp. $4.75.

_ vs William Clark

FOR SOME time past we Europeans
have been aware that behind all the
brave reiterations of American foreign
policy, a painful reappraisal has been
taking place—at least outside the Ad-
ministration. Here are three books on
, American policy which agree on one
a point—it has failed.
What has gone wrong? Very simply,
the policy of negotiation from strength
‘ (which was proclaimed by a Democratic
f, administration and supported by a La-
bor government in Britain and has
been continued by Republicans and Con-
servatives) has lost its meaning since
sputnik showed that Russia had caught
up with America in military technology.
Ey By the Red rocket’s glare we could see
ei that our policy was still there—but in
; ruins.

These books are a post-mortem on
that policy, and perhaps go rather too
far in condemning the whole basis of the
Acheson-Bevin line. Living on the side
of the Atlantic nearer to Russia during
the postwar years, we were very glad
to see American troops returning to Eu-
rope, and to find that America took up
the Russian challenge at the time of
the blockade of Berlin (1948 version).
If America had not been strong then,
and prepared to use her strength, the
Free World might be a smaller and
more fearful place than it is today.

This is a point that Mr. Halle has
grasped, and his Dream and Reality is
rather surprisingly a success story about
ary American Foreign Policy with its climax
in 1947-48. He traces the history of

_ American policy up through the two
:

WILLIAM CLARK has been British
press attaché in Washington (1945-46),
_ diplomatic correspondent of the London
Observer (1949-54) and adviser on pub-
vt le relations to the Prime Minister
(1955-56). He is at present editor of
“The Week” in the Observer. ——

‘i ”
114

u a c
‘ ee ieee A
le: eh A

lt
“a

Pere

BOOKS and the ARTS _

The Policy That Failed

world wars and their immediate after-
math, showing how it had failed to deal
with the “real world” of power politics,
by retreating into a dream world of high
principles.

The “Truman Doctrine” and the de-
cision to take over some of Britain’s
power responsibilities in Greece and the
Eastern Mediterranean mark the end of
that era. Mr. Halle concludes on a
heartening note:

In 1947, then, the United States fi-
nally adopted a new policy to meet
the dire necessities of the twentieth
century. That new policy was to as-
sume leadership in organizing and di-
recting the power of the free world
so as to balance, and thereby to
check, the expanding power of the
Soviet Union. What this new policy
will bring forth in the long future I
don’t know. Initially, it led to suc-
cesses of a magnitude which, being
so close to these matters as we are,
we have hardly appreciated.

But in his final chapter Mr. Halle has
to admit that, having decided to mix
herself up in the Big World, America
today finds herself without a world
policy. There is no leadership, he com-
plains, only followership.

The real complaint against American
policy that runs through all these books
is that since the war America has adopt-
ed a single, unchanging attitude toward
all the extraordinarily varied political
phenomena of the period. That attitude,
borrowed from the war period, is one of
hatred for the enemy. The only question
has been to identify the enemy; once that
is done Congress and public opinion—
without any leadership, indeed without
any new thought—react in the way that
has become conventional whether the
enemy is labeled Hitler, Stalin, Mao or
Khrushchev.

The blame for this failure to adapt
to new situations is generally laid on
Congress, which will only react, it is
said, to the banging of the patriotic
drum. To someone outside America this

is very odd. Why should a people so in-

telligent and thoughtful as the Ameri-
cans place their political neper in such
feeble hands?

Perhaps the answer is dae Congress
is too much blamed for doin,
stitutional _job of By cizing

: i ey MA
zi ft a

tive, and perhaps the present Adminis-
tration is too much blamed for the
doldrums into which American foreign
policy has drifted. On the whole, coun-
tries get the Government that their Op-
position deserves, and what is most
striking about the American scene, as it
appears from abroad, is the lack of con-
structive proposals for an alternative
foreign policy by the present Opposition -
leaders.

IT IS interesting to note that the criti-
cisms of American policy offered in Eu-
rope are the same as these put forward
by these three American commentators.
They all center on the fact that it is far
too negative, and seemingly directed only
against the menace of international com-
munism. The immense generosity of
American aid, therefore, is always tar-
nished by the breath of the cold war. .

Mr. Sulzberger, who gives a fascinat-
ing personal account of the detailed
workings out of American policy in vari-
ous parts of the world, fundamentally
seems to accept the official view that
the object of American policy is to win
the struggle with “Sino-Soviet Imperial-
ism.” What he wants is an “armistice,”
so that America can regroup its forces
and reconsider its tactics. The criticisms
he makes, therefore, are mostly criticisms
of tactics rather than a re-examination
of strategy. He pleads for a more ef-
fective execution of the existing direc-
tives.

But he does observe that America has
no policy at all for Afro-Asia, where
communism will offer rising standards
of life more speedily than present-day
capitalism. This is all discussed quietly
and calmly in a chapter entitled “Some
Weaknesses of Approach.”

Surely it is far more serious than that.
If in fact America, as the leader of the
West, has no policy for dealing with the
real revolution of our time—that in the
underdeveloped countries — then the
West is doomed to become an isolated
club of wealthy white members in a
world which will not long tolerate its
exclusiveness, its patronage, or its
wealth. '

It is here that the constructive criti-
cism of American policy is most needed.
In the dozen years after the war Ameri-
can power stopped Russian power from
expanding universally—with all the er-
rors that has been a great achievement.
But now a wholly | new direction: of pole
icy is ee AN Mr. William un) puts it,

fe om,
7 \ Thy Naric

ey / SA 1

J
|

we need “to admit that Russia is an
equal eyen though it is a rival and pro-
ceed to work out a program for living
with it in a world that America no long-
er dominates.” Working out that pro-
gram is the great task before America
and the West in the second half of the
twentieth century.

This is not the first time that Amer-
icans have had to compromise with a
system they dislike and live in a world
with a rival nation. It happened before
with the British system of monarchical
imperialism against which the United
States had fought. In 1812 it looked as
though the two systems might be in
permanent conflict, but fortunately both
nations turned their attention to more
profitable enterprises than war—eco-
nomic development.

The analogy should not be pressed
too far—there is no guarantee that
Khrushchev’s Russia will liberalize as
fast as George III’s Britain, though it
is not hopeless—but the basic fact re-
mains that once again the task before
America has changed from winning po-
litical freedom to helping economic
growth. This time the economic develop-
ment needs to be carried out overseas
and not across the continent.

There is very little doubt that Amer-

i ica will in fact devote an increasing
amount of her resources to aid for un-
| derdeveloped countries; but the crucial
decision, which must be taken very
shortly, is how this program is to be
carried out. Is it to be part of the cold
war and designed to maintain anti-
Communist regimes? Or is it to be part
of the obligation which the rich should
feel towards the poorer parts of their
own community? In other words, will
America grasp the fact that a world
community is coming into being, in
which mutual obligations are felt be-
tween nations, as they are now between
| groups within a nation?
At present it appears, to an outsider,
. that American official policy is still to
carry on aid on a cold-war basis—it is
the easiest way to get it past Congress
(if that appearance is false, please take
, it up with those responsible for Ameri-
can representation abroad). Yet it is
j the unanimous view of these writers
(and many others) that all aid thus
iven fails both politically and econom-
ically.

What is needed is a complete change
of approach in American policy, away
from the quarter century of hate towards
a new era of cooperation. Mr. Williams
in his final. chapter summarizes the new
policy that is needed, and stresses the

practical point that the new type of aid
must be given through and administer-

ed by, United Nations agencies so as to
free it of the taint of the cold war.
America’s allies must finally ask
themselves what chance there is of this
new positive and hopeful policy being
adopted. They have no reason to be
downcast; generous idealism is part of
the American tradition. But the change
will not come of itself; someone must
give America a new lead. As the United
States enters the long labor of an elec-
tion, that 1s the question which we shall

Beatniks Then and Now

THE IMPROPER BOHEMIANS. By
Allen Churchill. E, P. Dutton & Co.
349 pp. $5.

THE HOLY BARBARIANS. By
Lawrence Lipton, Julian Messner,
Inc. 318 pp. $5.

Gene Baro

A NUMBER of years ago, when I was
a Greenwich Villager, I used to meet
beatniks at bars like the San Remo,
Goody’s and the White Horse. Of
course, there were no official beatniks
then; Kerouac and Ginsberg were
safely at Columbia University. The mcn
and women I met and listened to were
mere dissidents, argumentative but
ignorant leftists with artistic leanings,
sexual drifters, misfits trying to make
a personal destiny out of general ideas.
I suppose if I had been sitting in Vil-
lage bars twenty years earlier I would
have met the young woman, document-
ed by Allen Churchill, whose contribu-
tion to civilization was to give herself
freely to any man who asked her. And
perhaps I would’ haye met Elsa von
Loringhoven wearing a coal scuttle for
a hat.

The fact is, Mr. Lipton’s encomium
of today’s Beat Generation and Mr.
Churchill’s account of the Village in
the “heyday” of the twenties are books
related in substance and spirit. Both
volumes celebrate a knowledge presumed
unavailable in Scarsdale or Oak Park.
Both detail eccentric lives of nervous
irascibility, poverty, sexual license and
alcoholism. Both denigrate contempo-
rary civilization and support promiscu-
ous individual freedom at the expense
of social regularity. Both praise cre-
ativeness for its own sake, without ap-

GENE BARO has written fiction,
poetry and criticism for a number of
magazines. His Northwind and Other
Poems will be published soon by Scrib-
ner’s. Mr. Baro is a@ member of the

Bennington College 7
r > ' 4 .

be asking on this side of the Atlantic.
The White House is the natural seat of
leadership for the whole West; will it
soon be filled by someone who can be
the leader of the West and of the world?

Now Eisenhower is off to Europe as a
prelude to his exchange of visits with
Khrushchev. Is this the first fruits of
the reappraisal? Could Eisenhower in
his last eighteen months in the White
House become the leader we thought
we had lost?

plying any sound standard to what is
created.

Mr. Churchill’s book is somewhat the
less pretentious. There is also less in it
that merits serious consideration. It is
a compendium of anecdotes gathered
from many sources. Not much is fresh
in viewpoint or expression. Mr. Churchill
writes dully: “Miss Millay, apparently _
so gay and carefree, was quickly hailed 5
as a genius. Yet her life proves that :
even in poetry genius is in part hard
labor. She was born on February 22,
1892, in Maine.” The style. might be
called putative journalism. Here is
Ferdinand Pinney Earle discovering
Renascence: “...he grabbed the manu-
script pages and read them through
with rising excitement. Then he seized
his pen...” ete.

“Artistic gypsydom, together with
Left Bank atmosphere and minuscule
rents” are the ingredients of Mr.
Churchill’s Village. “Much as John
Butler Yeats had cocked an ear to
hear the sound of fiddles, so restless
young men and women, anxious to be
indecorous, seemed to know that Green-
wich Village stood ready to assume its
destiny as the Left Bank of New York
—or America.” And there were those,
too, it appears, who came out of a
sense of literary history: “Still other
young writers seemed to seek out the
Village because Edgar Allan Poe, to
whom belongs the lonesome distinction
of being America’s first Bohemian, lived
on Carmine Street, on Greenwich
Avenue, and finally on Waverly Place,
in a house a few doors from whe
Edna St. Vincent Millay would later
reside.” And Mr. Churchill makes much
—though at the same _ intellect al
depth — of those who came to the Vil-
lage by way of social protest or politics.

What insight develops from this b ok
is incidental to its purpose. One comes
to realize how little the Village fi
as a source or center of the impa
American writing of the twenties. —

> ie

Jth PRI

Now! The UNTOLD Story of Nixon’s Career

Honorable |
Tea

William A. Reuben

Author of THE ATOM SPY HOAX.
Former Pubjicits
American Civil Liberties Union

Director ot

THE TRUTH OF WHAT HAPPENED BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

How Nixon “uncovered” a spy ring that never existed to
“nrove”’ that the Democratic Party was soft on spies and
traitors.

How Nixon branded the New Deal as a breeding ground
for espionage by his “discovery” of State Department docu-
ments which have’ since been shown to be forgeries.

How Nixon deceived the public into believing that the famous
“pumpkin papers” proved conclusively that Alger Hiss was
a spy, whereas in fact they were never linked to Hiss in
any way.

How Nixon “discovered” these “pumpkin papers” (3 rolls of
microfilm), which disappeared after Eastman Kodak stated
that the code mark manufacture was 1947, 9 years after
Whittaker Chambers (and Nixon) said they were turned
over to the Russians by Hiss!

WHAT THEY SAY:

“Fascinating and revealing ... a shocking eye-opener that

reads like a mystery story.”
—Robert W. Kenny. former Calif. Attorney General

“Alger Hiss was never convicted of being disloyal to_the
Government of the United States. ...I do not believe Hiss

ever was a Communist spy.” =
—Harry S$. Truman

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116

i Lae F tiab a

“heyday” there may have been, but it
did not include I. S. Eliot, Robert
Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne
Moore, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F.
Scott Fitgerald, William Carlos Williams,
or William Faulkner. For that matter, it
did not include, except in a technical
sense, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood An-
derson, Willa Cather, or Sinclair Lewis.
These writers owed little or nothing to
the Village. Even Eugene O’Neill’s debt
is hardly a spiritual one. What litera-
ture the Village produced was largely
second-rate.

The visual arts are another matter.
The modern movement has been more
closely connected with the life of the
Village but, even here, the peculiar im-
portance of the Village as milieu is ex-
aggerated or distorted. in fact, the
essential vigor of the Village has been,
and is, intellectual rather than creative.
Its role has been the exchange and con-
sumption of culture rather than the
creation of it. Book-and-print shops,
little magazines, outdoor art shows and
experimental theatre are among. its
cultural commodities. Like Paris’ Left
Bank or London’s Chelsea, the Village is
distinguished principally by a popula-
tion that actively supports arts, letters
and the theatre. The Village is a market
place of culture, specialized and con-
centrated within the larger market of

New York.

A“NEW” Village is discovered in Mr.
Lipton’s book. Venice, California, is the
Village of the West, the beatnik para-
dise. Another vocabulary, more elab-
orate and ironic, celebrates virtually the
same phenomena. The “square” might
as well be the man from above Four-
teenth Street. The Bohemian has_be-
come the Cat.

The Holy Barbarians differ from the
Improper Bohemians in that their myth-
ology is still in the making. (The Vil-
lage mythology was made from politics,
and nothing is staler than political at-
titudes a few decades old.) The beatniks
are anti-political and, while their rejec-
tion of society is accomplished by tradi-
tional means—by sex, drinks, drugs
and the arts of self-expression —_ the
rationale of their behavior is exotic and
sophisticated, a matter of mysticism,
philosophical solipsism and natural re-
ligion. The beatnik apologists have
raided all cultures for tags in support
of not very precise attitudes; sensa-
tions, after all, are hard to intellectual-
ize, especially as sensations are The
Thing. The beatniks talk too much to
be Zen philosophers. Their failure to
find a vocabulary reasonably sufficient
to their states of being has given so

The Nation

‘

much beatnik literature its rather wordy,
serambled, egghead character. Whether
beatnik literature can ever be more
tnan Village second-rate depends really
upon how coherent a view of the world
it can give and how it overcomes its
ignorance of tradition and discovers a
connection with the literary past. As it
is, writers like Kerouac make mistakes
as if they were discoveries.

Mr. Lipton’s book is of great interest
as a social document. It has a preciosi-
ty of tone difficult to improve. When
Mr. Lipton speaks of Hollywood writers
coming to refresh their souls in contact

. pits ' r i: \e

with the “creative energy of dedicated
artists,” he is referring, not to Picasso
or Braque, to Mauriac or Hesse, but to
the writers and artists of Venice, Cali-
fornia. “Newsmen and radio people on
the prowl for ‘experience,’ or just pla‘n
hungry for a taste of intellectual honesty
and artistic integrity” go likewise to
the pundits of Venice, California, and
not, say, to C. Jung or Eleanor
Roosevelt or Pablo Casals or Margaret
Mead or Jonas Salk or to any of a
thousand other men and women work-
ing to bring mankind into a viable
relationship with the future.

Doubt as Corollary to Faith

THEOLOGY OF CULTURE. By Paul
Tillich. Edited by Robert C. Kim-
ball. Oxford University Press. 213 pp.

$4.
Cabriel Vahanian
THERE IS evidence to show that reli-

gion in the last decade has again be-

come fashionable, and not only on the

popular level. Indeed, colleges that once
__ offered no courses in religion now do
so, and many established departments
| of religion have been hiring additional
| staff. Tillich’s latest book serves as a
witness to this more serious religious
renascence and gives the core of his
religious thought.

In fact, Paul Tillich is a theologian
(Reinhold Niebuhr is another) who can
address §.R.O. campus audiences. Now
a university professor at Harvard, he
spends almost as much time on the

road as he does on his teaching duties.

_ There is something electric about the
man which, no matter how difficult or
obscure his statements, magnetizes even

__ the least intellectually-minded students.
| They return from his lectures with a
| feeling approaching awe and wonder-

ment, although they do not always un-

derstand what he has been talking
about. To be sure, this does not mean
that his intellectual influence on stu-
dents is universal; in fact, it may be
. more limited than surface appearances
} ~~ would have it. On the other hand,
there is no doubt that from his lectures
religion gains a higher academic status.
i How to explain all this is not al-
together easy. The traditional answers
do not help very much, either. They
tend to relate the resurgence of religion
to the various human experiences dur-

GABRIEL VAHANIAN teaches at
Sara eae” His field is re-

ing the war, or to the sense of the
futility or absurdity of life which a war
and similar cataclysms bring about.
But this can hardly serve as a clue
to the attitude of the present genera-
tion of students. They did not ex-
perience the war; quite seriously, they
do not know what tragedy is. And for
the most part, Tillich’s utterances can
be understood most readily in the con-
text of tragedy, or from the perspective
of a tragic sense of life. Of course, it is
true also that the weight of present
world tensions is felt by the students as
well as by those who lived through the
last war. The possible imminence of
catastrophe spares no one who is mature
enough to appreciate it. In such a con-
text, life easily appears meaningless.
And this, precisely, is one of the motifs
of Paul Tillich — namely, and at the
cost of putting it paradoxically, the
meaning possibly yielded even by a
meaningless life.

Naturally, there is something irra-
tional here. Yet it may be that this
approach is the only one that fits with
the image of a world at the mercy of
international deceit and __ ideological
colonialism. Tillich analyzes apparent
meaninglessness and attempts to give it
a structure which points to the pos-
sibility of transcending it. In fact, one
might say that this meaninglessness is
as necessary to life as meaning itself.
The latter does not cancel the former.
And if that be so, we are forced to
realize that political mihilism or pes-
simism about life do not constitute
valid alternatives to the dignity of man,
in spite of the fact that the world offers
us few if any promises of harmonious
possibilities by which: to regulate one’s
life. ee

To go. back to Tillich’s fame among
students, one must_ acknowledge that,
to some ext he factors at work

“

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in the spread and appeal of popular
religion are present also in the response
he gets from these somewhat more
sophisticated listeners. The differences
do not obscure the fact that their
respective motivations offer similarities.
In general, however, mass religiosity
suffers decisively from overemphasis on
pragmatism, on how to achieve this or
that with the least amount of pain. The
defect here is inescapable — such a
stress is less religious than it seems at
first, because at bottom it thrives more
on spiritual gadgets than on the spir-
ituality of religion. And the God whom
these gadgets are supposed to bring
near is actually removed further and
further from the alleged worshipper.
Not infrequently, gadgets are relied
upon as if God did not exist at all.
Thus, interestingly enough, the recent
revival of religion has been serving to
remove God from the concrete scene of
human activities. In the end, the revival
of religion becomes a negation of religion.

NOW it is significant that Tillich on
one occasion, when addressing the
massed student body of an Eastern
university, conceded that the popular
revival could not by any means be all
bad. He thought that behind the dif-
fuseness of mass religiosity there re-
mained nevertheless a valid concern
indicative of genuine religion. This is not
to suggest that Tillich is a glorified
evangelist. What he says is not readily
intelligible to the sophomore. But his
theology, as evidenced by this volume,
presents the traditional doctrines in a
way more compatible with the relativ-
ism, even the agnosticism or secularism,
of the contemporary mind — and those
are aspects of that mind which popular
religion also deals with in its own way-
For example, Tillich’s concept of the
God beyond our conceptions of God
implies the irrelevance of any old-
fashioned certitude about the nature of
God, and makes room for doubt as a
constructive corollary to faith. The am-
biguities of religion thus become as
much apparent as what Tillich calls
the “ultimate concern” with which
religion deals and which is its very
essence.

There is a reason for these ambigui-
ties. It lies partly im the fact that
religion is also a cultural phenomenon.
The truth, of which religion is a witness,
can therefore be stated only in terms
emanating from, and accessible to, the
ambient culture. Moreover, “religion is
the substance of culture, and culture is
the form of religion.” Religion per-
meates every cultural expression of
man, as culture permeates every religi-

3 ol odin tle Wis oo olin

ous expression of man. That is why the
essence of man’s ultimate concern,
namely God (or, to use Tillich’s words,
the “Ground of Being,” “Being-Itself’’),
is immanent in, though he transcends,
everything that is. Estrangement, alien-
ation and anxiety, or, more traditional-
ly, sinfulness, are seen in the context
of God’s distance from man, while self-
acceptance, the “courage to be” or,
more traditionally again, salvation, are
conceived in the light of God as the
Ground of every being. Tillich’s em-
phasis on the necessary alliance between
religion and culture prevents religion
from being parochial, or provincial, or
even too religious in a narrow sense.
Religion belongs everywhere, in the art
gallery and at the cocktail party as
well as in the church. And, in a way,
for the same reason, ultimately it be-
longs to none of these.

Until Tillich, practically no theologian
had so dynamically analyzed the re-
lationship between religion and culture
within such a mutually pregnant frame-
work. The religious people would shy
away from a culture they indignantly
termed secular; and the cultured secu-
larists would reject religion as a ridic-
ulous atavism. By contrast, Tillich’s
aim is to reconcile — though not to ac-
commodate — religion and secular cul-
ture.

THE BOOK shows its significance in
still another respect that points to Til-
lich’s importance in contemporary religi-
ous thought. Perhaps this corresponds
merely to a subjective impression of
this reviewer. However, in the essay
comparing Europe (mainly Germany)
and America, Tillich describes how his
new environment in this country and
his deepening acquaintance with the
American mind gradually helped him
to get rid of his intellectual provincial-
ism. He confesses that when in 1933 he
left Germany to come to the Union
Theological Seminary in New York he
wrote to a friend: “There is everywhere
in the world sky, air, and ocean.” He
did not write: “‘I can continue every-
where my theological and philosophical
work,’ because unconsciously I doubted
whether one could do this anywhere ex-
cept in Germany.” Later on, as_ his
mind became more and more receptive
to the culture of this country, he was
to overcome this doubt. What this
means is not that the intellectual hege-
mony of Europe is now dismantled or
replaced by an American one. The
point is not that there is any decline
in the intellectual achievements of West-
ern Europe, but that these no longer
dominate the cultural scene everywhere:

The Nation |

weed which has shrunk and

y are no longer “looked up to.” In a

should
therefore resist all forms of provincial-
ism, religious, cultural and_ political,
Tillich’s best “American” book is a
living witness to the dignity of man.
It is testimony to man’s invincible
spirit whether it realizes itself in the
higher, or hesitates through the lower,
forms of religion.

Forged or True?

THE BLACK DIARIES OF ROGER
CASEMENT. By Peter Singleton-
Gates and Maurice Girodias. Grove
Press. 536 pp. $7.50.

Donat O'Donnell
THIS large and lavishly illustrated book

contains, in addition to the title material,
a short journalistic history of Ireland, a
similar account of colonialism in Africa
and copies of Casement’s long-available
and long-forgotten reports on the Congo
and the Putumayo. The only parts of
the book which are likely to interest a
reader today are the so-called “Black
Diaries” themselves. These reproduce
typescripts obtained by Mr. Singleton-
Gates in 1922 and alleged to be copies
of diaries of the late Sir Roger Casement
for the year 1903, while he was a Brit-
ish Consul in the Congo Free State; and
for 1910, when he was British Consul-
General at Rio de Janeiro and a mem-
ber of a commission engaged in investi-
gating conditions in the Putumayo rub-
ber plantations.

Both these diaries, especially the
second, contain accounts of pederastic
experiences. The typescripts were pre-
sented to Mr. Gates in 1922 by “a
person of some authority in London” as
“4 kind gesture to a journalist and
writer.” Mr. Gates adds: “I was in-
formed, and I saw no reason to doubt
my informant, that the typescripts were
true copies of the diaries found in Sir
Roger Casement’s lodgings in Ebury
Street some time before his arrest on
Good Friday in 1916, and that the same
typescripts were identical with those
circulated in London and Washington

__ after Casement’s trial and condemnation,

in an effort to discourage efforts for his
reprieve.”

Casement was sentenced to death in
1916 for the part he had taken in try-
ing to obtain help from Germany for

| DONAT O'DONNELL is the nom de

plume of an Irish diplomat whose es-

Says: oo frequently in the ee
fe Ou

the Irish ]
land and America signed petitions for a
repeal — mainly on the ground of his
humanitarian services in South America
and on the Congo — and the British
Government of 1916 made use of the

obscene passages in the alleged diaries’

by showing them to influential people
in order to destroy sympathy for Case-
ment and thereby mitigate the adverse
propaganda effect of his execution. It is
an interesting comment on the psychol-
ogy of the time that this device worked
quite well and that many respectable
and humane people withdrew their
signatures to the petition — presum-
ably on the ground that homosexuals
deserve to be hanged for treason.

In Ireland, and much more recently
it England, the authenticity of the
diaries was called into question. A book
called The Forged Casement Diaries by
a Dr. Moloney induced Yeats to appeal
to Alfred Noyes—who had helped to
pass the documents around in America
—to recant.

And Noyes, many years later, did
speak his bit in public, in a book called
The Accusing Ghost, in which he de-
clared himself convinced that the ob-
scene passages in the diaries, at least,
were not by Casement. A heated con-
troversy in the English and Irish papers
followed, but was necessarily inconclu-
sive because hardly any of the par-
ticipants had even seen, and none had
studied, the original documents.

The British Home Office refused to
release these on the rather Pecksniffian
ground that they did not wish to black-
en Casement’s memory. The effect of
this was really to leave the “forged

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diary” theorists party in possession of the
field. They could argue that the offi-
cial who interrogated Casement and
“discovered” the diaries — Sir Basil
Thomson, Assistant Commissioner at
Scotland Yard—has left five materially
different accounts of the circumstances,
including dates, in which the docu-
ments were discovered. They also
were struck by the coincidence that,
awhile several Casement diaries and
notebooks exist, the only extant Case-
ment diaries containing obscene ma-
terial should be precisely those in the
possession of the Home Office: if they
were authentic, why were they not pro-

duced?

This phase of the controversy was
ended in July when Mr. R. A. But-
ler, Secretary of State for Home Affairs,
stated in the Commons that he would
place the diaries in the Public Record
Office where they would be available for
inspection by trained historians and
other responsible persons competent to
express an opinion on their authenticity.
He added that he had had them ex-
amined by a leading handwriting expert
who believed them to be genuine. While
this brings the whole controversy down
from a largely speculative to a more
pragmatic plane, it is hardly likely that
the authenticity of the disputed pas-
sages can ever be determined beyond
doubt, Indeed, a Dublin handwriting
expert has since examined the docu-
ments and declared the passages to be
forgeries.

Mr. Butler’s action in handing the
documents over to the Public Record
Office is a welcome one, in keeping with
his reputation as a sensible and liberal

125.

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man. It would have been even more in
keeping with that reputation if he had
found it in himself to express some re-
gret for the use which a previous Brit-
ish government made of the documents
in 1916. Mr. Butler obviously believes
the documents to be genuine. Even if
they are genuine, however, the use made
of them remains shameful, by what are
generally believed to be Mr. Butler’s
standards.

Second Impressions
Review of Paperbacks

Robert M. Wallace

Darwin Centennial

BY 1837, twenty-two years before The
Ongin of Species, Darwin had formu-
lated a pattern for his “speculations” on
the variability of species. The Autobr-
ography of Charles Darwin and Selected
Letters edited by his son Francis (Dover,
$1.65) reflects Darwin’s perfectionism
and irenic temper and explains his long
preparations, which almost allowed A. R.
Wallace to anticipate him. This gentle
man’s impact on his times becomes
freshly clear in the story of Thomas
Henry Huxley’s brilliant rejoinder when
Bishop Wilberforce attacked Darwin at

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Time's Arrow and Evolution (1951,
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American Scene

The Heart of Emerson’s Journals
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Creoles’ and Cajuns by George W.
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Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow by
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The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose
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McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon by Jo-
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New World Writing (Mentor, 75c),
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Great Stories by Nobel Prize Win-
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A Nonsense Anthology, Carolyn Wells,
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Nikolai Gogol by Vladimir Nabokov
(New Directions, $1.25) interprets Gogol
as a probing universal satirist rather than
a Russian Dickens,

_« Mtseellaneous ©
The Moral Decision by Edmond Cahn
(Midland, $1.75) takes adjudicated

cases, examines the conflict of opinions
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and throws much light on the varied
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ethical questions. Fruitfully indicates
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law a sensitive and articulate vehicle of
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A Way of Life and Other Selected
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The Arabs: A Short History by Philip
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Kathleen Ferrier, her life by Winifred
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Love Against Hate by Karl Men-
ninger (Harvest, $1.95). Non-technical
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Late Holiday Miscellany

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day, $1.25). The Financial Expert by
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the Greek and The Greek Passion by
Nikos Kazantzakis (Simon and Schuster,
$1.75, $1.95). The House of the Dead
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dell, 50e),
And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail
Sholokhoy (Signet, 75c).

wt Bi

Crossword Puzzle No. 832

By FRANK W. LEWIS

a
a

ACROSS:

1 One might plan a complete course
around such things. (15)

9 Thin case, without the members of |

the ruling family. (5)

10 Back in the game, perhaps, with
the approved part. (5, 4)

11 Falls in the triple-A ring? (7)

12 The particular thing a girl puts to-
gether? (7)

13 Cries for sweet potato makers? (7)

14 “The , the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact”:
(M-N.D.) (7)

16 oo” 17 was broken for him.
Ul

19 Uncle gets the old town in good
ae finally, as part of the gentry.
7

21 A house may have this look with-
out raising an ardent racket! (5, 2)

23 This could lead to a drain. (7)

24 ae ey standards applied to canvas?

25 A sticky cake would be more than
wrong. (5)

26 Louis Armstrong’s with a mes-
sage? (Sounds far-reaching!) (8,

DOWN:

1 Stacks flounders? (One may not be
oa swift, but close to it!)
2 I'm cleared, but not specifically

ee
Pee) ome |e) de
earn

asked for a second time! (9)

Not the depressed condition of Al-

bany. (7)

William in England and Thomas in

America? (7)

Receive something in meat — like

beans, for example. (7)

Retting was instrumental in the old

days. (7)

A thicket used to stop things. (5)

ab hee it should give one a choice.

15 Almost complete fish support for
the air lift. (9)

17 We would shut up, if in such a
state! (7)

18 Hurried with an incredulous exprés-
sion where the baritoné’s paddles
started. (7)

19 The gentleman of 19 across has
nothing ready for the chief. (7)

20 The god of 19 down. (7)

22 London tube? (5)

ON Dd oO —- Ww

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 831

ACROSS: 8 Diversification; 9 Canary;
10 Elective; 11 Avid; 13 Inconstant;
15 Instant; 16 Aseptic; 19 Balderdash;
21 Dint; 22 Recouped; 24 Levels; 26

Svpernaturalism. DOWN: 1 Disadvan- |

tageous; 2 Vera; 3 Assyrian; 4 Offence;
5 Screen; 6 Stet; 7 Conventionalist;
12 Dated; 14 Typed; 17 Scholars; 18
Bandits; 20 Repent; 23 Omen; 25 Vale.

VACATIONS

New Faces of Summer 59.

A new season—a new crowd—young, alive and
active—an exciting and festive Crystal Lake
Lodge with programs to make your vacation gayer
than laughter. Repertory Theatre with resi-
dent company, Ralph Cooper and Band, Folk
Dance with THE Fritzi Girden. Film Classics,
revues, etc. 1500 romantic woodland acres, 60
acre private lake. Water skiing, 9 pro clay ten-
nis courts, canoeing, boating, all sports. Owned
and operated by the Slutsky family. A modern
resort for young adults high in the Adirondacks,

CHESTERTOWN 5, N.Y.
3830 N.Y.0. LU 6-1678

Phones:

ON ORANGE LAKE
WINDY HILL Tel.: Newburgh 1232
A pleasantly informal vacation in friendly at-
mosphere. Swimming, Boating, Fishing on Nat-
ural Lake. Badminton, Volley Ball, Ping-pong,
other sports. Records, books. Summer Theatre,
Golf nearby. Food of excellent quality in gen-
erous quantity. $55.00 Weekly; $8.00 Daily;
Weekend: Fri. Supper thru Sun. Dinner $16.

14¢ hrs. from N.Y.C. via Thruway

Jane C. Arenz, R.D. No. 1, Walden, N.Y.

RELAX in a friendly atmos-
phere. Golf at a magnificent
Country Club. Dancing. En-
tertainment. Superb cuisine#t
Fireproof Bldg. Elevator sery-
ice. In N.Y.C. call at local
rate.
MAhopac 8-3449

FAirbanks 5-7227

Mmmm LAKE MAHOPAC, N. Y.
PINECREST. rue serxksuires

W. Cornwall, Conn. : On Housatonic River

A delightful vacation resort near Tanglewood,
Music Mt., Summer Theatres. Sandy beach,
swimming, fishing, boating; tennis, badminton,
ping-pong. Lovely lawns for relaxing. Delicious
food. Cabins with private bath and fireplaces.

Diana & Abe Berman Phone: Orleans 2-6678

A rrowhead
LO D G ss
RON & NAMA

Entertainment Staff, Social, Folk & Square
Dancing, Painting, Arts & Crafts, Fast Tennis
Courts, Fishing & All Sports.

CALL DE 2-4578 — ELLENVILLE 502

ROOMS — APARTMENTS

THE ARIZONA — Residential Hotel — oppo-

SAUUAEALUUUUAUL CARROLL

site Columbia University, 508 West 114 Street,
between Broadway and Amsterdam. Fire-
proof building, newly decorated and re-
furnished, Doubles, singles and two-room
apartments. Self-service elevator, switeh-
board and complete hotel service. Moderate

rates for students.

Advertise
Your Wants

in The NATION
————————————————————————

| September 5, 1959

Printed in the U. 5. A. by RCR Publication Printers Corp., MN. ¥. 0,

A little more than a month ago, journalist Albert M. Colegrove

wrote a series of articles on South Vietnam for the New York

World-T elegram and other Scripps-Howard newspapers. The first
article, which bore the date July 20, 1959, began as follows: “The
American aid program in little Vietnam is an outrageous scandal.

The true story of this footless fiasco has been hidden from the

American public.”

It was not hidden, though, from that section of the American
public which reads The Nation.* In our issue dated May 31, 1958—
fourteen months before Mr. Colegrove’s series appeared—Bernard

B. Fall wrote a lengthy analysis of the South Vietnam situation

which may be summarized in the following direct quotes from his

article: “In spite of a most generous measure of American financial

help . . . the South Vietnamese Government is faced with growing

insecurity in the countryside and an economic crisis. . . . American

aid to the small country has become one of the biggest Santa Claus

operations of all time.”

*Perhaps Mr. Colegrove cannot be considered altogether wrong

on this point. Certamly The Nation’s readers, who so often learn

the truth about things months ahead of anyone else, constitute a

very special part of the American public.

THE NATION, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York 14 |
Please send THE NATION |

( One Year, 8 (0 Three Years, $20 !

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(] Payment enclosed O Bill me |
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City Pre a oe ee Zone. .\csae State... suman l
0-5-50

em a aa cae cece ee ee

x '

SHE

NATION

SEPTEMBER 12, 1959 . . 25¢

CAN KHRUSHCHEV SWING
THE °60 ELECTION?

Frederic W. Collins

Pare

SEES ROOHOOHOEEC SE FOBBO

VISIT WITH PASTERNAK

EE AL a a

Ralph E. Matlaw

eee GRGHSHRHPHSOKROCH EBA DH KDE

RAILROAD LABOR CRISIS |

Dialogue on Featherbedding —

John Barden ‘

LETTERS

Frost’s ‘Dark Side’

Dear Sirs: May I say a good word for
M. L. Rosenthal’s article on Robert
Frost’s 85th anniversary dinner [“The
Robert Frost Controversy,” issue of June
20|. Mr. Rosenthal is perfectly right in
saying that Frost has a dark side and
that Mr. Trilling had a right to em-
phasize it. (I once introduced Frost to
an audience at Derry, New Hampshire,
...and I dwelt somewhat on that aspect
of him — that “dwelling in darkness, so
it seems to me, not of woods only or
the shade of trees” — and found later
that Frost didn’t like it. In fact, he
told me so the next day.)

I was at the Frost dinner and I am
sure that the audience felt that this was
no time to dwell upon the “minority re-
port” phase of Frost’s work. This is not
what America loves him for... . Mr.
Rosenthal is right, however, in saying
that the dark side is there.

WiLBert SNOW
Spruce Head, Me.

An Expert’s Judgment

Dear Sirs: David Cort’s piece, “Ciga-
rettes, Cancer and the Campus,” in the
August 15 issue of The Nation, is one
of the very few honest, well-informed
articles I have seen on this important
health problem. We need many more!

Micuaet, B. Suimxkin, M.D.
Chief, Biometry Branch
National Cancer Institute

Bethesda, Md.

Shattering the Crystal

Dear Sirs: “Life in the Crystal Palace”
(The Nation, January 11, 1958)
troubled me in ways I could not ana-
lyze. But “The Crystal Palace Forsak-
en” (The Nation, August 29) helps re-
veal what may be a confusion over just
what is wrong with the royal policies
there. I got at the difficulty this way:
Harrington rightly despised Palace life
for removing all insecurities, or trying
to. We need insecurities as incentives
and get no sense of progress without
hard-to-get goals.

Yet material incentives weaken fast
as societies develop affluence. And it is
an ugly culture in which we slave for
more and more money. That the Crystal

Palace should recognize that it can af-
ford to supply material security is not

its sin. Its sin lies in failing to offer:

such other goals as are within its power
to bestow. For example, it could offer to

the most deserving promotion all the
way to the throne. That would be its
most dramatic goal, but by no means
the one most conducive to the growth
of personalities and influence.
Let the Palace ponder what Judge
Hand had in mind when he wrote: “A
great people does not go to its leaders
for incantations ‘and liturgies by which
it may propitiate fate or cajole victory;
it goes to them to peer into the recesses
of its own soul, to lay bare its deepest
desires. .. .”
Francis Y. GoopELt

Yarmouth Port, Mass.

Dear Sirs: I thought the article, “The
Crystal Palace Forsaken,” a little silly.
There are many people with greater or
lesser ability who would like a job free
of tension and with good working con-
ditions, and which entails useful labor.
Why complain when the two things
are combined? Doesn’t this world pro-
vide enough sources of anxiety and har-
assment outside the job, and aren’t there
enough opportunities for creative initia-
tive in the “leisure” fields of politics,
civic work, the arts, etc.?

ELIZABETH SMITH

Milwaukee, Wis.

TV Mischief

Dear Sirs: The television industry has a
code to protect the public against vari-
ous abuses, principally dealing with ad-
vertising. There is one program which
needs a code badly, as it presents ob-
vious fiction and baldly states it as fact.

I refer to Behind Closed Doors, which
is shown on ABC Channel 7 at 10:30
Mondays in New York City. The pro-
gram states that the story enacted on
the screen is one of the true experiences
from the files of Rear Admiral Zacharias.
Had the stories been true, they would
have been blazoned in tremendous head-
lines throughout the world.

Showing these dramas as true stories
would be of not more importance than
the fiction printed in True Romances,
were it not for the fact that the purpose
of this series seems to be to stir up an-
tagonisms between East and West and
to prevent any agreement on ending
nuclear tests.

For example, the half-hour drama on
January 15 (then on NBC) purported
to tell the real reason why Russia was
trying to get an agreement to end nu-
clear tests. .. . It turns out that...
there had been a terrible explosion at
the principal nuclear testing installation
in Russia and this had wiped out thou-
sands of their nuclear scientists. . . .
Zacharias is shown on the screen with

- ay .

wa alla ia A ois Se amide egies cael aa

" "i } -
7 c .

his assistant, who says, “I am authorized
by Admiral Zacharias to reveal this re-
port for the first time.”

Other episodes show American Secret
Service agents stabbing Russian officials
in the back and an American vessel
dropping depth charges on a Russian
submarine.

Auten A: Smita
New York City

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
121 @

ARTICLES

124 ‘@ Can Khrushehev Swing the ’60
Election?
by FREDERIC W. COLLINS
126 @ Plus All You Can Steal
by EDWARD W. ZIEGLER
128 @ Railroad Labor Crisis
by JOHN BARDEN

153 @ The Navajo and the Barfly
by WILLIAM BASTLAKE

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

134 @ A Visit with Pasternak
by RALPH B. MATLAW

Moontide Low (poem)
by CHARLES PHILBRICK

Search for Power
by LEON BRAMSON

Primer on Brecht
by MARC BLITZSTHIN

Down to the Self
by ROBERT HATCH

Letter from Tokyo
by DONALD RICHIB

Song of the Hesitations (poem)
by PAUL BLACKBURN’

He Was a Sincere, ete. (poem)
by KENNETH BURKE ,

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 140)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

COO

George G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, Bditor ;
Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Wditoer
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

155 @

136 @

137 @

138 @

139 @

140 'e

Alexander Werth, Huropean
Correspondent

= Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
: The Nation, Sept. 12, 1959. Vol. 189, No. 7
=
=
=
a

Subscription Price Domestic—One year $8, Two
years $14, Three Years $20. Additional postage
per year, Foreign and Canadian $1.

Change of Address: Three weeks’ notice ts re-
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Information to Li ies: The N. is indexed
in Readers Guide P ieal Literature, u
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Affaire, Informa’
A
. . s

ew ‘

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 122, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 7

NATION

EDITORIALS

It’s Only Nikita, After All

- During the Middle Ages, cities, sometimes whole
countries, were thrown into consternation by visitations
of the Prince of the Powers of the Air — the Devil him-
self. It was noticeable that the Foul Fiend sought out
the most devout members of the community for the
purpose of tormenting and terrorizing them; the easy-
going were relatively immune. Something of the sort
seems to be happening in the United States as the mod-
ern incarnation of Satan, a short, stout Russian named
Nikita Khruschchev, prepares to board his U.S.-bound
jet plane. The experienced immunologists of Freedom
House are busy advising us on ways and means of
avoiding the psychic contagion which the Evil One
is bringing to our shores. In the House of Representa-
tives, the distinguished member from Wisconsin, Mr.
Zablocki, urges that Americans of all major religious
faiths—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Eastern Ortho-
dox—observe a nation-wide minute of silence at 11
A.M. on the fateful day of arrival. Workers, business-
men and farmers are asked to cease their labors for
the crucial minute “where this will not entail a great
inconvenience”—but what inconvenience could be too
great in a matter of such importance? All automobile,
bus and truck traffic would halt on every road and
street in America. Church bells and air raid sirens would
sound at the beginning of the minute of silence and
again at its expiration. The minute of silence would
sweep across the nation in eight great waves, begin-
ning on the East Coast and Puerto Rico, and continu-
ing across the continent and on out to Hawaii and the
Bering Strait.

Other members of Congress have joined in a call to
the American people for a day of national mourning

during the ineffable Khrushchev’s visit. No doubt these
demonstrations, if they occur, will assuage the anxiety
of those who engage in them. But is it not strange that
the Russians were unconcerned about the visit of Vice
President Nixon and the witchcraft he might work on
them and their institutions? Even stranger, many
Americans look on Khrushchev in the same way. Of
course, if emotionalism is to be equated with patriotism,
these Americans are not patriotic. They may have
learned, however, that the great crises of life are best
surmounted by a matter-of-fact attitude, rather than
histrionics. When the Geneva Conference approached
stalemate, the President, advised by Secretary of State
Herter, decided to invite Mr. Khrushchev for an in-
formal visit in preference to a renewed Berlin crisis or
to a summit conference without the preparatory prog-
ress the President had stipulated. The visit of a for-
eign statesman does not imply endorsement of his ideas
or his policies. All it implies it that it is in the national
interest to talk with him.

The Peace Juggernaut

The President himself is certainly matter-of-fact
rather than excitable in the handling of his job, and
this is a very good thing for the country and for him —
it explains his survival. This quality contributes to his
success as a moderator; sometimes, also, it leads to
startling disclosures. One such occurred in Mr. Eisen-
hower’s otherwise unenlightening TV dialogue with Mr.
Macmillan, when the President remarked that the peo-
ple of the world want peace so much that one of these
days governments better get out of their way and let
them have it. The hunger for peace, for an end to the
threat to human existence, underlies the ovations ac-

eee a eee aE

i corded to the President in Bonn, London, Paris and
elsewhere, just as the promise of an end to war led an
earher Kuropean generation to cheer President Wilson.
Mi) But the President’s implication that governments
a (and not only the Government of the Soviet Union)
; are essentially war-making agencies, or at least bodies
which obstruct peaceful relations between peoples, is

one that would scarcely have been expected from a mind

4 as conventional as his. It is less strange when we con-
1 sider that he is about as honest’ as a statesman can
. afford to be, that he is a man of good will, and that he
has now had considerable experience in the ways of
;. diplomacy. If first things came first in reporting, the
headlines would have been given to this almost offhand

remark, rather than to the ceremonial banalities and
pure tripe which are inseparable from great occasions of
Rr, statecraft.

‘Shelter’ Is a Nice Word

Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s success in inducing
the Governor’s Conference in Puerto Rico to adopt, by
-an overwhelming vote, the report of his special task
force on radioactive fallout suggests that the question
____ of shelters is being shaped up as a political issue. Re-
cent speeches by Representative Chet Holifield and
Senator Hubert Humphrey lend support to this view.
In fact, Senator Humphrey has said that the civilian-
defense problem is now in the process of being taken
\ directly to the people. Fine; the more intensively peo-
ple discuss the hazards of a nuclear war, the more they
will seek to avoid them.

But despite the fact that large amounts of money and
effort have been devoted to so-called civilian defense
in the last decade, the issues have not been defined in
a way that will permit intelligent public discussion or
debate. Nearly everyone, of course, is in favor of
_ “shelter” and therefore, by simple extension, of a
shelter program. The difficulty is that a shelter pro-
gram, sufficiently detailed to be debated as a political
issue, simply does not exist — in Albany or in Wash-
ington. All that the OCDM has come up with is a “do-
it-yourself” kit which has aroused little enthusiasm
either among those who have been guided by it or
_ those most vocal on the need for shelters. More signifi-
cant is the fact that no one has defined what is meant
_ by “civilian defense,” much less prepared a careful
s pecification of what it would cost, of what it would
‘is onsist, or of how it would work.

“Shelter” is a nice word, but it represents merely the
first and perhaps the simpli phase of a highly com-
P lex problem. The shelters that are currently talked

lot against the blast effects of hydrogen explosic
epee the massive radiation which would bla
uch of the country in the wake: ig suet She

Vv,

about would provide at best a degree of a ;

ve e ee pe a

This same radiation, however, would also endanger vital
water and food supplies as well as human lives. More-_

over, the dislocations in services, communications and
productive facilities that would certainly result from a
nuclear attack would create major hazards in them-
selves. And beyond these practical considerations are
other and larger issues relating to the political and
psychological, the moral and ethical implications of
the problem. Before taking the shelter issue to the
people, our political leaders should first present a plan
that is susceptible of debate and discussion.

The Built-In Bloe

A member of Congress who is a regular reader of
The Nation offers us a striking analysis to support his
contention that the Democratic Party, despite its hand-
some Congressional victory in November, 1958, is ac-
tually a minority party in the House. Of the 283
Democrats in Congress, according to this analysis, 160
are Northern Democrats, ninety-nine Southern Demo-
crats, and the rest are from the border states. Demo-
crats from Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and

Missouri tend to cancel out as voting units on key ~

national issues: Maryland usually votes with the
Southern Democrats, West Virginia with the North-
ern Democrats, Missouri is divided and Kentucky is
ambivalent. Of the sixty-three new Democratic Con-
gressmen elected in 1958, thirteen replaced Democrats
who had retired for one reason or another, while fifty
replaced Republicans. But these fifty new seats still
left the Northern Democrats short of a majority on
key issues by fifteen to thirty votes. In the initial vote
on the Landrum-Griffin bill, for example, the North-
ern Democrats managed at one point to muster 201
votes against it, but when the final tally was made the
total had dropped to 125 votes. “That figure,” our in-
formant insists, “is the real core of the Democratic
Party.”

Accept this analysis and the conclusion is inescap-
able that the Democratic sweep in November, 1958,
would have had to be far more impressive than it was
in order to create a bare working majority for the
Democratic Party in the House. As long as the South-
ern Democrats — the invisible third party — are per-
mitted to exploit the resources and good name of the
Democratic Party nationally, every liberal-independent
vote in the Democratic columns is subject to an offset
which cuts its practical political value to a third or a
fourth of what it should in theory represent.

One inference from this analysis may be that, for
purely tactical reasons, liberal-independent voters
should, wherever possible, support “modern” Republi-
can Congressional candidates, For these voters cannot

i “expect to hav

a ae sssy salts ‘influence in. the |

'
1

\
’

4 «
fa rt

of wri =

fluence of the Dixiecrats remains beyond the reach of

broad national currents of interest, need and aspiration.

Mr. Porter’s New War

Congress shall have power, says Section 1, Paragraph
3 of the U.S. Constitution, to “regulate commerce with
foreign nations.” Obviously this implies some knowl-
edge by the regulators of conditions within foreign
countries. But nobody in Congress today has any first-
hand knowledge of what mainland China is like — at
least as of recent years. Indeed, we have more direct
up-to-date information about life under the Arctic ice
floes than about conditions in the world’s most populat-
ed country.

Representative Charles O. Porter (D., Ore.), who
takes his Constitutional duties seriously, sought to go
to Peking to determine for himself whether the present
restrictive regulations on trade between this country
and China are wise. But the State Department, which
on matters Chinese acts as if Chiang Kai-shek were
Undersecretary for Far Eastern Affairs, refused him the
necessary visa, just as it has refused visas to sundry
other Americans who doubt that ignorance furnishes
the best foundation for a foreign policy.

Mr. Porter, however, is not easily suppressed (wit-
ness his one-man war against Trujillo in the Galindez
case), and has taken his case to a federal district court.
The defendant is Secretary of State Christian Herter,
no less. Mr. Herter will have to prove to the court
that his reasons for banning Mr, Porter’s visit are more
cogent than the Congressman’s obligation, implied un-
der the Constitution, to make it. A court decision
against the Secretary, in this instance, will not knock

the props out of the State Department’s passport

restrictions; a Congressman, after all, is a special case.
But it may well open up a line of judicial reasoning
that would ultimately have that effect.

After all, the State Department did grant permission
to forty-one American newsmen to visit China (the
Peking regime, which is demanding a complete open-door
policy on correspondents, has refused to admit them);
and, as Mr. Porter remarked in the course of a speech
on the floor of the House, does a Congressman deserve
less consideration?

Mustangs and People

The mustang is the wild horse of the Western plains.
Its phylogeny has been much like that of the bison. In
1800 there were some two million mustangs. About
20,000 are left. Much of the slaughter came after World
War II and was the consequence of the demand for

horse meat for feeding pet cats and dogs. Commercial

hunters took to using pines to flush the mustangs
_ from the canyons onto the ds. There they were
1 by sah lassoed, « owed ‘to run them-

oy ‘

Pe eee rere ey eS

ae
. 4
: i

selves to exhaustion with heavy truck tires lashed to
the ends of the ropes. Finally they were thrown, loaded
into trucks and slaughtered. Cattlemen favored this
traffic, since it left a better food supply on the public
lands for their cattle.

Two humane women, Mrs. Velma (“Wild Horse An-
nie”) Johnston of Nevada and Mrs. Christine Stevens 3
of New York, and several Congressmen intervened on 4
behalf of the maltreated mustangs. A motion-picture ‘ By
actress, Miss Peggy Taylor of California, observing the
slaughter of mustangs while on location, appealed to ;
Senator Kuchel, who declared, “So far as I am con- 4,
cerned, my family’s . . . Belgian sheep dog would not |
want to eat any such meat if he knew the wanton
manner by which it was brought to the canning factory.”
The use of aircraft and motor vehicles to hunt wild
horses or burros was thereupon prohibited by act of
Congress.

Now all that remains is to curb man’s inhumanity to ‘
man.

Once More the Nightstick "ee

Crime waves are a familiar feature of the Amer-
ican scene. Equally familiar are the proposed remedies:
the electric chair, the policeman’s club and, in strange ‘
juxtaposition, religion. The particular crime wave which
is currently agitating the City of New York is a juvenile
one. It follows a familiar pattern in that the youthful 4
gangsters and murderers are largely immigrants. New ‘
York has seen successive waves of immigration which
coincided roughly with crime waves involving pre-
dominantly the ethnic groups latest to arrive, who lived in
in the worst neighborhoods, received the poorest edu- !
cation and the lowest wages and, not altogether sur-
prisingly, committed the most offenses against law and
order. In New York, just now, it is the Puerto Ricans
who are causing the most concern. But they have had
their predecessors and they will have successors, unless
a grossly imperfect way of life is succeeded by some-
thing better (but it is almost seditious to conceive of
anything better or to suggest that, as Buckle said, so-
ciety prepares the crime, the criminal commits it).

In a society in which news is treated as entertain-
ment and an aid to salesmanship, there is always the a
temptation to resort to hysterical exaggeration when-
ever emotions are aroused, A police captain is quoted
as saying, “When a grown man in uniform with a gu
and nightstick has to stand and take abuse from
age snotnoses without being allowed to do
about it, what can you expect?” Anyone who k
the New York police force does not era yi
ers spol to “turn tail and walk «
e : police need not t
Sy pane SS a dene)

Be SUN Te

gotten that it was the habitual misuse of force which
brought about the imposition of curbs by probably the
best Mayor New York ever had, William J. Gaynor),
it has not diminished crime. New York does need more
police, but law enforcement, even up to the electric
chair, has its limitations. Those who rely solely on it,
who denounce “do-gooders” and “coddlers” — some-
times from the pulpit — are venting their indignation,

but nothing practical is achieved. There will be no great —
change. Palliatives are possible and should be applied: |
the district attorneys, the police, the youth workers,
the courts, are there for that purpose. But an essentially
exploitative and self-satisfied society, further overloaded
with refugees from an even worse environment, is
bound to have a high crime rate and all its outcries will ©

not change cause and effect one whit.

Can Khrushchev Swing the’60 Election?.. Frederic 7. Collins

Washington
IT IS ALREADY quite evident that
the political consequences of the visit
of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrush-
chev to this country this month will
keep the seismographs at party head-
quarters, in the conventions and out
at the grass roots in a state of violent
palsy at least through the 1960
elections. It is equally evident that
no one knows exactly what the con-
sequences will be, a circumstance
which has led to a frenzied guessing
game in those areas of political de-
cision where expediency prevails over
principle. The one outstanding politi-
cal result which can at this time
be noted with certainty is deep and
wide division—between the parties;
within the parties and among politi-
cal leaders—as to the wisdom, in
terms of both national and partisan
interest, of initiating this trend to-
ward bilateralism and personal diplo-
macy between the two great princi-
pals of the cold war.

Under these circumstances, it is
noteworthy that in one part of
Washington where the talent for
political realism is hardly thought to
be endemic, the Department of State,
a more searching insight into the

political results of the Khrushchev

visit has been achieved than in any

of the editorial or political comment

upon it. The truth is that Mr.
_Khrushchev’s appearance in_ this
country raises a most serious issue—
so serious, in fact, that some officials
who have perceived it have quite
literally spent sleepless nights think-

ing about it. What they have seen

FREDERIC W. COLLINS is Wash-

s a ingvon correspondent of the Provi-

ce, R. I., Journal.

and identified at the center of all
the current political confusion is the
hard fact that to a meaningful and
disturbing extent, the Khrushchev
visit, and all it implies, brings Ameri-
can domestic politics at its highest
level—the process of Presidential
nomination and election—within the
thrall of the Kremlin’s will. This is
true with regard to the great issues
of policy which figure in the process
and, as can be shown, also with re-
lation to the competing positions of
the parties and the men who will
be seeking the Presidency in 1960.

THE manner in which this comes
about is simple, for everything hinges
on what the Kremlin will do—and
the Kremlin is master of its own
deportment. If, on the one hand,
the Soviet leaders choose to maintain
through 1960 an attitude of doing
business on a fairly reasonable basis

with the United States Government,
the political consequences of Mr.
Khrushchev’s visit here, and of Presi-
dent Eisenhower’s journey to the.
Soviet Union, will be favorable to
the party which led this country
into the exchanges and to the men
of the party who associated them-
selves with the project. But if, on
the other hand, the Kremlin chooses
to switch back to a hard and brutal
line, then the consequences to the
Republican Party will be unfavor-
able—perhaps decisively so.

This issue, in turn, raises corollary
ones. By 1960, will Soviet behavior
make the Republican Party seem to
be, in the view of the electorate,
the agent which solved, or significant-
ly eased, the cold-war crisis, or will
it seem to be the stupid victim of
Soviet duplicity, demonstrably in-
capable of conducting the nation’s
affairs in such dangerous situations?
Should the Democratic Party, gam-
bling on the long-term malevolence
of the Kremlin, oppose the phi-
losophy of accommodation inherent
in the Eisenhower-Khrushchev ex-
change, or should it gamble the other
way and try to get aboard the dove?
And which way should a Presidential
aspirant bet? How can he possibly
make an intelligent guess, so long
as it is true that whichever way
he jumps, the Kremlin may switch
course with the sole and simple pur-
pose of doing him in as a Presidential
possibility?

When one considers that the
Kremlin is fully free to: make its
move at any time up to and including ~
Election Day, the magnitude and
duration of the dilemma _ become
clear. The peli anaes, circumstance —
i at oth Krer

4
min

> FR- >

Ze. September 12, 1959

might make a wrong guess. (Who
could logically have assumed that
the events at the close of the 1956
Presidential campaign, Suez, the in-
vasion of Egypt and Hungary, would
have given such a boost to the can-
didate of the Party of Peace?) But
that possibility is small comfort; it
contemplates only a different kind
of thralldom.

It requires only an easy extension
of this reasoning eastward, inciden-
tally, to see that Mr. Khrushchev
looms as potent a figure in British
domestic politics as he does here. The
Conservative Party has irretrievably
committed itself to the Eisenhower
policy; indeed, it is believed that the
Maemillan-Eisenhower TV broadcast
from Chequers was deliberately
staged as a prelude to the calling of
British elections in October, and un-
less Mr. Khrushchev suddenly chang-
es the Kremlin’s current “soft” tac-
tics in the meantime (and it is highly
unlikely that he will), the Tories will
be in excellent shape to win.

AS FOR American personalities, the
issue becomes clearly defined in the
case of Richard M. Nixon versus
Nelson A. Rockefeller. The Vice
President is committed, whether he
likes it or not, to the processes of
exploration and the quest for ac-
commodation. The commitment de-
rives both from his role in the
Administration and from his recent
visit to the Soviet Union. The
dangers for him in this situation are
apparent. There is a well-developed
theory in Washington that the whole
elaborate business by which Mr.
Eisenhower kept Mr. Nixon in the
dark about the ongoing White House-
Kremlin exchanges until the Vice
President was almost ready to en-
plane for Moscow, was designed to
make possible a shifting of responsi-
bility from. Mr. Nixon to Mr. Eisen-
hower (prospectively only a specta-
tor in 1960) if the end results were
bad.

But no matter how many escape
hatches may have been provided, the
commitment stands. Mr. Rockefeller,
on the other hand, is playing it cool
as far as the Soviet Union and Mr.
Khrushchev are concerned. His con-
spicuous avoidance of the Soviet
Exposition in New York is already
in the record, and his attitude toward

the Khrushchev visit has been hard-
ly more cordial.

But—the Governor of New York
could prove to be wrong. If, as the
primaries unfold and as the GOP
convention meets, the Soviet Union
wishes to create the impression that
the Eisenhower Administration has
made headway in relieving the ten-
sions of the cold war, then the pub-
lic’s longing for an end to inter-
national crises will give Mr. Nixon
an advantage over Mr. Rockefeller.

In the Democratic Party, the di-
lemma of the candidates is no less
acute. Adlai Stevenson is still under
some handicap from the diligent ef-
forts of Mr. Nixon in 1952 and 1956
to impose upon him a reputation as
an appeaser of communism, however
undeserved that reputation may have
been. Mr. Stevenson, as a result, is
not even wholly free to make up
his mind on the issue according to
the dictates of his conscience and
his political judgment, Senator John
Kennedy’s freedom of choice is re-
stricted for another reason: the
opposition to the Eisenhower-
Khrushchev exchange of the Catho-
lic Church, most militantly expound-
ed by Richard Cardinal Cushing of
Boston. Senator Humphrey must
deal, on the one hand, with the fact
that Mr. Khrushchev has given him
the rough side of his tongue and on
the other with a need to prove that

he is not an extreme left-winger; and,
to complicate matters further, he
must also deal with the obligations
imposed by his own strategy in offer-
ing himself as an apostle of peace.
Senator Stuart Symington has to
wonder whether it might become
necessary to attempt a reconciliation
between his commitment to a dev-
astating startegic air capability and
a new posture of accommodation
with the target regime.

In the broad battle between the
two great parties, the Khrushchev
visit and all it entails have already
had this result as of right now: The
Democrats have not yet gained an
issue, but the Republicans have lost
one which they had cherished for
nearly two decades—the issue sum-
med up in the word Yalta. But no
one at either headquarters, canvass-
ing tactics and strategy for 1960,
can know for sure that an abrupt
Kremlin move will not change all
this, conferring upon the Republi-
cans a winning slogan, “Progress
Toward Peace”—or upon the Demo-
crats a losing one, “Stumbling into

War.”

THE NUMBER of subsidiary issues
generated by the Khrushchev visit
can be determined roughly by multi-
plying the number of parties by the
number of candidates, multiplying
that by the number of states, multi-

plying the whole result by X. No
one, for example, can read Cardinal
Cushing without realizing that every
candidate with a significant Catholic
element in his constituency must
walk on eges in dealing with the
issues raised by the Khrushchev
visit. (“His |Mr. K’s] visit is a de-
vice which is bringing about the con-
traction of the free world and with
it the cutting down of the number
of men and women who dare openly
to express their belief in God.”—
Cardinal Cushing in The Boston
Globe, August 30, 1959.) The fact
that Mr. Khrushchev was steered
away from Chicago and Cleveland

MVE St

because of the strong representation

of Kastern Europeans there is evi-
dence enough of the political prob-
lems raised by the visit in those and
comparable areas. In _ ideological
terms, there are efforts at awesome
thunder on the Right: viz., the full-
page advertising by the Committee
Against Summit ~ Entanglements,
running the gamut from A (T. Cole-
man Andrews) almost to Z (Albert
C. Wedemeyer) by way of Barry
Goldwater and Clarence Manion.
The American politician, contem-
plating the Khrushchev visit, might
well find himself fervently hoping
that a last-minute cancellation might

en a Poe
“S42 - ve

5 Mg oo hig, ae
. 9 8
occur—and in Washington, the wish,
in some quarters, has been father to
the thought. But the same politician,
if he were honest with himself, might
have to admit that, visit or no, a
considerable amount of fat is already
in the political fire. Even if the visit
were canceled, the movement toward
accommodation has gained such mo-
mentum that the unhappy politician
might still find himself required to
explain whether he was for it or
against it. Either way, he finds him-
self standing on a rug which could
still be yanked out from under him
by Kremlin caprice any time be-
tween now and November, 1960.

PLUS ALL YOU CAN STEAL..

WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS, Amer-
ican industry has been loudly bewail-
ing its falling profit margins for
almost a decade. Industrial leaders
have been glumly predicting that in-
dustry is pricing itself out of world
markets; indeed, judging by the reac-
tion of auto buyers and the TVA,
American industry may be pricing
itself out of its own market as well.
Almost all the trouble is blamed
on the high cost of labor (never on
the high cost of management). But
perhaps a better explanation lies in
the short and brutal word larceny.
Workers usually take things (tools,
parts, materials); managers usually
take money (kickbacks and inflated
expense accounts); but whoever
takes, and in whatever form, in the
long run the consumer has to foot the
bill in the form of higher prices.
How much is the bill? Industry, be-
cause it regards any kind of adverse
publicity as tantamount to convic-
tion of mismanagement, hides its
losses (even from itself) by complex
accounting methods. But insurance
men, who have to make good on at
least part of what might be called
the pure thievery, say the annual
total runs into $5 billion or more.
That, too, is the estimate of Nor-

EDWARD W. ZIEGLER, a former
newspaperman, 1s now an editor at

McGraw-Hill.
126

a>! a

man Jaspan, New York management
consultant. And above and beyond
these billions is a much larger total
of semiofficial and quasi-legal thiev-
ery that higher managers and execu-
tives carry on by means of padded
expense accounts.

Mr. Jaspan recently told the Amer-
ican Management Association that
the general price level could be re-
duced 15 per cent if dishonesty were
removed from American business.
“The nation’s gross national prod-
uct has increased by $92.3 billion
since 1952,” he pointed out, “but
profits have remained at the 1952
level.” He put the blame on business
dishonesty, adding that more than 60
per cent of the losses are the work
of supervisory and executive em-
ployees. Mr. Jaspan’s figures may be
exaggerated, but not — according to
other observers — by very much.
And no one can say that Richard L.
Bollard of Liberty Mutual Insurance
Company was exaggerating when he
pointed out, a short time ago, that
insurance Companies are paying out
130 per cent more in fidelity claims
than ten years ago.

GEORGE Y., a toolroom worker at
a 6,000-man General Motors plant,

along with Tony A. and Bill M., had

been stealing fine gauges, taps, car-
bide tools, micrometers and other

easily portable metal-working equip-

by Edward W. Ziegler

ment for years. George’s home work-
shop was superbly equipped. He stole
nothing but the best.

But George got caught by a fluke.
His supervisor knocked George’s coat
off a hook one day when he brushed
up against it. About $20 worth of
carbide inserts rolled out of the pock-
et. George had put them there just
an hour before. The supervisor
hustled George to the plant man-
ager’s office, where they were joined
by the personnel manager.

They grilled George. They got
nothing. For $20 worth of tools, the
company wasn’t going to go to the
police and George knew it. The worst
they could do was fire him. The tools
he had been hoarding in his garage
workshop bore no GM imprint. No
one could prove he hadn’t bought
them. But a quick audit raised the
alarm. There was a $10,000 shortage
in the tool room for that one year
alone. Further evidence implicated
Tony and Bill. All three were fired.

Today in Elyria, Ohio, there is a
new, well-equipped and highly suc-
cessful tool-and-die shop. Its owners
are George, Tony and Bill. It was fi-
nanced — short term — by General
Motors. Long term, you and I are
amortizing the cost every time we
buy a new Chevrolet. According to
one cynical observer, the flourishing
new business no doubt lists General
Motors as a customer.

| yw
The Nation
'
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af)

At another GM plant, the scrap
supervisor made a quiet deal with a
scrap dealer. The supervisor would
sell the dealer scrap brass at the price
of scrap iron and split the difference.
The plan was so simple that it worked
perfectly for three years. The weight
tickets and the price tickets always
matched properly. And the scales
were always in perfect working order.

But one day someone thought to
look inside one of the scrap dealer’s
trucks to see the “iron.” Of course
it was brass. The plant was poorer
by almost $80,000. The supervisor
was fired. But none of his $40,000
share was recovered.

General Motors, by the way, is
widely acclaimed as one of the most
efficient, best organized of our large
corporations.

IN RICHMOND, Va., the district
manager of an electrical manufactur-
er’s distributing subsidiary checked
over the warehouse inventory figures
against a physical audit in the fall of
1955. He discovefed serious shortages.
Vacuum cleaners, portable radios,
television sets—even bulky electric
ranges—had simply disappeared.

He hired two private detectives,
who hid themselves above a false
ceiling over the shipping dock and
began watching outgoing shipments.
Within forty-eight hours they saw
one of the delivery men nudge an ex-
tra vacuum cleaner carton from
stock into his outgoing pile. Then he
loaded the whole shipment into his
truck and started off. The private
eyes climbed down and_ followed.
They trailed him to his mother’s
house, where he dropped off the
vacuum cleaner. They made their
arrest.

The district manager called in the
police. Two city detectives, the pri-
vate detectives, and the manager gril-
led the delivery man for hours. He
confessed only the theft of the $49.95
vacuum cleaner. Although the short-
age totaled many thousands of dol-
lars, the evidence would support only
a petty larceny charge.

The manager fired the delivery
man and the warehouse manager, He
came very close to firing his operat-
ing manager, as well, suspecting a
kickback arrangement among the
three. But he could prove nothing

September 12, 1959

lea,

more. The case was closed to the
satisfaction of the parent company.
But what the company did not know
was that the manager himself had
“borrowed” a_ television set from
stock for his own use, along with a
window fan and an air conditioner.

‘He “bought” an electric range and a

refrigerator that same year with
money he made on his expense ac-
count.

Little men perform little acts of
larceny, all gaining much more than
they would lose if they got caught.
Typical of industry’s half-tolerant at-
titude is this response a cigar com-
pany executive gave Dun’s Review
and Modern Industry to the ques-
tion: “Which kind of dishonesty is
most expensive?” Answered the ex-
ecutive: “The kind we never dis-
cover.”

IN THE TOTAL picture of larceny
in industry, however, the petty pil-
ferings of little men fade into insignif-
icance.

“Come on, Jack, $12,000 a year
and all you can steal — sounds good,
doesn’t it?” Thus an electronics en-
gineer carrying too much gin on top
of too little vermouth egged an old
friend into following him to a new
job in California.

The spirit of the times is caught in
little incidents, by occasional bursts
of candor, such as one insurance ex-
ecutive loosed on a meeting of busi-
nessmen. “I’m in the insurance busi-
ness,” he said. “My job is to protect

business people against loss. But I’d
be a phony if I stood up here and
didn’t admit that my four children
have all gone through school and
never spent a nickel on pencils, eras-
ers or paper pads... .” The business-
men roared their amusement.

At a large Philadelphia district of-
fice of a national corporation, an as-
sistant sales manager told one of his
salesmen: “Joe, if you don’t do bet-
ter than this you'll have us all in hot
water. Who ever heard of paying
only $8 a night for a hotel? Or spend-
ing $1.75 for dinner? I don’t care
what you spend. Make it look like
you went first class.”

In a New York publishing firm, the
secretary of an editor regularly picks
up the accounts of the sub-editors on
the tenth of every month with the
line, “All right, boys, time for your
creative writing reports.” It never
fails to get a laugh.

And even in the red-carpeted halls
of the National Council of Churches
according to a former executive
— there is frequent, if muted, use of
the term “swindle sheet” on expense-
accounting day.

Any competent expense-account
writer can pocket 10 per cent of the
amount he allegedly spends. If he’s
really savvy, he can put away as
much as 50 per cent. On an annual
expenditure (of record) of $2,500,
any reasonably larcenous man can
net $800, or the equivalent of at least
$1,000 in taxable income.

One Chicago fork-lift-truck sales

127

:
'

manager spent sixteen days winging
around the nation to district sales
offices. He turned in a tab for $850.
He really spent just a little more
than $500. When he ate liver, it be-
came steak on his report; a $1 cab
ride became $3.75; a $10 hotel room
grew into a $17.50 suite, and so on.

A former executive of one of the

largest television networks tells this
story: One day, shortly after taking
an administrative job, he was invited
to lunch by a sub-functionary of one
of the popular daytime serials. The
executive was taken to New York’s
swank restaurant, the Colony, and
treated to a lavish meal that cost his
host no less than $45. When it be-
came obvious that his host had noth-
ing in particular to discuss with him,
he became curious.
;; He decided to make a sub rosa
study of all his co-workers’ expense
habits. He asked for, and got, his
vice president’s approval. He did not
have far to look for clear evidence of
systematic cheating by all manager-
ial employees. A typical example of
the extreme to which the practice
was carried was illustrated by one
of the close friends of his original host
who was a low-echelon unit manager
of a now-defunct quiz program. The
man’s weekly salary was $116.87. His
weekly expense averaged $167.

“T found tab after tab,” the ex-
ecutive told me, “for lunch at the
Forum »f the Twelve Caesars or Le
Pavillon—both top-flight New York
restaurants — for three or four of his

THE BROTHERHOOD of Locomo-
tive Engineers, the Order of Railway
Conductors & Brakemen and the
Switchmen’s Union of North Amer-
‘ica will ask their employers next
_ November 1 for a 12 per cent in-
crease in wage rates. The notices
_were filed last February under Sec-

JOHN BARDEN, former newspa-
perman and union official, had ex-
_ tensive cooperation from both man-
agement and the Railroad Brother-
hoods in perparing this article.

ore oP | eee

ad rr ae ra 5

buddies with a total bill of $80 or.
$90. Then, the next day, one of the
other four would put down the others
for lunch at Twenty-One or the
Colony with a similar bill. I don’t
think those guys ever went to any
place more expensive than Chock
Full O’Nuts, but you couldn’t prove
it by their expense accounts.”

Shortly after beginning his investi-
gation, the executive went to the
West Coast with his vice president
on business. “We got to a gift shop
in San Francisco and he told me to
buy a crystal vase for him. ‘Put it on
your expense account,’ he said, with
a wink, ‘and I'll okay your ac-
count.’ ”

By then the zealous investigator
began to realize he was tilting at a
windmill. “I was shocked,” he says,
“and somehow I knew what would
happen when I finished my study.”

If he thought he was through find-
ing exorbitant items he was wrong. In
the higher echelons, it wasn’t unusu-
al to find things like: “Flowers, for

’s opening, $25.” “Those
guys,” he says, “had more friends
with birthdays, openings, anniversa-
ries or funerals than you can imagine.
And they always sent $25 worth of
flowers.”

A $35,000-a-year man would typ-
ically spend $15,000 to $18,000 on
expenses a year, much of which went
for hard-to-check items like “home
entertainment” of business associates.

“At last, when I was done, I turned
over my consolidated reports to the

tion 6 of the Railway Labor Act. By
June, the other brotherhoods — the
Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen
and the Railroad Trainmen — had
filed for 14 per cent increases. Eight-
een non-operating unions are also
negotiating; last week eleven of them
demanded a 25c package increase.
The three-year national agree-
ment for a moratorium on rule
changes relevant to alleged “feather-
bedding” practices expires October
31. These rules, some dating from
1875, were standardized by the Lane

Y eee re

’ , _* ‘1 ™, "3 ; ‘ ©
boss. He said something like, ‘Good-
ness, this is terrible, Ill certainly tell
the executive committee about this.

. .. I never heard anything more
about it.”

The honest man, thoroughly disil-
lusioned, quit his job. “It goes on all
the time. I know that. But I found
myself torn between what I knew
was right and what my friends
thought was permissible. I said to
hell with it. It wasn’t worth it.”

This, admittedly, is an extreme ex-
ample, drawn from an extreme busi-
ness. In less volatile, less profitable,
fields the expenditures are far more
modest, but the technique is the same
and the number who play the game
is greater.

THE SEERS AMONG us can make
endless capital of the abundant signs
of decay. Little of the above would
be possible except that stealing is so-
cially acceptable. No doubt a great
deal of its acceptability is a result
of high income taxes that encourage
men to find income that cannot be
taxed. High living costs put pressure
on the breadwinner to become a
bread-stealer. So great are the re-
wards, and so few the risks, that the
temptation is simply greater than
any but the most ethical man can
resist.

Instead of industry asking, “Are
we pricing ourselves out of the mar-
ket?” perhaps it had better ask it-
self, “Are we stealing ourselves out
of the market?”

RAILROAD LABOR CRISIS 8 by John pyar,

Commission and promulgated by
General Order 27 in 1918 while the
railroads were under wartime federal
control. They appear today more or
less uniformly in the contracts be-
tween the railroads and the operat-
ing unions.

Throughout the country, union of-
ficials and managements at division,
terminal and lower working levels
are entering discussions and report-
ing the issues to higher authority.
Union general chairmen are taking
up disputes with individual railroad

fe} Th i NATION

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nanagements. Their differences on

wages are already coming to the na-
tional bargaining table; those as to
rules will come up in or after Novem-
ber.

It is not difficult to write out the
dialogue now ensuing so far as it
relates to the issues which will reach
the national level. Railroad manage-
ment and unions have been writing
the script for months, using all
available platforms and their various
publications. Management has the
edge on publications. More than 90
per cent of the U.S. press, according
to a sampling of editorials by the
Association of American Railroads,
believes the railroads are over-regu-
lated, over-taxed, under-financed,
out-run by subsidized competition
and badly hurt by featherbedding. The
chance, therefore, of the dialogue’s
getting more than a one-sided hear-
ing in many papers is small. The
Nation accordingly undertakes to
state both sides, almost in the very
terms of the official speeches and
publications of labor and manage-
ment. The writer has assumed equal-
ly articulate and_ well-informed
spokesmen for each side.

LABOR: Getting down to the
economic issues, we are asking for
a 12-14 per cent over-all wage in-
crease and a cost of living adjust-
ment based on the Consumers Price
Index as it will stand in September.

MANAGEMENT (expected to
broaden the agenda with appropri-
ate notices of its contentions):
You're going to draw a 15-cent-an-
hour cut unless the ridiculous and
outmoded featherbedding rules are
dropped from the contracts. This
cut is the exact measure by which
increases in railroad wages have
topped those in other industries in
the last five years. The carriers could
pay substantially higher wages and
offer many more job opportunities,
but only if you will agree that the
antiquated work rules of 1918 are
no longer possible in 1959. We are
losing more than $500 million a year
paying you fellows for work you
don’t do.

LABOR: That’s a phony figure,
and we know how you came by it.
You’d lay off all firemen, third

_ brakemen, and crews on self-propél-

h ember 12, 1959

ing 2 hours and 51 n

led maintenance equipment, though
they are required for the safety and
efficiency of operations. You’d abol-
ish the short turn-around passenger
rule, putting short-run operating
crews on the 10-hour day, straight-
time, though there’s a 1957 Emer-
gency Board ruling against you on
that. You’d lay off people by using
road crews in the yards and switch-
ing crews on the road. Your $500
million figure includes paid vaca-
tions, holidays, time for meals, ab-
sences on leave, time when called in
but not used, investigations, run-
around pay, deadheading, attending
court when ordered by the manage-
ment to protect management in-
terests, and the like. You’ve counted
all these items in your “losses,” but
they’re part of the cost of doing busi-
ness, operating safely, and fair
treatment of employees. There isn’t
another industry moaning about
legitimate costs like you do. You
only do it to mislead the public.

MANAGEMENT: We don’t care
what you call it, cost or loss. No
other industry has to take the costs
you hand us, Our $500 million is a
conservative figure derived from the
study of (1) the antiquated dual
mileage-day basis of paying train
crews; (2) jurisdictional work sep-
arations — rules banning road crews
from working in yards or vice versa
and prohibiting train crews from
crossing division and __ seniority
boundaries; (3) unnecessary fire-
man jobs and other train positions.

Here’s a case: A passenger train
covers the 1,034-mile trip between
Chicago and Denver in 16% hours.
For this, the carrier’s cost — be-
cause of the dual mileage-day basis
of payment — runs to ten and one-
third basic days’ pay for each en-
gine-crew position. The competitive
bus lines pay their drivers for each
eight hours of work. We’re paying
whole crews a day’s pay for two or
three hours’ work.

LABOR: We're glad you brought
up the Chicago-Denver run. There’s
a passenger engineer on that run
named M. E. White. He has 30
years’ seniority and “Bonin a daily

assignment on the Burlington be-
tween Lincoln, Neb., and Creston,
Ia., a distance of 115 miles, averag-
linutes per trip.

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For all this he receives just $31.66
straight-time pay per trip, including
nights and Sundays. In the first half
of July, 1958, he spent 210% hours
either on duty or laying over. For
this he received $481.63, or $2.26
an hour for time actually in service
for the company.
MANAGEMENT: Let’s put that
this way: He drew $481.63 for 15

trips, about 43 hours of work. That.

figures out to $11.17 an hour. We
have to give eight crews comparable
pay to get a train over 1,034 miles
in 16% hours, when it should be just
two crews. Between Chicago and
New York it’s worse — nine crews,
each getting a day’s pay to move a
train some small part of a 900-mile
trip which takes altogether 16 hours.

LABOR: We doubt that you’d
want crews operating trains up to
80-90 miles an hour for eight straight

hours, but, quite aside from that,

let’s look at what these crews net
after the food and hotel bills con-
tracted in the service of the com-
pany during layovers. If on each trip
Engineer White pays $15 for board
and lodging, he was making a little
less than $1.79 an hour for his time
— less than an unskilled worker
gets in any major industry and about
half what a building-trades laborer
gets, straight time. They also get
time-and-a-half for overtime, night-
work premiums, and double time on
Sundays. Engineer White doesn’t.
MANAGEMENT: Sure. He’s a
victim, like the rest of us, of the
41-year-old work rule — the 100-
mile day for engine crews and the
150-mile day for passenger-train
crewmen — though not nearly as
badly off as you try to make out.
Engineer White is in railroading, a
round-the-clock, seven-day-a-week
service. It is not unusual for other
industrial labor to work weekends at
straight time under such circum-
stances. Our non-operating employ-
ees work straight time where con-
tinuous operations are involved, as
do workers
process industries. Operating
ployees in yards receive extra pay
for holidays or the equivalent in
higher hourly wage rates. Road train-
men were denied paid holidays by
mergency Board 116 which held
that the rules applying to road se A
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ice place the majority of such em-
ployees in a much more favorable
earning position than yard-service
employees.

Against away-from-home expen-
ses, you received a 5-cent hourly in-
crease during World War II. This
is still in the pay structure. Your
estimate of Engineer White’s ex-
penses classifies as riotous living.
At most railroad layover points,
low-cost facilities are provided for
crewmen away from home.

LABOR: The 100-150 mile basis
was introduced by management to
encourage efficiency and stimulate
crews to move trains faster. The
rule, as formulated since 1910, pro-
vides that eight hours or less, or
100-150 miles or less, shall entitle
the crew to receive a certain min-
imum pay. It is an incentive sys-
tem. The 100-150 miles was never
a day’s run. The pay was not a day’s
pay, but simply a base rate for the
100-150 miles. We make it fast and
safe in two to three hours, and this
is what you wanted. Now you’ve
got it — and you’re crying.

MANAGEMENT: Sure we're
crying. The standards were set when
average train speed was only about
half what it is today. Incentive pay
is not at issue. The issue is pay
standards unchanged in the face of
vast changes in operating methods.

LABOR: The 100-150 mile rule
has nothing to do with a day’s work,
just as the pay you keep calling a
day’s pay has nothing to do with a
day’s pay. They had trains at the
turn of the century which ran near-
ly as fast as our fastest today. The
rules you complain about provide
incentives for performance enjoyed
by few other industries. From 1947
to 1956, the real product of the
railroad workers, under the rules
you helped invent but now chal-
lenge, increased 43.6 per cent when
measured in revenue traffic-units
per hour. In the same 10-year pe-
riod, the real product of the entire
non-agricultural part of the Amer-

ican economy increased only 26.1

per cent. Since 1956, the productiv-
ity gain of railroad workers has been

8.5 per cent, and the current rate is

the highest in history. The rail-
roads aren’t paying for it, either.
Total compensation to employees in

i? 1 | = ‘ ve iG Mean CIRC rae
this period of 1947.57 rose oily 03. 1
per cent, while the cost of living rose
25 per cent, Yet according to the
annual report of the ICC, 1957 div-
idends were up 115, 7| per cent over
1947.

MANAGEMENT: How can you
talk like that? We earned just 2.7
per cent on our net investment last
year, and 20 major lines operated in
the red. Railroads rank third from
the bottom among 73 industrial
groups in comparisons of profits
earned on net assets. We’re paying
out 53 cents of every revenue dol-
lar to our employees. Yet if you go
back to 1926 for the long look, we’ve
lost out by at least 50 per cent on
inter-city ton-mile freight to our
subsidized competition, the truck-
ing industry.

Your “total compensation” con-
cept has too many variables to have
any meaning. Total compensation
reflects both wage level and num-
ber of employees. Increases in wages
are offset by layoffs. We’ve had to
resort to layoffs to stay solvent in
the postwar period. While Class I
railroad employment declined 41
per cent in the period from 1945 to
1958, the total payroll increased 27.5
per cent. The level of individual
wages in the industry is among the
highest for any industrial group in
the nation.

We'll concede that productivity
has risen over the years, mainly
because of railroad spending for im-
proved plant and equipment, but
youre far ahead in wage gains.
Traffic units handled per hour paid
for have risen 220 per cent since
1922. Yet wages per hour paid for
have risen 304 per cent. Since World
War II, revenue ‘traffic-units per
hour worked rose 49 per cent, but
straight-time earnings per hour
worked went up 169 per cent, bet-
ter than three times as much as em-
ployee output.

LABOR: You keep talking poor,
but the fact is that your profits in
the last quarter of 1958 were run-
ning at the rate of $1 billion a year,
and you’re doing even better in
1959. Railroad management has
been especially favored by low labor
costs. We feel it’s time you began
to catch up with other U.S. in-
dustries, —

oy 0 ’ Pte pa

MANAGEMENT: Wa in fend
but not as you'd like it. We want —
productivity increases in line with —
what we’re paying for. Besides sad-
dling us with the 100-150 mile day,
you’ve built jurisdictional walls all
over our operations. Not long ago
on the Minneapolis & St. Louis, a
two-unit diesel was being prepared
to move a freight train, Before the
engine left the roundhouse, the
mechanical department coupled on
a dead diesel unit for repairs at the
next terminal. The road brakeman
that day made the same moves in
herding the locomotive from the
roundhouse to the train yard he al-
ways did. Since the dead unit was
attached to the regular train engine,
it was necessary to walk 15 addi-
tional steps to couple the locomotive
to the outbound freight train. This
brakeman collected an extra day’s
pay on the ground that moving the
dead unit was work not included in
his contract.

LABOR: Yet if we let minor in-
fractions of the rule pass, you fel-
lows immediately push for major in-
fractions, and then where’s the rule?
As the "National Railway Adjust-
ment Board said in a similar 1959
case: “The claim here presented may
seem trivial. It must, however, be
remembered that the protection of
the sanctity of the rules against
major infractions is attained in large
part by their protection against
minor infractions.”

The case you cite was bad man-
agement. Where was the switching
crew?

Let us put this in terms you rail-
road executives can understand.
Suppose after you have put in your
regular tough day at the office,
your superior comes to you and tells
you that, since you’re here and the
charwoman isn’t, he wishes you
would pick up a broom and clean up
the place before you go home. You’d
refuse, of course, and with good
reason. Jurisdictional rules in the
railroad industry are basically the
result of situations as simple as that,
though in many instances they also
involve an element of safety that
can’t be ignored.

MANAGEMENT: Believe us, if
it would pay to have executives
sweeping out their offices, we’d have

The Nation

*
‘
/

—— *

’em doing it. The point of the case
we cited is that the rule draws a
firm and inflexible line between
things that road crews can do and
things that yard crews can do. Most
cases are trivial — except the money
we have to pay out. A few minutes’
work is involved which could readily
be done by a road crew or a yard
crew on duty at the point. In the
interest of efficiency and better serv-
ice, we should have the right to use
road crews to perform any and all
switching and station work required
of road trains at initial and final
terminals and at all intermediate
points. We should also have the right
to use yard crews to perform both
road and yard service either inside
or outside switching limits.

LABOR: Sure, and never mind
the facts that switching crews don’t
know the road and road crews don’t
know the yard. Never mind the foul-
ups and accidents, the injuries and
loss of life, the damage to your ex-
pensive equipment. You think this
would lead to efficiency and better
service. We don’t.

MANAGEMENT: You fellows
think nothing of stopping the whole
service — and the public be damned
— when the right man for the job
isn’t around. Last spring in New
York, a New Haven train was de-
layed 23 minutes because of a dirty
locomotive windshield. The train’s
engineer refused to clean it. That
was somebody else’s job. Finally a
workman of the proper classification
arrived, cleaned the windshield, and
the train pulled out.

LABOR: Bad management again.
You blame the engineer, but where
was the maintenance foreman who
put that locomotive on the line with
a dirty windshield?

We took a beating on that case
at the hands of your publicity
artists, but here are the facts: That
engineer had complained repeatedly

about dirty windshields. He had
cleaned the window himself and put
in for the pay, but was refused. He
had no alternative but to sit it out.
We can only help improve manage-
ment from where we sit, but there
is a lot of poor management higher
up we can’t do anything about.

Let’s have a look at featherbed-
ding in management. Back in 1923,
the Class I railroads had approx-
imately 1.8 million employees, and
16,000 at the managerial levels. In
1959, we have only 820,000 employ-
ees and about the same number of
managers. From 1955-57, 190 new
officials were added at top levels,
while other workers dropped from
1,041,792 to 969,737, with the total
outlay for management increasing
$21.8 million to a staggering total
of $180.9 million annually. Six top
officials with. the Boston & Maine
drawing $145,800 in 1955 went to
seven drawing $243,358 in 1957. The
Chicago & Northwestern had 11
drawing $353,809 in 1955 and 19
drawing $618,226 in 1957; Southern
Railroad went from 31 drawing
$903,970 in 1955 to 58 drawing
$1,667,510 in 1957. All this new
talent succeeded in doing, so far as
we can see, was to drive layoffs of
our people higher in 1958 than
they’ve ever been, even at the bot-
tom of the Great Depression. They’ve
also shunted alarming amounts of
equipment to await repair at over-
loaded . shops.

The result is that the railroads
are confronted with increasing short-
ages of equipment to handle the
greater volume of business offered.

MANAGEMENT: Anybody can
make their statistical story look good
by selecting the dates. You left off
the 1958-59 period, when manage-
ment personnel decreased 6 per cent,
more than twice the average de-
crease for all rail employment. Man-
agement’s getting just 1.7 per cent

September 12, 1959

of each revenue dollar. It’s your 53
per cent take that is staggering. Au-
tomation and advances in technology
brought on by research and invest-
ment in new plants and equipment
have called for higher technical skills
and administrative abilities—brains
rather than brawn. In 1958, 15,463
employees were executives, officials
and staff assistants. This was just 1.8
per cent of the total of 840,000 em-
ployees.

As for deadlined equipment, reve-
nue ton-miles of Class I railroad
freight traffic fell to 550 billion in
1958, or 11 per cent under 1957’s 618
billion. We didn’t need the equip-
ment deadlined. To continue pros-
perity repair programs in the face
of equipment surpluses and poor
traffic prospects would leave less
money for other payrolls.

LABOR: You're losing business
because you want to. A number of
roads are trying to get out of the
less-than-carload-lots_ freight busi-
ness. The Chicago & Northwestern
discontinued its pick-up service and
admits it lost 40 per cent of its LCL
business. So did the Atlantic Coast
Line. Some are trying to dry up the
express business and stop hauling
mail. Postmaster General Arthur
Summerfield, a pal of yours, not
ours, wrote us a letter dated January
17, 1958, saying, “The railroads re-
quest the Department to remove
mail in advance of petitions for
abandonment in order that the un-
profitability of the remaining serv-
ice can be more easily demonstrated.”

Many railroads don’t want regular
passenger business, except for a few
crack trains, They want to stop being
common carriers. They prefer to
haul only bulk freight on which they
often have a monopoly.

MANAGEMENT: You _ don’t
know what you’re talking about.
We’re being driven out of some busi-
ness by high employment costs —
67 per cent of total rail expenses,
Abandonments and discontinuances
are last-ditch efforts to prune off
the dead branches of losing services
so that more profitable limbs may
be kept alive.

LABOR: When you stop wasting —

money on top-level salaries, letting
equipment stand idle and throwing
away business, maybe we'll think

31 4

about the rules of the game which,
we remind you, you agreed to time
and time again because you found
the incentives profitable. Some
things management is doing to lose
business are unbelievable. Let us
quote an engineer on the L & N’s
Southland Limited between Cincin-
nati and Florida:

“First they removed the dining
car. Then they removed all Pullman
service. The remaining coaches are
almost always dirty. Very often be-
cause of some mechanical defect,
the steam heat breaks down, and the
people have suffered for hundreds of
miles.”

MANAGEMENT: All this is the
direct result of the ancient dual mile-
age-day basis of paying train crews,
costs which figure heavily in passen-
ger operations. We dieselized, put in
modern signal and electronic com-
munications systems, centralized
traffic control, radio, heavier and
stronger rail, reduced curves and
grades. This expensive effort simply
led us into paying double time for
our crews as compared with 1922 at
triple the 1922 rates, Crews were
then getting paid for only 4% to
5% hours’ work. We even have to
carry firemen today on the freight
diesels, though, as the neutral mem-
bers of Arbitration Case No. 140
have justly said, “The change from
steam to diesel power left little or
nothing for the firemen to do.”
We’re spending more than $200 mil-
lion on unnecessary firemen’s jobs
each year.

LABOR: Now there’s a typical
management economy: Fire all the
firemen! The dictum you cite from
Case No. 140 had nothing to do
with the facts or decision in that
case. It was held that firemen do not
have the exclusive right to do en-
gine-work on diesels, but no one
may be assigned an operational posi-

tion on a diesel in lieu of a fireman.

“multitude of duties” firemen per-
~ form.

_ They are the men practical rail-
roaders rate as the most valuable
safety factors in the industry. The
fireman notes the wayside signals,
_ speed zones, track obstructions, hot-
boxes and other conditions which

may affect the safety or progress of

The opinion commented on _ the

{ iy Pe

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the train. He takes over operations
of the train if the engineer is in-
capacitated. He is railroading’s co-
pilot.

MANAGEMENT: The safety
argument didn’t impress the Royal
Canadian Commission on whose rec-
ommendation the job has_ been
abolished in Canada. Besides, no-
body’s suggesting all firemen be dis-
missed. Only those on freight and
switching diesel locomotives are in-
volved. There is no move to take
them off the passenger diesels.

LABOR: Keep losing passenger
business the way you have, and there
won’t be any passenger diesels.

MANAGEMENT: We can’t af-
ford the luxury of featherbedding
when we are faced with rate levels
depressed by government assistance
to other carriers. Although the rail-
roads are inherently the low-cost
carrier, they can’t develop this po-
tential because of needless, artifi-
cially high internal costs. Removing
the firemen from freight diesels would
not, even in the case of yard locomo-
tives where ground crews work side
by side with enginemen, result in
one-man operation, Freight trains
carry a head-end brakeman in diesel
cabs in addition to the fireman and
engineer. He would be available for
emergency and other functions now
performed by firemen.

LABOR: Why. management, con-
fronted with a safety record already
bad, wants to risk making it worse
by taking off the firemen beats us.
Last year nine carriers paid fines on
382 indictments for failure to re-
port accidents. We refer only to
cases actually detected by inade-
quate ICC staffs. It is a negligible
percentage, probably, of the true
number of accidents.

The Kellock Commission’s finding
in Canada against the firemen can-
not be taken seriously. It did not
have a single practical railroader in
its membership; three judges de-
cided the question. No_ practical
railroader agrees with the findings of
the commission, not even in Canada.

MANAGEMENT: The Kellock
Commission for nearly a year ex-
amined records of train-operating
procedures and studied conditions

‘in diesel cabs. It also conducted ex-

, a nee ~
‘ -

4 ya ' et 7 er Jie a
tensive hearings at which operating
men from all classificatioixs were in-
terviewed. Its findings were reaf-
firmed by a special conciliation board
last March in the Canadian National
Railways dispute over the fireman
issue.

There is in fact strong evidence
for not dividing the responsibility
for observing signals and right of
way. Several railroads on which ex-
tensive multiple-unit electric-train
operations are conducted without
firemen, recorded for a recent 5-year
period an accident ratio of .82 for
each million passenger-train miles
operated. The ratio on these same
railroads for all other passenger serv-
ice was 1.73. It is worth noting, too,
that many suburban electric pas-
senger trains are conducted without
firemen both in this country and
abroad with excellent and fully com-
parable safety records.

Everything the firemen do has
either disappeared with the coming
of the diesel, as in the case of the
production of power, or is duplicating
the jobs of others, as in the case of
lookout functions performed by the
engineman and the head-end brake-
man.

LABOR: Obviously there are no
fires to tend on a diesel locomotive,
with the exception of steam gener-
ators on certain locomotives. How-
ever, this does not mean diesels
operate automatically, what with
fires, explosions, faulty wiring and
mechanical failures. When a warn-
ing light in the cab goes on, indicat-
ing trouble in the engine room, it is
the fireman who investigates and
takes necessary action to correct the
trouble. The engineer cannot leave
the cab while the train is in motion.
In essence, the diesel locomotives
increase the value of locomotive fire-
men. They are also engineer trainees.
They acquire essential knowledge of
track curvature and grades, loco-
motive operations, air brakes, train
speed and switching techniques.

MANAGEMENT: We'll find
cheaper ways to take care of the
engineer-trainee problem. The rest is
a fine lot of fiction you’re talking,
and we’re no longer in position to
pay $200,000,000 a year for it.

LABOR: That’s right. Starting
this year, you'll be paying $200,000,-

i The IN A TION .

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000 plus 14 per cent, or $228,000,000.

veprer

MANAGEMENT: Doesn’t look
like we’re going to get much agree-
ment on any issues... .

LABOR: We'll agree on that....

IF THESE disputes are not resolved
at the national bargaining table,
the National Mediation Board, act-
ing under the Railway Labor Act,
must proffer arbitration, but this

may be rejected by either side. The
unions thereupon set a strike date,
and the board makes its report to
the President. He may appoint an
Emergency Board and instruct it to
study the disputes and make recom-
mendations. The strike date is sub-
ject to postponement up to 30 days
after the date the Emergency Board
makes its report. If there is then no
settlement, railroad management and

eee eae gee

labor are left to their resources, the
President is left to his, and the nor-
mal result is a strike.

The winter of 1959-60 may be a
hard one for the railroads, their 820,-
000-840,000 employees, and_ the
American people who will find out,
if there is a strike, just how impor-
tant the railroads are to the U.S.
economy. It could be a bed of nails,
no feathers, for everybody.

THE BARELY and the NAVAJO -- William Eastlake

Cuba, New Mexico
MAN IS UNHAPPY when his ex-
periences do not accord with his
values. He is very unhappy when his
values are no challenge. He is hap-
py doing the impossible and most
happy when his failures (as all art
is) are grand failures, maintaining
all of his arrogance, demonstrating
none of the wan humility and false
generosity that society demands of
success.

I put this down in order that I
might repeat it again at the end of
my dialogue between my white man
and my Navajo Indian.

My white man is a composite, a
composite of every white man who
wants to do good, and all white men
want to do good. If you call it evil,
you are being subjective. All white
men want to do good. Ask any In-
dian. Those of us who do not want
to do good have been frightened out
of it by some childhood experience
that has left us crippled and difficult
and probably a disgrace to our race,
and sick. Odd.

Because I live in Indian country,
the white man will feel me out first.
T am the link. I live in the valley and
the shadow. I am a suspect cow-
puncher dwelling in a Navajo camp.
The barfly who flew, the gentleman
who stole second base in cowboy
costume.

Very well, my good man, what do
you want to know about the In-
dians?

Well, tell me, Bill—. Do you mind
if I call you Bill?

No.

Tell me, Bill, could you introduce
me to an Indian?

WILLIAM EASTLAKE has been
writing for years about cowboys,
Indians and the Southwest. His lat-
est novel is The Bronce People (Har-
court, Brace).

mber 12, 1959

ae
a

A real live Indian? Here is one
right here.

Would he mind if I take his pic-
ture? I think it would be a good way
to break the ice.

It is actually a good way to get
your nose broken, but my Indian is
a tame Indian. Specifically, it is
Chee Felix Francis, called Rabbit
Stockings. I must pick a definite
Indian because they tend to be more
individual than we do. Indians com-
posite badly.

White man: I'll send you one of
these pictures when I get it devel-
oped.

Rabbit: Okay.

White man: \’m with Farmington
Pumps. Actually Banacal, an affiliate,
but no one ever heard of Banacal.
Bypass compressor valves for Nike
and Jupiter and Atlas rockets.
Doesn’t that make you curious? I’ve
always been curious about the In-
dians and I'd like to help them out a
little if I can. But every man is en-
titled to his privacy. But I would,
though, like to ask you one thing.

Rabbit: Okay.

White man: No, an Indian is en-
titled to his privacy. But I would
like to ask you one thing. But first
look at this. We always find these
things a good way to break the ice.
It’s a fountain pen. Actually a ball
point. Look, you see the dressed
woman on the side of the pen? Now,
when I turn the pen upside down
she is actually undressed. It’s a
fluid hydraulic principle. It demon-
strates our bypass valve. This pen
has little value in itself, actually a
joke, but we like to think it demon-
strates in a visual sell the value
built into our rocket product. Do
you dislike us, eh? I don’t think you
do. I tell you, I’ll send you one. I
don’t have an extra with me. Or
would you rather I didn’t?

Rabbit: Okay. %

White man: I’ve got a pretty good
one. I went into the Albuquerque
Hilton for a room and the desk
clerk asked if I had a reservation and
I said, Jesus no, what do you take
me for — an Indian? You can take
a joke. I think you like us okay.
All right, but do you know I’ve got
a suspicion. Do you mind if I tell it
to you? I guess I’m a queer bird,
but do you mind if I ask it of you?

Rabbit: Okay.

White man: Do you hate us?

Rabbit: Okay.

White man: By Jupiter, I thought
so! I always thought so. By Nike, I
thought so. I said to Herbert — ac-
tually it was my wife — I said, by
God there’s a challenge. There’s some-
thing worth failing at. Find out if
these Indians really hate us. The
superior way they act and everything,
like as though they were kind of
kings, like as though they were bet-
ter than the rest of us. With their
goddamn aloof dignity like they
hate us. As I told my wife, actually
it was Herbert I think — what dif-
ference does it make? I’ve succeeded.
I’m being successful, by Jupiter, in
finding out — thank you, Bill —
what I came to find out. Those In-
dians hate us!

AS I promised I will insert again
what I put at the beginning. A man
is unhappy when his experiences do
not accord with his values. He is

very unhappy when his values are cae

no challenge. He is happy when he
does the impossible and most happy
when his failures (as the bypass

valve is) are grand failures, main- ia

taining all of his arrogance, onal
strating none of the wan hu
and false generosity that society ¢
mands of success. Ask any raps
It has been my experience, living hes’
on the edge of their sen
that oe vu say, vam

, 7
at

zi
ty
al) Je

" Th. oi A

BOOKS and the ARTS. °™

A Visit with Pasternak

Ralph E. Matlaw

ONE DAY last June I went to speak
to Boris Pasternak. A twenty-minute
; train ride through an area of truck farms,
. small factories and grazing goats brings
one to Peredelkino, a village about ten
miles outside Moscow. It is distinguished

ps from other local stops by its pleasant
a scenery and, more important, by a writ-
ri ers’ colony located along one side of the
ay village and an adjacent row of four or

five large private houses populated by
Pasternak, Konstantin Fedin and other
i luminaries of Soviet literature.

; My visit was prompted by a search
ie for answers to two critical problems
stemming from my reading of Doctor
oe Zhivago. The first is that of symbols

and symbolic juxtaposition, for Doctor
i Zhivago is primarily shaped by images,
hi and images, particularly when they are
recurrent, have a way of turning into
' symbols and symbolic schemes. Among
the more obvious ones are those of light
and illumination, of the window, of the
elements (rain, snow, wind, etc.), of
h signposts, of trains and communication,
-. of Christ parallels (the flight into Egypt
at the beginning, the road to Calvary
at the end, and the heavy beam picked
up by Zhivago on the night of the Rey-
olution mark the main stages). Edmund
Wilson’s article in The Nation of April
i 25, 1959, was the first published analysis
of the book to illustrate that there is a
persistent pattern of meanings attached
to Pasternak’s images. The patterns
themselves are yet to be elaborated, but
I thought it important to learn to what
extent these images were consciously ex-
ploited and manipulated by the author,
for this would also imply answers to
other aspects of design and craftsman-
ship.
The second problem concerns “The
Poems of Yuri Zhivago.” Are they really
_ the creations of a fictional character,
helping to define him, his experiences,
views and aspirations; are they the dis-
tillate of the novel’s themes, established
by the inner logic of the book and in
turn establishing its ultimate meaning?
Or are they poems by Boris Pasternak?
In either case they will also suggest the
“delicate problems of precedence and

RALPH E. MATLAW tcaches Rus-
sian and Russian Literature at Prince-
ton University,

¢
meaning: were they written first, and
the book adapted to their demands? Or
did they grow out of the book? Or was
there perhaps a constant interchange and
adjustment of one to the other? Before
leaving the United States, I had written
to Pasternak, asking if he would consent
to see me. His reply, indicating why it
would be impossible for him to do so,
still has not reached me.

A series of minor irritations — a
missed train, a change in the schedule
requiring a délay at the station before
Peredelkino, a wrong turn in the road —
had the fortunate result that I turned
into Pasternak’s driveway just as he was
coming out of his house to sign for mail.
Pasternak explained to me that he
was not supposed to talk to foreigners,
but in the end kindly consented to an-
swer a few questions on his art. For the
better part of an hour we talked about
this and related matters. So much has
already been written about the setting
in which Pasternak lives and about his
personal charm and verve, that my own
impressions and aspects of the conver-
sation other than those reported here
would add little to the available store
of information. It should be noted, how-
ever, that while Pasternak very hos-
pitably chose to -speak English, he
switched to Russian several times, when
absolute clarity and precision of mean-
ing were necessary. I have not tried to
translate these portions into an idiom
approximating Pasternak’s English.

PASTERNAK began by saying that he
was glad the excitement about the novel
and the Nobel Prize had taken place,
not because it made his novel better
known, but because the way it had all
come about illustrated his own funda-
mental ideas and the conception of
reality which he considers the central
part of the novel. These he proceeded
to expound with great care, repeatedly
seeking to assure himself that I had
understood him correctly.

“In the nineteenth-century masters of
the novel, Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy, if
you take away the characters and char-
acterization, the imagery, description
and so on, you still have left causality,
the concept that an action has a con-
sequence. Flaubert’s style is the ulti-
mate, merciless verdict on thi

teénth-century causality. For me reality
lies not there, but in the multiplicity of
the universe, in the large number of
possibilities, in a kind of spirit of free-
dom, a coincidence of impulses and in-
spirations (not religious inspiration, just
inspiration vdokhnovenie). Even
modern science and mathematics, about
which I know little, or better, nothing,
is moving in that direction, away from
simple causality. Whatever happens, for
example loss or destruction in nature or
life, it is just one of many things that
happen. There is always an enormous
quantity of happenings. Nature is much
richer in coincidences than is our ima-
gination. If all these possibilities exist,
reality must be the result of choice, of
a choice deliberately made. Even in the
novel, the totality of the work, the total
conception, is important, not the details
or the irrationality of details. I have
frequently been asked about the coin-
cidences in the book, particularly by
young people of fifteen or sixteen, from
whom I get many letters. Of course I
made the coincidences on purpose, that
is life, just as I purposely did not fully
characterize the people in the book. For
I wanted to get away from the idea of
causality. The innovation of the book
lies precisely in this conception of real-
ity. It has nothing to do with Joyce.
There is such a book (knizhka) Finne-
gan, isn’t there?

“The article of Edmund Wilson is
very good, he is very smart, but what
he says about the symbolism of Mesh-
chanskaya and Serebryannaya streets
and the name Zhivago is just nonsense.
I am an enemy of this kind of symbol-
ism, That Lara is a foreigner just hap-
pened that way, it has no specific mean-
ing, and the remarks about her and
history are just not so. The name Zhiva-
go has no special significance, it is just
a name.”

I remarked that while some of Wil-
son’s interpretations (like all such sym-
bolic interpretations) were occasionally
fanciful, arbitrary, or even erroneous, I
thought his reading was in the main cor-
rect and for me meaningful despite
Pasternak’s objection. He replied that
of course everyone is free to write about
the book and interpret it as he sees fit,
and that that was good, but that he had
not intended these meanings.

I objected that in other instances he
seemed to use such effects; that windows
are mentioned perhaps sixty times in the
novel, and almost never me ely as a

a } "he .Na nan

De ral,

i anes

[arr es

,
f

_
4
Wwe

5
;

hor example, when

Blttive detail.
Zhivago looks out of the window in the

stationary train when he first meets
Strelnikov, he sees a human graveyard
and a graveyard for old locomotives,
while Strelnikov, at the end of the scene,
looking out of the same window, does
not see either. Was Pasternak aware of
this? “Certainly,” he answered, “there
are several such organizing centers or
principles in the book.” But he seemed
surprised and interested when I told
him that only once does Zhivago open
a window (in Moscow, to let out smoke),
that he turns his back on the window
when he begins to write poetry, that he
sees Lara in the Yuriatin library only
after the curtains have been drawn,
that Lara’s windows are whitewashed so
that one cannot look out on the street.
Pasternak maintained that none of these
images was more than a description, and
none was symbolic, but he was willing,
if not eager, to entertain the idea, and
asked if I took these incidents as in-
dicators of an internal life in Zhivago,
separate from the rest of the world. I
did not want to limit the meaning to
that single concept, as the images also
imply something about the clarity, qual-
ity, adequacy, or completeness of vision
and understanding, and elsewhere in the
novel the images are associated with
memory, personal loss and communica-
tion. Yet how else can the non-material,
the past, the results of thought and
emotion be apprehended save by turning
inward? I cited the last moment of
Zhivago’s life when he tries to open the
trolley window three times, pulling it up,
down and toward himself, but not out.
Pasternak became even more animated
and quickly interjected, “Ah, you noticed
that!” I concluded that while a great
deal of symbolism in the novel is con-
scious, there is also much that is equal-
ly valid if not conscious or intentional,
and that Pasternak’s objections to Wil-
son’s article may well be a negative ap-
plication of the so-called “intentional
fallacy,” the notion that a work of art
necessarily means what its creator in-

tended it to mean.

A SIMILAR kind of ambiguity emerged
while we discussed the poems in
the novel. Since Pasternak had unhes-
itatingly identified as his own the vari-
ous pronouncements of the character
Yuri Zhivago, I asked whether the poems
were not also his own. Pasternak re-
plied: “During the six or seven years
I was translating European classics,
Goethe, Shakespeare and others, I wrote
some poems from the point of view of a
character. Because to write from one’s
own person in that era one: would have

had to be either “nervously - ill or a

woman. Gradually these poems accumu-.,

lated. Others were written while the book
was in progress.” Pasternak expressed
interest in my comment that some of
the poems, particularly the personal,
sensual ones, were véry-similar in subject
and manner to. his eatlier collection The
Waves (Voalny") ; in rephrasing the
statement asa question for further dis-
cussion, he said ‘a ‘continuation, = put 1
sisted it was a.“return” and reminded
him that his. wartime “(and rather in-
ferior) collection, On. Early Trains, had
intervened. He had forgotten that col-
lection, but denied that he no longer
liked the volume. : Pasternak attributes
the fact that there are no poems on art,
and other cyclic peculiarities of the verse,
to Zhivago’s charaeter. | ‘The choice of
poems, presuimahly from: a larger num-
ber, is contrite: by: the: demands of the
novel.

A further question: evtived the first
three chapters of. the novel, wherein
there seemed to me to be a readily dis-
cernible pattern, a contrapuntal intro-
duction of characters and themes, of
images and procedures, To what extent
was this planned? Pasternak said that as
the novel was taking shape, that is, un-
til he was sure about its scope, about
the characters he liked and those he did
not, about the good and bad, he wrote
down certain things, impressions, scenes.
“As in Stendhal,” he said, “who wrote
novels and impressions and diaries all at
the same time.” And when the con-
ception jelled, this material was employed
at the beginning. Hence the effect is
different there than in the rest of the
novel. Pasternak went on to say that
for him the inchoate or the ugly can
never be matter for art, that art is
reserved for the beautiful. Only, perhaps,
the ugly can be used for contrast, as in

the figure of the lawyer Komarovsky.
Some of Pasternak’s remarks had
about them a sureness of statement
that indicated previous formulation and
probably previous use in correspondence
or conversation. Other remarks on pro-
cedure seemed ‘to me guarded, or at
least reticent. But the flashes of interest
in new questions and pleasure in the
discovery of certain details, and finally
the outright “And what do you think
of the novel?” point to the thought,
skill and love lavished on Doctor Zhiva-
go. At the same time, they strongly
suggest that its structural and symbolic
ramifications, while consistent, far ex-
ceed Pasternak’s conscious efforts.

SHORTLY before our talk had to end,
Pasternak asked me what my impres-
sions of Russia were so far. I replied that
I constantly found myself trying to turn
back the clock, to find out what streets
and buildings had been called before,
yet on the other hand wishing that, at
the opera and theatre, productions were
less antiquated and traditional. The
name “Museum of the Revolution”
meant nothing to me, but the fact that
it was housed in what used to be the
English Club at once established the
significance of the building. Pasternak
immediately came up with a loci classi-
ct, the use of the club in Griboyedovy’s
Woe from Wit and in Tolstoy’s War
and Peace. | mentioned that I had been
to Tolstoy’s Moscow house, and Paster-
nak of course remembered the house
well from former days. It was somehow
fitting that Tolstoy’s name should have
been brought up at the end of our talk,
for it took place outside Pasternak’s
house in a setting comparable to that of
the “Tree of Truth” under which Tolstoy
used to receive visitors and pilgrims in
Yasnaya Polyana.

Moontide Low
(A Wellfleet Calamity)

The blackfish moan like mothers bereft
Under the pulling, tourist moon tonight;

Along Lieutenant Island sand they lie.

Small blow-holes let their huge complaints;
And many tiny eyes, un¥idded, try to tear.

In the bellowing dark the tons of bloated woe

Accuse the air with flop after dying flop;
The Seleetmén will ferry bulldozers there
Because of The Season, but acres of flesh
~ Can clean out a thousand cottages, waste the July.

So a hut dred tons of life go rank |

oe odorless moon in the
rom wi ) nothing, no hurt

The lou 1 ste ch, nor a lands

y the lipping tide,
air of night,

ane, can ever erase |
€ conceal the large pain,

Cuances Puiuarice — ~<

1% oa

yh!

TOP LEADERSHIP U.S.A. By Floyd
Hunter. University of North Carolina
Press. 268 pp. $6.

Leon Bramson

THE social sciences have arrived at an
interesting crossroads in their history.
Nathan Glazer has recently pointed out
that empirical social research, a dis-
cipline which was developed to study
the masses, is now being turned on the
classes which sponsored it. The impulses
which animated and directed such works
as Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of
the People in London in the last two
é decades of the nineteenth century were
variously humanitarian, uplifting, re-
formist and even Christian. Some of the
early sociologists, like Booth and Fried-
rich Engels, had made fortunes in in-
dustry and may have suffered from bad
conscience. In any case, times have
changed. Presumably having absorbed

ee THE TWO FACES OF
“ RICHARD NIXON
. By Guy W. Finney

A story every American should read!

42 pages... 50¢ a copy
ERA BOOKS

Box 112, Toluca St., No. Hollywood, Calif.

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1959
$1600 Cash Awards plus 406% royalty. All types of
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The Nation

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i i a

Search for Power

the pessimistic message of European
political sociologists from Pareto and
Michels to Max Weber, American re-
searchers are turning their attention
from the masses to the elites. Nor has
the social philosophy behind this re-
search remained unchanged. While the
studies of Booth and others served as
documentation for Victorian moralizing
on the condition of factory workers,
contemporary sociological theory some-
times ends by justifying a_ particular
power system on the ground that it is
“functional.”

At the end of the nineteenth century,
a generation of theorists interested in
reform dominated the field in America.
They were succeeded, in the period be-
tween the wars, by a generation of fact-
gathering empiricists who wanted to
emancipate seciology from reformism
and make it “scientific.” Although sub-
sequent reflection by contemporary
sociologists has stressed a rapproche-
ment through the emphasis on empiri-
cal study of more limited problems from
a standpoint of “functionalism,” the re-
form impulse is still strong and crops up
repeatedly in the sociological literature.
Floyd Hunter, Professor of Social Work
at the University of North Carolina, has
a difficult time in the present book be-
cause, as he reminds us, he comes out of
the earlier tradition of reform in Amer-
ican sociology. This tradition, heavily
influenced by Populism, Progressivism
and the Social Gospel, is not easy to
shake off. Much of the interest of the
book is provided in his wrestling with
the devil of functionalism: “I have
determined to lay aside some of my
preconceived notions as to the evil of
power by saying to myself that power
is exercised as a vital function of the
social system, that it is necessary —
not a necessary evil, but just plain
necessary.”

READERS will wonder whether there
is a relation between Professor Hunter’s
book and C. Wright Mills’s The Power
Elite. Although I could find in it only
one modest reference to Professor Mills’s
book, Top Leadership U.S.A. is clearly
an attempt to test his leading hypothesis
by empirical research. The idea of the
existence of an interlocking elite of
powerful men in business, politics and
the military served Professor Mills as
an assumption; it was not the result of
empirical study. The author of Top
neal U.S.A, had a very sensible

e decided to study the men at the

i est levels of torn in the
Lae ¥ * ci

oo ‘.
a0 oe ee!

United States, and devised an ingenious —
scheme of questionnaires ahd ratings to
determine who they were. It may have
occurred to him that if there were a
conspiracy of powerful men running
the country, they would have been pow-
erful enough to thwart the inquiry of
a presumably powerless sociologist, and
instead of agreeing to be interviewed,
would have kicked him out of their
offices. It is instructive that this last
did not occur. Instead, Professor Hun-
ter learned enough about these men to
begin to understand their point of
view. Like many American intellectu-
als he is fascinated by power and the
powerful— and in the course of his
study he found that the men who were
universally designated (by other lead-
ers) as being the most influential were
in fact very able men. His first-hand
observations (he gives the impression
that a modern sociologist may find it
necessary to travel as much as a mod-
ern Secretary of State) as well as his
sociological functionalism told him that
they were doing an enormous job. To
accept this or dwell on it at length
would, however, constitute a betrayal;
and so Professor Hunter must wrestle
the devil to a fall, and spring back to
a position of suspicion, questioning
whether his leaders “represented a con-
spiracy of interests bent on doing the
nation out of its birthright.”

Generally speaking, I think Profes-
sor Hunter’s answer to the question of
the existence of an interlocking direc-
torate of American leadership is am-
biguous. He has satisfied himself on
one count: the one hundred men in the
“inner circle” of American leadership
know one another. That is not surpris-
ing. Beyond that, however, the results
of his analysis are not decisive. His
own point of view appears to be that
the case for an interlocking directorate
of decision-makers is plausible, and
that something of the kind may come
into play on certain issues, but that this
will not guarantee the successful manip-
ulation of policy. “During my _ trips
across the country, I had reached a
tentative conclusion that it would be
difficult, if not impossible, to find any
one issue or public policy in which a
majority of the top leaders I had been
interviewing would be __ interested.”
Speaking of corporation leadership,
Professor Hunter says: “Many of the

n'y
5

LEON BRAMSON has returned from °
a year spent in Holland as a Fulbright
Scholar and is now a Resident Tutor
and Teaching Fellow at Harvard. He is
pani nieting a history of American so-
ciology. ‘

7
The Nation”
Li IN ATIC N

a oe Pern ee 6

leaders seem actually to be rather
timid and cautious, and one of my so-
cial science colleagues who has been
studying top leadership in Boston
thinks of the men he has been seeing
as ‘gutless.”” The image of American
leadership suggested by such quotations
is closer to that presented in Galbraith’s
notion of “countervailing power” and
Riesman’s “veto groups” than to the
power elite of Mills. Nevertheless,
Mills has apparently influenced the au-
thor by providing a badly emulated
model for mood and style. There are
occasional lapses into sensationalism in
the manner of the exposé magazines, of
which the book’s title itself gives warn-

ing.
PROFESSOR HUNTER’S prose is opa-

que and spongy, salted with jargon (“ma-
terials that are the building-blocks of
the action patterns of national policy-
making groups”). This is unfortunate
because he often has something inter-
esting and important to convey. But
his chief problem is his inability to
reconcile the conflict between his re-
form background and the materials he
has explored. At bottom this may be
the failure to see the issue in terms of
political theory, a subject which the
author says he is willing to leave to
others. If he had troubled to examine
the political theories which are relevant
to his research, he would never have
penned the following confusing state-
ment:

To confess that another is socially
better or stronger than oneself vio-
lates the egalitarian values in Ameri-
can society. The way must be left
open for achievement and advance-
ment for the able, who may reluc-
tantly concede that at the moment
a few have gone ahead of them but
believe that, given time, they will
prove their equality with the best.
This is the American promise that
men may freely achieve, and I believe
that it must be fulfilled for the
masses of the people and not just
a few.

The author does not distinguish be-
tween egalitarianism and equality of
opportunity: the first points to the
ideal of a classless society made up of

Primer on Brecht

THE THEATRE OF BERTOLT
BRECHT. By John Willett. New Di-
rections. 272pp. $8.

Marc Blitzstein

BRECHT died in his native Germany
in August, 1956, at the age of fifty-eight.
Over a period of years his literary star
has risen steadily, until it is now of the
first power. He is possibly the sole figure
in post-World War II literature to be
welcomed and cherished on both sides
of the Iron Curtain, with Aufbaw Verlag
and Suhrkamp Verlag as his faithful
East and West German publishers. His
poetic and dramatic works are being
translated and performed everywhere;
there have even beenscuffles among poets,
playwrights, publishers and producers in
other countries and languages to get
there first. Methuen Editions in Eng-
land and New Directions in America
will issue all his plays in suitable Eng-
lish at the rate of two volumes a year.
It is said that no self-respecting young
intellectual on either shore of the Atlan-
tic would be caught dead without a
copy of some Brecht under his arm. I

pressive.

often attribute
says Allen Tate.

phrases whic

“The real thing! The range is im-
” That’s Conrad Aiken’s de-

scription of the poetry of H

“Here...is the unified sensibility so
d but seldom found,

“Bverywhere one finds lL aes
h delight and astonish,

says Oscar Williams.
63 new poems by

Hy Sobiloff

remember Archibald MacLeish telling
me in 1955 that his literary-composition
students at Harvard were not much
longer going to be satisfied with Rilke
or Yeats, that the next one would prob-
ably be Brecht. Auden claims to have
been influenced by Brecht’s poetry. The
“new” playwrights, JIonesco, Beckett,
Duerrenmatt have made use of his “epic
theatre” method, even when they ex-
coriated his Marxian philosophy. Piran-
dello, Thornton Wilder and, to an ex-
tent, Tennessee Williams can all be said
to have moved on parallel planes with
him in breaking up the conventional
drama of realistic illusion and insisting
on theatre-as-theatre as against theatre-
as-life. Brecht is clearly a major phen-
omenon of the literary century.

Some summary and study in English
of Brecht’s career have been needed.
Considerable preliminary spadework has
been done by Eric Bentley in his essays
and in the prefaces to his “Modern
Theatre Library” collection. There have
also been numerous articles and reviews:

by Becker, Gorelik, Nellhaus, Drew,

Heinzheimer (the last two in connection

y Sobiloff.

ines and

Here then, are

individuals of equal status, the second
to an equal chance in the climb toward
the upper rungs of a hierarchic social
ladder. To have faced this problem
would have meant a resolution of the
tension between the reform tradition
and functionalist sociology. But if this
had been resolved, Professor Hunter
might not have been able to offer us a
book as rich as Top Leadership U.S. A.

_ September 12, 1959

IN THE DEEPEST AQUARIUM

INTRODUCTION BY ALLEN TATE

$3.00, now at
your bookstore
THE DIAL PRESS

with Brecht’s famous collaboration with
Kurt Weill on various musical pieces)
and others. Now at last Methuen and
New Directions have issued John Wil-
lett’s The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht as
an Opening gun in their series. It is a
very good primer: thorough and com-
prehensive in informational detail, and
valuable as a start in terms of analysis
and interpretation. Willett subtitles his
book “A Study From Eight Aspects”;
and the advantages of his scheme far
outweigh the loss of a strictly chrono-
logical survey. (As a matter of fact,
chronology is well taken care of in the
opening pages, where, in place of a final
appendix, all Brecht’s works are ar-
ranged in temporal order, with concise
plot-synopses and dates and places of
publications and productions.) By go-
ing over Brecht’s creative years eight
times, with emphasis each time on a
special aspect (subject matter, language,
theatrical influences, theatrical practice,
and so on), Willett manages to gather
together and expose a surprising aggre-
gate of the whole artist and the whole
output.

BRECHT is poet, poet-dramatist, moral-
ist, humorist-humanist. His philosophy,
as well as his political outlook, moves
from a kind of Dada-anarchism in the
earlier works to a Marxian basic con-
viction in man’s ultimate triumph over
man’s social conditioning. His theories,
and the form that has grown out of
them, are his most spectacular contribu-
tion; he has called them “epic theatre.”
This concept is daringly anti-Aristotel-
lan: it rejects atmospheric or emotional

Ww. R. McGuire

HERE is no more graceful ornamental Evergreen tree than

the CANADIAN HEMLOCK.
backgrounds and windbreaks.

12 to 18 inches......50 for $18......100 for $ 30.
18 to 24 inches......50 for
2to 3 feet........25 for
3 to 4 feet........25 for 40......100 for 125.
4to 5 feet........25 for

audience-involyement, au-
dience-catharsis; it demands floodlit ex-
ploration, unsentimental demonstration,

persuasion,

quclience-cqtranaen tts final audience-
realization.
Set forth asa concept, this may

seem forbiddingly cold; but so intense is
the Brechtian energy, so Waried the in-
genuity, so deep thé insight and com-
passion, and so -umetring the sense of
“spass” or human ‘comedy, that in ac-
tual reading (and certainly in a: good
performance) the plays take on quali-
ties of an intellectual circus. There are
always placards, subtitling each scene;
there are always songs and incidental
music (used never for gluing or linking
scenes, but as new. statements); there is
a great deal of pantomime. (sometimes
acrobatic) in the stage directions; there
is, in short, a steady stream’ of different
media, propelling the thought and mean-
ing. Producing one of Brecht’s plays
demands an extraordinary versatility
and a special concentration. So far only
the Berliner Ensemble, which he found-
ed, and which still carries on brilliantly
at the Theater am Schiffbawerdamm,
has done them complete justice.

There is much too much in Brecht to
be swallowed in one gulp. Many books
will be written on the many sides of his
art. Meantime, the book by Willett has
done an inestimable service in giving
us a first total picture.

MARC BLITZSTEIN, playwright and
composer, is the .translator-adapter of
Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera,
now entering its fifth year on the New
York stage.

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Down to the Self

THE CAVE. By Robert Penn Warren.
Random House. 403 pp. $4.95.

Robert Hatch
ROBERT PENN WARREN’S | sixth

novel is a considerable work, richly char-
acterized, livened with completely ob-
served incident, strongly purposeful. The
goal of life, it says, is self-knowledge:
“Who am I?” Warren’s men and women
keep crying, and they are all — the
good and the bad, the strong and the
weak — sufficiently complex and devel-
oping personalities so that the answer
is never easy or obvious. The cave, deep
in the Tennessee limestone, where a man
lies trapped and dying throughout the
book, is a materialization of the center
of consciousness which the individual
must penetrate to find himself. Warren
uses this device elegantly — it never
hardens into a mechanical symbol, yet
the beckoning, frightening great hole in
the earth envelops the action and no
one in the book is Saved unless, actually
or by the extension of imagination, he
has ‘braved its deepest passage.

Warren’s Tennessee hill country, not
at all far from Nashville, is a contempo-
rary frontier that strangers to the area
will, I think, have to take’ on trust. Not
that it is excessively bizarre; rather, the
relationship between town and_ back
country, between the worlds of modern
commerce and ancient husbandry, is too
subtle a matter for outside judgment.
This justified: fusion of past and present
gives his book the removed and height-
ened stature of fable that is one of the
generic assets of contemporary Southern
writing.

BUT though I respect the power, fer-
vor and intelligence of The Cave, I can-
not pretend to be attracted by the book.
It is too possessive a novel — Warren
guards and guides it so closely that the
reader feels almost an intruder in a
private rite. The organization is_ bril-
liant—through flashbacks and musings,
simultaneous action and delayed ex-
planation, the story unfolds like a bril-
liant, intricate flower. Every character
is connected by precisely calculated
strands to the heart of this fictional or-
ganism; no event, no gesture, no word
is excessive and none is omitted. Prop-
erly — indeed inevitably — the deep
emotional contacts of the novel are vari.
ations on the love equation. In these
situations, Warren is the narrator of
event, recorder of interior monologue
and analyst of the drive beneath the
mind. He is so completely creative that
his reader is permitted no share of the

‘
i) nA pote |

The Nation

_—-—-

September 12, 1959

r Re

work — and it is not possible to care
about a character unless one has been
put to some trouble to measure it.

Not having had to grapple with them,
I cannot say whether or not the men
and women of The Cave behave in ways
appropriate to their nature. Toward
the end of the book, I felt that the
current of Warren’s energetic imagina-
tion was more and more sweeping these
people along to a pool of catharsis that
he had determined must lie ahead. Per-
haps, if it had been possible to shape
my insights according to my degree of
sensibility, I might acknowledge that
they found their own ways by their
own roads, but Warren is too anxiously
instructive for any such intimacy to
develop. And, though it may be true in
life that to know all is to forgive all,
in fiction to forgive all is to. turn all
gray. When a novelist enfolds all de-

grees of good and evil into one embrace
of compassionate understanding, he risks
pitching his book to a lofty amorality.

Despite the unmistakable humanity
of its people, despite the critical and
communicable nature of their joys and
sorrows, despite a noble progress from
the hot terrors of ignorance to the
peace of knowledge, a coldness . grips
the book. I cannot recall that Warren’s
earlier novels gave this effect; on the
contrary one plunged joyfully into the
events of Night Rider and All the King’s
Men. Perhaps it is that in The Cave
Warren shifts from the habits of men to
the findings of his own heart, and he is
solicitous that these be,clearly framed
and clearly understood. There would be
high motive in that, but the nature of
fiction is such that the reader cannot
take hold of a novel until the author
makes up his mind to let it go.

LETTER from TOKYO

Donald Richie

EVERY YEAR when the tourists come,
there is much talk about the inadequacy
of Tokyo’s hotels: there are not enough
of them and they are not large enough.
When this occurs, other hotel owners
point the finger of envious scorn at the
Imperial Hotel.

The envy ‘is natural enough. Built in
1922 and surviving both earthquakes
and wars, it is the Tokyo hotel— to
the capital of Japan what the Royal
Danielli is to Venice, Claridges to Lon-

Song of the Hesitations

The moon is setting in the west
the hour near four o’clock
Temperature’s down, wind is high
I’m walking toward the docks

Loose sheets of old newspapers whirl
above my head like gulls

are circling above the subway grates
are diving for the kill—

where I’m the fish in the empty street
that’s caught below the wind

One newsprint bird tears at my cheek
another swoops behind

and wraps its rattling wings about
my frozen face with love
I read a headline on one wing

VISIONS THAT LED TO DEATH

And I will sing of Death and Love
But still I am not drunk enough
to dream us into Spring

Pau. BLackBuRN

don, the Ritz to Paris. The scorn, how-
ever, has basis other than jealousy.

What Frank Lloyd Wright was think-
ing of when he made it is not known,
but as a hotel it has never been ac-
counted a complete success. An ex-man-
ager once remarked that it was born as
a “joint production” between a Mr.
Okura who ordered it “without know-
ing anything about a hotel” and Wright
“who had no experience in hotel busi-
ness.”

At least one scholar has said that the
inspiration was plainly the Cheops Pyra-
mid, referring not to its outside —
which is lion couchant — but to the in-
side with its endless corridors, its flights
of pumice-stone stairs, its cubicle-like
rooms, and the fact that almost no light
penetrates from outside. For decades
now there have been jokes about peo-
ple lost in the labyrinth for days, weeks,
months; messages found scrawled in
blood in the basement galleries; lifeless,
emaciated bodies propped against the
wall in the left wing, third floor.

In addition, since Wright made the
building for the Japanese, the rooms
are tiny, the stairways are shallow, and
the basement galleries (the “arcade”)
are so low-ceilinged that foreigners with
unbumped heads are the exception. In
the last two decades, however, the
Japanese have grown. Now they trip
on the stairs; they bump their heads.
Though, to be sure, very few Japanese
have ever been inside the Imperial, much
less stayed there. ‘

Then, like all buildings thirty-eight
years old and never kept up, it is falling
apart. There are cracks, the plumbing
is a problem and, worst of all, the bed
of mud upon which the hotel was built
(thus “floating” it through the 1923
earthquake) is drying up. Now, seen
from the outside, the building is sway-
backed; inside, it more and more re-
sembles a beached ocean liner.

The owners of the hotel, the Messrs.
Inumaru, father and son, are fully aware
of the state of things. Tetzu, the father,
has said: “I wish people who want to
keep it the way it is could see what
shape the inside is in . . . the public
rooms are fine, but the guest rooms... .”
On the other hand, “I never said any-
thing about demolishing the old build-
ing and I am not thinking of tearing it
down now or in the future.” ,

The reason for the statement is that
the destruction of the Imperial Hotel
has been in the air for some time. Ichiro
Inumaru, the son, was even quoted as
saying that it was to be pulled down,
being “old and uneconomical.” The ap-
parent division of opinion between
father and son soon blossomed into a
full controversy which is still going on.

Recently the big-circulation Yomiuri
Shukan ran a long feature about the
pros and cons of destruction. The cons
were handled by a professor of architec-
ture; the pros, oddly enough, by an
executive director of the hotel itself.

The architect made a somewhat un-
fortunate comparison to the Eternal
City: “The old ruins of Rome are found
in the heart of this modern city. They
are there like a road sign of past civil-
ization. . . .” He added, however, that

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139

5
,

“Gf the hotel people should be too con-
cerned with Wright’s work, they would
miss the bus for the 1964 Olympics.”

The executive director demolishes the
theory that doing away with the Im-
perial would destroy this “valley among
the buildings” (which is what the
Japanese call it) and “mar the beauty
of our capital,” but goes on to say that
he doesn’t really want it destroyed be-
cause foreigners like it so much, but if
it keeps on sinking it will have to go.
As with most Japanese pro-con discus-
sions, the two participants change sides
several times during the article.

Whether foreigners actually like the
Imperial as much as all that is a moot
point, though it does have its partisans.
Miss Ann Baxter, granddaughter of the
architect, has written: “It is a shame
to tear down a true monument to the
first exchange of creativity between
Japan and America, East and West.”
Mrs. Wright has written: “One of the
most disheartening things to Mr. Wright
in the last months of his life was the
fate of the Imperial Hotel.”

What also particularly disheartened
Frank Lloyd Wright was the Imperial
annex (now. called the New Imperial,
the former Imperial haying become the
Old) opened about a year ago and oc-
casioning a fierce interchange of letters
between the elder architect and those
responsible for the new building.

It is international-modern, a standard
Hilton-type hotel with Howard Johnson
trimmings. The arguments used against

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He Was a Sincere, ete.

He was a sincere but friendly Presby-
terian—and so

If he was talking to a Presbyterian,
He was for Presbyterianism.

If he was talking to a Lutheran,
He was for Protestantism.

If he was talking to a Catholic,
He was for Christianity.

If he was talking to a Jew,
He was for God.

If he was talking to a theosophist,
He was for religion.

If he was talking to an agnostic,
He was for scientific caution.

If he was talking to an atheist,
He was for mankind.

And if he was talking to a socialist,
Communist, labor leader, missiles
expert, or businessman,

He was for

PROGRESS.
KENNETH BuRKE

it have been in main that it is badly
constructed (cracks are already appear-
ing, but then they always do in Japan)
and that itis theultimate in kitsch. In-
deed ft is. The lobby alone, with its
Takarazuka-type hangings, its marble
veneer, its dumpy little beige seats, and
all the fake Japonatserie, is little short of
breath-taking.

But the Old Imperial is also the ulti-
mate in kitsch, with its pre-Aztec stone-
work, its “modernistic’ oak-veneer
seats, its leaded diamond-panes. It looks
as though it were designed by William
Morris and bound by hand in real calf
by Elbert Hubbard. The difference is
that when kitsch gets old enough it
stops being kitsch — it becomes period.
Too, the Old Imperial kitsch is absolute-
ly original, nothing like it on the face
of the earth; the New Imperial kitsch is
absolutely international, you can find
precisely the same thing in Miami or
Cannes.

THE furor about the stability of the
Old Imperial has brought on other criti-
cisms, two often heard being that the
service is bad and the staff insolent, and
that it is too expensive. Actually the
service is excellent and if the staff ap-
pears insolent (and it does), this is
merely by comparison with service in
other Japanese establishments. In Amer-
ica the attitude of the staff would be
considered absolutely affectionate.
Also, by foreign standards, it is not
expensive — there are many much, much
more expensive Japanese-style inns in
Japan. Its prices for twin-bed and bath
run from $12 which is almost exactly

what the Nikkatsu (an ‘elegant estab-
lishment occupying the upper four stor-
ies of an even more centrally located
building) costs. The other main down-
town hotels are slightly less expensive.
The Marunouchi, a very pleasant “Eng-
lish type” hotel costs $9 first class, and
the Dai-Ichi, perhaps the most centrally
located of all, costs from $6.50 to $8.
There are, of course, literally hundreds
of hotels costing less.

None of them, however, has the
éclat of the Imperial, and it is perhaps
this somewhat mystical. quality — which
has nothing whatever to do with ac-
commodations — which has accounted
for the popularity of the hotel, and its
fame. What most Americans know about
Japan may be readily encompassed by
reference to cherry blossoms, Fuji, gei-
sha, the’ Kamakura buddha and the
Imperial. During the Occupation, when
“Imperials” were falling left and right,
when the Tokyo Imperial University
had its name forcibly changed to Tokyo
University, when the Imperial Theater
was, for a brief season, called the Ave-
nue A Theater, the Imperial Hotel was
allowed its name unchallenged. Now
that there is talk of dismantling, the
foreigners have again joined the: fray.
Burton E. Martin, writing in The Eng-
lish Mainichi jokingly proposed found-
ing a SPOI (Society for the Preserva-
tion of the Old: Imperial) association,
and was promptly deluged with letters,
phone calls and telegrams. The prepon-
derance of opinion was that such a
Japanese monument should remain.

The Japanese, on the other hand, have
never ceased to regard it as a palace of
foreign culture. Though not one out of
a hundred thousand (a most conserva-
tive estimate) has ever been inside,
everyone knows about it, and approves.

Thus one hears foreign tourists say-
ing: “Oh, how Japanese, how quaint.”
But I was taking a group of amateur
sumo wrestlers from Yurakucho to
Hibiya where they were to have an ex-
hibition. There is a short cut through
the hotel, from the side basement en-
trance, up through the lobby and out
the front door, and since we were late
I took it. Instantly a hush fell on the
sumo. “Is it all right?” they kept ask-
ing, tiptoeing through the red-carpeted
corridors, stopping to stand politely
aside when foreigners appeared. Finally,
one, looking around at the wonders of
the lobby, said: “My, this is just like
going abroad.”

DONALD RICHIE, at present living
in Tokyo and teaching at Waseda Uni-
versity, is the film critic for The Japan
Times and co-author of The Japanese

Film (Tuttle),

Crossword Puzzle No. 833

By FRANK W. LEWIS

Prt].
es 5 & pe Be
Pols

—

—_

ACROSS:

1 The one with a hammer and another
tool in the middle? (6)

4 People who wear them in summer?
(8)

10, 16 down, 1 down, 5 down, 26, 25
down, 23 and 28 across Where did
the prophet have an appointment
with the boss pilot? (7, 3, 3, 5, 3, 2,
PeesenO. 2.) 55 3)

11 Gave the first part of 5 down. (7)

12 Browning called to this after boot
and saddle. (5)

13 The point of the left half, perhaps.
(3)

14 Something used by the archer that
is associated with a knife. (5)

15 There’s no point to Schumann-
Heink’s first name, according to the
fliers. (5)

17 Suggest M* or M®*. (8)

21 See 8 down

29 Melville’s was of the sort associated
with effort. (5)

80 Did Alice’s type of lesson? (7)

31 Lemon and chrome, for example,
affects the teeth. (7)

82 A real dodo of the old West. (8)

33 Something added in charge? Just.

the opposite, and goes on and on.
(6)
DOWN:

2 Where some stenogs put gum to de-
stroy the enemy? (7)

September 12, 1959
na 5

ee) ee Poy | a

ate “ae
re ii

peat Mee ee

ee wee
Ce ee

3 How to stand for what hecklers get

out of their victims. (5)

6 Unpleasant brace, in a way. (5)

7 When do we reach the benefactor

there? (7)

8 and 21 More rue implied—however,

more sage as well. (6, 3, 5)

9 Copper records? (8)

8 Left X and Beta, for example, in

pictures. (8)

19 Court that takes up most of the
forest. (3)

20 Cheeks about lines. (8)

22 a the case that hasn’t come up?
7)

24 Get a loan from 2 of 4, or 3 of 9?
(Pine for a long one.) (7)

27 Duck down! (5)

28 In time, people should become cor-
rect. (5)

29 One who might fix squares to sound
Presidential material. (5)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 832

ACROSS: 1 Cireumnavigable; 9 Incas;
10 Right half; 11 Niagara; 12 Theresa;
13 Yammers; 14 Lunatic; 16 Widower:
19 Samurai; 21 Lived in; 23 Manhole:
24 Oil colors; 25 Torte; 26 Speaking
trumpet. DOWN: 1 Chimney swallows;
2 Reclaimed; 3 Upstate; 4 Normans; 5
Vegetal; 6 Gittern; t Brake; 15 Turbo-
prop; 17. Wedlock; 18 Rangoon; 19
Samoset; 20 Manitou; 22 Valve.

SS"

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SEPTEMBER 19, 1959 . . 25c

BURLING,

PUBLIC LieRaRy

eg as, Catl

oceans

Atomic-Waste Case No. II

‘HOT’? DUMPING OFF BOSTON

Grace DesChamps

DETROIT DISCOVERS THE CONSUMER

Robert P. Weeks

Algeria at the Ls N. Mario Rossi

And What Will France Do? Alexander Werth

ary © ge Pees Wie eT?

LETTERS

Gelding the Hero

Dear Sirs: If the expansion of Nation
articles into full-length books becomes a
trend, I nominate Emile Capouya’s
“Apropos of Don Juan” [August 29
issue] as the next. The potentialities,
in scope and depth, of his key ideas in
this acute and evocative essay are limit-
less. Not only has the revolutionary
Don Juan been devaluated and gelded
to serye reactionary ends; so have
numerous other legendary figures. Christ,
Buddha, Robin Hood come readily to
mind. And in our own time and culture,
Shaw, Twain, Roosevelt, Darrow—the
process is continuous.

In Mexico, numerous scholars are now
seeking the same devaluation of another
popular hero, Pancho Villa. The man’s
dynamic part in the struggle against
a crushing feudalism is now being played
down in the official textbooks, with in-
creasing emphasis upon his banditry
and cruelty—with the rationalization
that these “impurities” reflect upon the
ideals of the Revolution. In effect, this
is a draining-off of a people’s drive for
fundamental change by the erosion of
a symbol. Thus in Mexico, too, the
soft-boiled eggheads are proving them-
selves the precious darlings of the
brothel, not only to the madam but to
the owners of the house.

Joun Bricur
Los Angeles, Calif.

The Montana Affair

|The following communications relate
to an editorial paragraph which ap-
peared in The Nation of August 15;
a commumcation from Mr. Robert O.
Bowen was carried in this column Sep-
tember 5.|

Dear Sirs: Your editorial “Belated
Smear” is misleading and inaccurate,
and casts aspersion on a _ very fine
writer, excellent teacher and close friend
of mine, Robert O. Bowen. Mr. Bowen
left Montana State University in Au-
gust, 1958, by the way, and is now
teaching at the University of Washing-
ton. I have corresponded with Mr.
Bowen since 1956, when he joined the
staff at Montana State, and I was
aware of the difficulties he encountered
during his two years there.

Mr. Bowen is a very honest and
forthright person. He dislikes hypocrisy,
doubie-dealing and the autocratic mis-
use of power, as do most of us, but un-
like most of us he does not hesitate to

eo) ae” Bal Poe oe ‘te ee

speak out against these human failings.
Mandarins have never been able to
tolerate the gadflies of truth, and Mr.
Bowen, because he was no sycophant and
did not conform to the gentlemen’s
agreement in such matters, was made
to suffer for his honesty. Fortunately,
as he is a nationally reputable author
and has behind him successful teaching
experience at such centers of creative
writing as Cornell University and the
State University of Iowa, Mr. Bowen
did not have to continue taking this
punishment.

Your recent editorial has done Robert
O. Bowen an injustice.

Pau. C. STEELE

Assistant Professor of

English Composition

The George Washington University

Washington, D.C.

Dear Sirs: 1 feel some injustice has been
done by your calling Robert O. Bowen,
the American novelist, “ambitious”
without defining your term and with-
out enlarging upon the entire case or
problem at Montana University.

I wonder if you’d first of all care to
define in what sense you use the word,
ambitious. Ambitious in the sense of
Caesar or, say, William Faulkner? I’ve
known Bowen as his student and as a
peer for quite a few years, and I would
say that although he is ambitious to
be a good writer and an effective teacher,
it ends there. On the other hand, I
would say Dr. Fiedler earns the tag
“ambitious” in the apparent Nation
sense. That is to say, he got his Ph.D.
in his twenties, worked his way up to
the head of English at Montana, and
began to publish widely in his thirties.
He once wrote an essay, “Come Back
to the Raft, Honey,” which was more
of an ambitious article than a scholarly
one; 1.e., it attracted attention to
Fiedler, rather than Twain.

So—both Bowen and Fiedler are am-
bitious—but since when, in America,
has ambition become a pejorative term?

If Fiedler is an ex-Commie, I imagine
Bowen has every right to say so. Pos-
sibly Bowen may have quoted Fiedler
out of context, but if this is so, I’d

\ imagine it was done only in the sense

of retaliation for a year or more of
undercover abuse at Montana Univer-
sity. There, so I understand, the pro-
Fiedler camp was often guilty of quot-
ing Bowen “out of context” in an effort
to undermine his writing classes.

L. W. Micuarison
Instructor in English
Colorado State University

Fort Collins, Colo. ca

Back Issues Available

Dear Sirs: | have in my possession a
nearly complete set of The Nation dat-
ing back to about 1927. I would be
willing to give the set to any non-profit
organization, or sell it for a token sum
to any private individual. I can be
reached at 62 Overbrook Place, Downs-
view, Ontario, Canada.

Morton Rapp

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
141 'e
ARTICLES

144 'e® Atomic-Waste Case No. II:

‘Hot’ Dumping off Boston
by GRACE DesCHAMPS

146 @ Algeria at the U.N.
by MARIO ROSSI

147 '@® What Will France Do?
by ALEXANDER WERTH

148 '@ Fear of the People
by PETER BACHRACH

151 'e@ Detroit Discovers the Consumer
by ROBERT P. WEEKS

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

154 @ Poetry as Confession
by M. L. ROSENTHAL

155 '@® Germany: A Miracle Unproved
by ROBERT G. L. WAITED

156 @ Matter of Taste
by KENNETH REXROTH

157 'e Architecture
by WALTER McQUADE

158 '@ The Old Order (poem)
by NICHOLAS BIWL

159 '‘@® Theatre in Mexico
by STANLEY MEISLER

160 'e Color Scheme (poem)
by HAROLD NORSE

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 160)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

= George G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, Hditor
Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Wditor
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, European
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Sept. 19, 1959. Vol. 189, No, &

The Nation published weekly (except for omis-
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A, by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
New York 14, N, Y. Second class postage paid
at New York, N. Y.

Subscription Price Domestic—One year $8, Two
years $14, Three Years $20. Additional postage
per year, Foreign and Canadian $1.

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quired for chi Se gaataee, wh ot be
made without ; Y ote address as we new.

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NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 8

Sere

NATION

EDITORIALS

We Can Be Stupid, Too

Laos is a country so primitive that some of its three
million inhabitants have no idea that they are Laotians,
while others, though aware of the fact, couldn’t care
less. Into this political and economic morass the United
States has, in the past five years, poured $225 million
in military and economic aid, and is now engaged in
pouring in more millions. If we are to judge by similar
performances elsewhere, most of this so-called aid has
been military. The results have been feeble, as the
present outcries of the Royal Laos Army attest. It is
opposed by a force of not more than 5,000 men, the
hard core of which consists of two disaffected Pathet
Laos battalions which, by the 1954 Geneva armistice
agreement, were to have been integrated into the regular
army. They were double-crossed, according to their
claim; according to the Royal Government, it was nec-
essary to disarm them. The 25,000-man Laos army
proved unequal to the task of subduing 1,500 rebellious
soldiers, even with American (and some French) help.
It may be that the more we help, the worse off the
Laos government is. Senator Mike Mansfield points out
that in 1953, American representation in Laos consisted
of two State Department officials; today it consists of
several hundred assorted soldiers and bureaucrats, in-
cluding the specially helpful operatives of the Central
Intelligence Agency. Yet things keep getting worse and
worse.

Under the circumstances, the action of the United
Nations in dispatching only a fact-finding mission is
prudent. The right-wingers in the State Department
have seized the occasion to jaunch the usual inflam-
matory broadcasts against Hanoi, Moscow and Peking,
and their colleagues in Congress have suggested that
the invitation to Khrushchev be cancelled. But nobody
is certain of what is happening, and whatever is hap-
pening seems to be the result of American and Laotian
political conspiracy as much as of the Communist pro-
pensity to upset the status quo wherever and whenever
possible. The British were caught flat-footed by the
whole affair and, although they automatically support
American action in the Security Council, still affirm

.
‘

4 Po 9

that they have no evidence that Laos is a victim of
external aggression. Even Joseph Alsop, calling for an
ultimatum to North Vietnam as the only way to “save”
Laos, seems to have compunctions. He remarks that
Laotion leaders, from the Crown Prince Regent down-
wards, warned that abandonment of the former neu-
tralist policy of Laos (which was the aim and meaning
of the Geneva Convention) would provoke Communist
“ageression.” He calls the action of the Laotian goy-
ernment in getting rid of the International Control
Commission (Canadian, Polish and Indian) a “most
provocative step.”

If Alsop is right, the untutored American may well
ask how, why, and by whose authority did we get into
this mess? Did the President know? Who in the State
Department planned it? What was the role of the
C.I.A.? Are we consciously trying to be as maladroit as
the Chinese Reds, or do these things just happen?

Is This Public Service?

Five days before the arrival here of Nikita Khrush-
chev, the Allen-Bradley Company of Milwaukee took
full-page newspaper ads to warn the public against the
blandishments of a man “reputed to be one of history’s
most brutal murderers and most vicious liars.” Main-
taining this tone, which recalls Communist rhetoric at
its most hysterical, the ad declares that to Mr. Khrush-
chev the slogan “‘Peace and Friendship’ means the
total enslavement of all nations, of all peoples, of all
things, under the God-denying Communist conspiracy.”
We are warned against making any “concessions, any
appeasements, any ‘deals’” lest by so doing we become
“his greatest captive nation.”

Well, this is a free country, and one of the unavoid-
able embarrassments of freedom is that our citizens can
publicly insult visiting dignitaries if they see fit. Mr.
Khrushchev does not strike us as a thin-skinned man,
and we have no doubt that he will survive being called
a murderer, enslaver and liar. But he may be puzzled
as to why the Allen-Bradley Company in particular is
willing to spend good money to attack him. A possible

esi.

POR a AR
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Pele ate

explanation is that Allen-Bradley manufactures “quality
motor controls and quality electronic components” and
that the trade press currently estimates that at least a
third of the output of the components branch of the
electronic industry is produced for the government
under defense contracts. Therefore, “Peace and Friend-
ship” is not a slogan that would appeal to Allen-
Bradley’s board of directors, nor are the directors likely
to approve of any international visits that might slow
the momentum of the cold war.

The ad says that it is “trying to sell . . . nothing
except the importance of recognizing and understanding
the horrible threat” etc. In effect, it is trying to sell
hate and fear because hate and fear stimulate the sale
of electronic components. The ad also calls Mr. Khrush-
chev hypocritical, and all reasonable men must operate
on the assumption that this must be so. Allen-Bradley,
however, has forfeited the right to employ that particu-
lar epithet.

Then and Now

Our public attitudes are like our children: we live
so close to them that it is almost impossible to see how
rapidly and strikingly they change. To judge the
difference that a few years can make, you need a point
of reference (like that snapshot of Ruthie in her first
party dress), and for public attitudes these mementos
are not so readily at hand.

A convenient and welcome gauge, therefore, are the
old feature movies that run on television; and a star-
tling example of quick mental mutation is exposed by
comparing the pre-1948 World War II films to be
found on the home screens in the late evening with
the new model now offered in the theatres. Watching
some of the more recent products—The Young Lions,
for example, or Fraulein, or The Enemy Below—you
might recall the Nazis as a bunch of great chaps who
played on the other team. But go back on TV a few
years—to Mortal Storm, Four Sons, Hitler's Children,
Action in the North Atlantic, Arch of Triwmph—and
you are reminded that the Nazis really were desperate
men who used obscene means in pursuit of a diseased
end.

As time passes, and the later films become available,
_ the TV Nazi will also become indistinguishable from
an opposing fullback; then we shall have to go to the
movie archives to find what people who could remember
v! thought of Hitler’s crusaders. This is not said to fix
_the blame on the movie industry; pictures are not
history, they are mirrors reflecting our own views of
_ the moment on truth, virtue and duty. In fifteen years,
the German menace has become the German responsi-
bility. By one of the greatest ironies in history, we have
come to feel that the welfare of Germany is our first
concern in world affairs. Solidarity is surely a more

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useful impulse than hate, though it is
with whom you are being solid. And for the sake of
our own sanity, and the good opinion of our children,
we should make some attempt to remember that the
Nazis were not just fellows who played hard on the
losing side. The films of Belsen and Buchenwald also
exist.

ae, S

Can’t Marry Your Sister, Can’t Vote Either

A gigantic charade of hyprocrisy and dirty politics
is being spelled out in Washington on the civil-rights
issue. Senator Wayne Morse, an old hand at ferreting
out skulduggery, has almost single-handedly brought it
into the open, for which he can expect only his usual
portion of abuse. A coalition of Southern Democrats
and Republicans rammed the Landrum-Griffin anti-
labor bill through the House and, in its essentials,
through the Senate. The quid pro quo is that no eivil-
rights bill worthy of the name will reach the floor of
either the House or the Senate. Lyndon Johnson, car-
rying water on both shoulders, may avow that some
form of civil-rights legislation will be passed by the
Senate, but the Administration’s Congressional leaders
will see to it that his promise, if kept, will be wholly
innocuous. The Federal Government will not, as Senator
Strom Thurmond puts it, “further rape the rights of
the states and the people,” i.e., will do nothing to en-
able Negroes to vote in the deep South. The neat way
of handling this situation would have been to adjourn
Congress before the devil incarnate, Nikita Khrushchev,
was due in Washington. But Morse, the old spoilsport,
refused to go along.

A sidelight on this issue is the sudden shift of popular
Southern feeling from the realm of sex to the prosaic
realities of political and economic exploitation. The
usual excuse for not mixing the races in the schools is
that a wave of miscegenation would sweep over the
South. Abruptly, however, the anguish has left these
overloaded parental bosoms, and fear of Negro voters
has rushed into the vacuum thus created. The Negro
must have his head bashed in whether he whistles at a
white girl or applies for registration as a voter. And
many of the legislators will go right along with the
underlying thesis that the Negro must be kept in his
place as a second-class, unfranchised citizen.

The Public Be Damned

Commodore Vanderbilt at least was forthright. The
Federal Government nowadays acts on the principle he
so eloquently enunciated, but it does so in secret, and
with the mealy-mouthed pretense that it is all done for
the public’s good. In this concept, the public is so child-
like that ignorance is good for it. The Government
knows best, the Government will decide.

_ Nowhere is this modern version of the insolence of —

1s Won » ae Ba
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well to consider

Tr RS TEER ST

office more evident than in the field of radioactivity.
Grace’ DesChamps’ article on page 144 of this issue
shows how citizens literally don’t know what is going
on around them in matters vitally affecting their health
and welfare. Who could have guessed that for thirteen
years the Atomic Energy Commission has been licensing
the dumping of hot radioactive wastes in fifty fathoms
of water twelve miles out of Boston harbor, in con-
tainers with an estimated life of ten years? Or that some
of the wastes of the Hiroshima bomb were interred in
this particular disposal dump, so near the place where
the Pilgrim Fathers landed? As far as the AEC is con-
cerned, the descendants of the Pilgrims would hardly
know more of radioactivity than their forefathers.

It is the same all over the country; as the AEC goes,
so go the other bureaucracies. In Portland, Oregon, Dr.
Alan M. MacEwan, a research biologist, is suing the
state board of health for the right to examine data
compiled for the Federal Government on local radio-
activity. In Washington, D.C., Edward Gamarekian, the
vigilant science reporter of the Washington Post, dis-
covered that a “security lid” has been clamped down on
the Army’s program of preserving foods with atomic
radiation. It seems that a small amount of residual radi-
ation was induced in the foodstuffs thus treated,
that it was found desirable to discontinue feeding human
volunteers under the program for the present. The
effect itself is nothing to get excited about; what is of-
fensive is the stand attributed to the Army’s director
of research and development — that the public is not
entitled to information in this field.

An alert press corps could be a force in inducing public
servants to take the public into their confidence. But
why should public servants need assistance? And who
gave them the authority to revise, surreptitiously, the
theories of democracy on which this Republic was
founded? If they have a better theory, let them ex-
pound it, but since they have so little confidence in their
fellow citizens, we can hardly expect them to have that
much confidence in themselves.

The Dilemma

Congressman Charles O. Porter suggests that a mission
should be sent to China, “made up of members of Con-
gress, journalists, businessmen and experts, to look into
the conditions and potential of trade with the United
States.” A first reaction to the proposal is to rule it out
of order on the ground that recognition should precede
the sending of such a mission and that the State Depart-
ment cannot abnegate the responsibility of deciding
whether to recognize or not recognize a particular regime.
But at this point the dilemma begins to take shape —
a dilemma which the State Department itself has largely
brought about. Given the peculiar facts of Chinese-
American relations, how can the department acquire the

September 19, 1959

facts and background on which a sensible recommenda-
tion might be based? For over a decade we have in-
sulated ourselves from the Chinese with a thoroughness
which a designer of high-tension electrical equipment
might envy. No reports directly from China have reached
the State Department from its representatives, nor has
the department been able to benefit from the informed
conclusions and observations of American newsmen on
the ground. Even such distinguished unofficial travelers
and observers as William O. Douglas and Averell Har-
riman have been denied permission to visit the forbid-
den country. The personnel of the department has been
purged of all who might give due weight to the facts,
were they available

Mr. Porter’s suggestion is admittedly irregular, but
special cases call for special remedies. If the State De-
partment is so myopic that it cannot “see” China, then
by all means let us use the device of a “mission” to re-

discover this land of 650,000,000 people.

Cheers for an Unbalanced Budget
UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s fund, is

suffering, appropriately enough, from growing pains. Re-
ports presented recently to the organization’s Executive
Board show that, for the first time in its admirable
history, UNICEF will be bursting out of its budget in
1960 unless its supporters come to the rescue.

UNICEF is proud to say that its financial problem
is of its own making. Established originally to take
over from UNRRA the job of providing the children
of war-torn Europe with supplementary foods — large-
ly milk — it has since joined with other U.N.-affiliated
agencies to educate mothers to raise better babies. As
its reputation for good works spreads, more mouths were
added to UNICEF’s milk route in the chronically
hungry areas of the world; and requests for help grew,
not lessened, .as living standards rose slowly in under-
developed countries.

So this year, the organization’s Executive Board heard
that requests for UNICEF assistance are at an all-time
high. Yet receipts this year — estimated at $22,500,000
— are a half-million under last year. This is because
until now the United States was prepared to match
all other contributions on a 50-50 basis, whereas this
year the matching basis is United States 52.5 per cent,
all other countries 47.5 per cent. What is needed is for
other countries to increase their contributions by 2.5
per cent. So far, only fifteen countries have done so.

It is not often that unbalanced budgets can be looked
upon with favor. UNICEF is an exception; its debts are
a direct measure of its increasing usefulness. And they
are debts which the conscience of the world, sooner or
later, will make certain are paid. You can hasten the
day by buying UNICEF greeting cards for use this
Christmas.

143

BE)

{

The problem of atomic-waste dis-
posal grows apace. In our August I
issue, we presented the situation in

“3 New Britain, Conn. (“Test Case on
*. .

a" Atomic Waste,’ by Gerald Mc-
oS Court); now the scene shifts to

Boston and Cape Cod and is de-
scribed by a Cape reporter for the
Boston Globe. In a forthcoming 1is-
sue, screntist Philip Siekevitz will
tell something of the public’s grow-

fe ing demand for information on the
e general subject of radiation.

a For editorial comment, turn to
rs Page 143 of this isswe. — Eprrors.
iw
\ Truro, Mass.
Ce FOR THIRTEEN years, the Federal
Ry Government was permitting the
ie burial of atomic wastes — much of
it “hot” — in 250 feet of water
er barely twelve miles off Boston’s
; shore and thirty miles northwest of
a Cape Cod’s tip.

a The dump site is in the heart of

ea the Atlantic sea lanes leading into
a Boston harbor — and a “near neigh-
ae bor” of the 2,000,000 people who live
in the city’s metropolitan area.

Included among the dumped radio-
active materials are isotopes yielded
by the development of the first A-
bomb — the bomb that exploded
over Hiroshima. The first of the
metal drums containing the isotopes
was dropped over the side of a ves-
sel in 1946. The skipper, glad to be
shut of his grisly cargo, turned his
ship about; but for twelve more
years — until a few months ago, in
fact — ships returned with clock-
like regularity to the site, dumping
cargoes whose potential hazard can
only be guessed at.

Until recently, neither the people
of Boston nor of Cape Cod knew
\ ny Fine, officially, of this. Even
_ when, in July, newspapers printed
the story of an Atomic Energy Com-
mission “proposal” to establish an
_ “atomic-waste disposal area” in off-
_ shore waters, the existence of the
- thirteen-year-old inshore dump site

known, too, was the fact that the
_ AEC had already established two

was still generally unknown. Un- |

ATOMIC.W ASTE CASE NO. Il

‘HOT’ DUMPING OFF BOSTON ee by Grace Delhi

Ocean

atomic dumps in offshore waters in
the same general area where it was
now proposing to locate a third.

All that Cape Codders knew was
that the AEC was seeking to license
the Navy’s Military Sea Transporta-
tion Service to dump radioactive
wastes some 200-odd miles due east
of the tip of the Cape.

But even this limited knowledge
proved disturbing—to the Cape Cod-
ders, if not to Boston. “Hot waste are
dirty words,” said Barnstable County
Commissioner Joseph Sorenti. “No
area used by so great a number of
people should be an atomic dumping
ground.” Captain Manuel Phillips of
the tuna-seiner Silver Mink, out of
Provincetown, was perplexed. “The
area from the Cape tip to Glouces-
ter is used by all our boats,” he said.
“Boats from Provincetown, the Cape
Cod Canal and Plymouth use the
southern area; the Gloucester boats,
the northern area.”

Two years ago, there had been
rumors on the Cape that atomic
dumping was going on somewhere
offshore. Norman Cook, executive
secretary of the Cape Cod Chamber
of Commerce, had to write twice be-
fore he got an answer from the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers on the sub-
ject. But when the answer did come,
it was reassuring. The Army en-
gineers said that waste disposal op-
erations were being carried out in
such a manner as to pose no health
hazard of “any significance.” If the
Army said everything was all right,
it must be so. No one on Cape Cod
knew anything about atomic dump-
ing, anyway; the Cape settled into
uneasy quiet.

‘THEN ON AUGUST 1, some Cape

om)

: a = “ r eos “
led Bote, iit: ee Ss Le i ‘—_

Codders took a look at the record.
They turned up the dumping, in in-
shore waters, of the radioactive iso-
topes from the development of the

: - 5) a eae

Hiroshima bomb. They confirmed
the dumping with George C. Perry,
president of Crossroads Marine Dis-
posal Corporation of Boston, whose
firm carried out the operation. They
verified the dump site with AEC and
the Army Corps of Engineers. They
learned that unknown tons of hot
waste, of unknown radioactive in-
tensity, also lay “in about 300 feet
of water” in the inshore dump. They
learned that AEC, only a few weeks
before, had shifted this dump site to
an offshore location, in 1,000 fathoms,
220 miles out. But the inshore dump,
in waters of 300 feet or less, had been
operated under license since 1946.

The investigators further learned
that a subcommittee of the Na-
tional Committee on Radiation Pro-
tection had specifically recommend-
ed, back in 1954, that radioactive
waste disposal in ocean waters be
carried out in depths of “at least
1,000 fathoms” — 6,000 feet.

The investigators turned up still
another dumping license, this one is-
sued to a second Greater Boston
firm: New England Tank Cleaning
Company, of Cambridge. The New
England Tank Cleaning Company
could store waste material with
radioactivity up to 1,000 curies—a
record storage level at the time the
license was issued, ten months pre-
viously. They discovered that AEC
had already established an offshore
dump site for the firm. That made
two offshore dump sites already au-
thorized by AEC.

All this had happened without
the knowledge or consent of Cape
Codders dependent for their exist-
ence upon the sea. Those Cape Cod
officials to whom some of the infor-
mation was communicated, were
numb with disbelief.

Perhaps no more patriotic Ameri-
can can be found than the native
Cape Oodder. He has -gove rned his

‘ Lhe Naric

Nation
ga ms

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&

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as Pe

_ September 19, 1959

towns since colonial days with town
warrants and yeasty town meetings
which are still the purest form of
American democracy. He was a di-
rect inheritor of the Mayflower Com-
pact, called the Magna Charta of
American democracy, drawn up in
the cabin of the Mayflower in Pro-
vincetown harbor in 1620. The
Cape Codders lived solely from the
sea—from the fish of its waters and
from the throngs of visitors who
bask on the Cape’s beaches. Four
bills have already been filed in Con-
gress to establish the Cape Cod Na-
tional Seashore.

Now come the hot-waste dumpers!

THE BOSTON Globe, which knew
the story, withheld it out of con-
sideration for Cape Cod. With the
vacation season at full tide, any ref-
erence to radioactive dumping or
“permissible levels of radiation”
could have panicked thousands. But
John C. Snow, chairman of the
Provincetown Selectmen, sent a tele-
gram to Senator John F. Kennedy,
whose home is on Cape Cod, fifty
miles from Provincetown. Kennedy
promised an investigation. Tensions
eased.

Then came a rumble from the ma-
chinery of the AEC. A newspaper
learned of AEC plans to go ahead,
on August 25, with issuance of a
license for a third dumping opera-
tion “in the absence of request for
a formal hearing.” On August 20, a
reporter pointed out the deadline to
Richard Adams, acting president of
the Barnstable County Selectmen’s
Association.

“I didn’t know anything about it.
Where did you find out?” he asked.
“In a newspaper,” he was told.

Adams wrote letters to Congress-
man Hastings Keith and Senators
Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall,
asking postponement of the license,
and a hearing. But Cape Codders
who knew some of the story, were
fearful the letters might be too late.
Thirty signers of a telegram to the
AEC asked for a postponement and
a hearing.

Meanwhile, a Globe reporter talk-
ed with Perry of the Crossroads Ma-
rine Disposal Corporation. He had
been first licensed, “by the Govern-
ment,” in 1946. It was true, he had
been operating under AEC license

since 1952. His firm did the final
packaging for disposal. He was re-
ceiving the hot waste “twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week,
fifty-two weeks a year.”

“We're getting it from all over
the United States,” Perry said with
professional enthusiasm. “By plane,
train, trucking concerns and our own
trucks. We don’t get all of it—the
Navy’s dumping an awful lot.”

Perry’s frankness held to the end:
“Let’s face it: I’ve got a nice little
business. ’'m making some money.”

WORRIED Cape Codders set up the
Lower Cape Cod Committee on
Radioactive Waste Disposal. The
Globe, on August 31, printed the
story, emanating from the commit-
tee, of the dumping of wastes from
development of the Hiroshima bomb
that had been going on for nearly
thirteen years outside Boston’s har-
bor.

Meanwhile on August 25, General
Manager A. R. Luedecke of the AEC
wrote Senator Kennedy a letter (for-
warded to Selectman John C. Snow
of Provincetown) offering reassur-
ance that in the handling and dis-
posal of radioactive wastes, “the pro-
tection of public health and safety
is a primary consideration.” Lue-
decke pointed to the recently pub-
lished oceanographic study made by
the National Academy of Sciences’
Research Council, at the behest of
the AEC, the Office of Naval Re-
search and the Commercial Bureau
of Fisheries. The study, Luedecke
said, was for the purpose of examin-
ing “the feasibility, primarily from
the point of view of safety, of dis-
posing of low-level packaged waste
closer to shore than the 1,000-fathom
sites used by the AEC.”

“Tt should be noted,” Luedecke
emphasized, “that all such packaged
waste disposed of in the Atlantic,
have been [italics added] and are
now, being disposed of off the con-
tinental shelf, in water 1,000 fathoms
or deeper.”

The words “have been” gave Cape
Codders pause for thought. What
about that Boston dump site, in fifty
fathoms of water, with thirteen years’
accumulation of radioactive wastes?

“The AEC,” Luedecke continued,
“has no intention of designating any
of the inshore sites without first car-

rying out detailed field studies as
recommended by the NAS-NRC
group. Further, the commission has
not made a decision to use or ap-
prove the use of these sites, even if
the results of studies and investiga-
tions are favorable from a_ safety
standpoint. This is a question for
future consideration in the light of
all pertinent facts.”

But the metal drums of hot waste,
if any of them still resisted cor-
rosion (they have an estimated life
of ten years) continued to rock in
the inshore dump site. What criteria
had determined the feasibility of
the dump which held them, Luedecke
did not say. Nor did he touch on
the matter of the two offshore
dumps, both of them authorized by
AEC during the previous year.

Luedecke came to the subject of
public hearings: “Before any areas
would be officially designated, pub-
lic hearings would be held so that
all parties concerned would be heard
on the matter.” .

But how, ask Cape Codders, can
you ask for a hearing when you don’t
know that a license is being grant-
ed? As the Lower Cape Committee
on Radioactive Waste Disposal
points out, “AEC puts its license no-
tices in the Federal Register printed
in Washington, D.C. Few, except
high-level government officials, ever
heard of the Federal Register—to say
nothing of reading it. It is not a
free government publication, and the
average citizen without special in-
terests would have little reason to
subscribe to it. If some local select-
man miraculously got his hands on
a copy the day it was printed, he
would still have only fifteen days in
which to alert his community and
summon the scientific and legal as-
sistance necessary to protect its in-
terests.”

As for the hearing, scheduled for
September 23 at the State House, in
Boston, it is “closed,” in the opinion
of selectmen, to all except officials.
Non-official local taxpayers, who
might have relevant information to
offer, are excluded.

As of this writing, no Cape Cod
selectman knows the latitude and
longitude of the site for which the
third AEC license is being issued.
Nor has he received official infor-
mation concerning the port of de-

145

BE ea TT i i rere ae
/ + Toe =

parture of the disposing vessel. If
the port, as has been rumored, is in
New Jersey, Massachusetts obvious-
ly would have no jurisdiction over it.

But on this point the Lower Cape
Committee has something to say:
“If atomic dumping, with its grave
implications to marine life and hu-
man well-being, can be initiated and
carried out without the knowledge or
consent of areas which
can receive contamination, we be-
lieve this is a matter for the U.S
courts.

“Even the estimated hazards are
of great potential. Wholesale dump-
ing has been going on for years with
only inadequate records to guide
current scientific investigators. Even
the National Academy of Sciences’
report admits to some doubt as to
whether presently used containers

citizens of

\ ae . a -

remain intact after disposal to the
sea bottom.

“AKC reported to the Joint Com-
mittee on Atomic Energy that its
licensing regulations call for
mum depths of 1,000 fathoms.’ Only
in’ August, 1959, did it amend the
license of Crossroads Marine Dis-
posal Corporation to dump at this
depth.”

ees
Mine

TODAY —confused, uninformed,
with little time to get scientific help
or the proper legal assistance — Cape
Cod is preparing to enter the lists
for the future welfare of its ocean
waters and its inhabitants. At stake
is its economic existence. Inherent
respect for governmental authority
adds to the confusion of local offi-
cials. If concealment and equivoca-
tion are techniques employed by a

7 =: ees ee =?
government agency, "eae vith
sweeping powers over. human wie
fare, native Cape Cod _ psychology
has no counter weapon for defense.

The license hearing at Boston’s
State House will be before an AEC
examiner. Scientists associated in
various ways with the effort of the
AEC will offer testimony. The AEC
will have complete jurisdiction. Ex-
ceptions to AEC findings must _be
filed, not with the courts, but with
the AEC itself. °

For the first time in the history
of Cape Cod—a stronghold of con-
servative political thinking and a
birthplace of American democratic
procedures—Cape Codders will weigh
their venerable heritage against the
power of a government agency from
whose rulings it would appear there
is no appeal.

ALGERIA AT THE il, N. ee by Mario Rossi

United Nations
THE DECISION to raise the issue
of France’s projected atomic explo-
sion in the Sahara Desert [see “Poi-
soning the Sahara,” by Ira V. Morris,
The Nation, Sept. 5] before the Gen-
eral Assembly is expected to add con-
siderable heat to the debate on Al-
geria. The two issues will be discussed
separately; but, inevitably, one will
overlap the other. The human drama
of Africans exposed to radioactive
fallout will place the Algerian prob-
lem in a more emotional context and
perhaps improve chances for passage
of a resolution recognizing the right
of Algerian independence.

Last year a similar resolution was
lost by one vote, with the United
States, refusing to side with France,
abstaining. At this year’s session, the
resolution might fare differently:
Cuba, formerly a staunch supporter
of France, will vote with the Afro-
Asians; countries which last year ab-
stained may support the group
“Se da is committed to do so and

énezuela, Guatemala, Costa Rica
and Mexico may follow suit); Can-

MARIO ROSSI reports on North

African affairs at the U.N. for The
Christian Science Monitor.

ada, Brazil, Nicaragua and Para-
guay, which’ last year favored
France, may now abstain.

This is how the situation appears
on the eve of the fourteenth session
of the General Assembly. Attitudes
might change of course if the French
offered concrete proposals holding
out any hope for putting an end to
the war. A shift favorable to France,
however, is not eased by the pros-
pect of a Saharan nuclear blast.

Among the colored peoples, the
bomb is something more than a fear-
some instrument of terror for the
whole of humanity; it represents the
white man’s instrument of terror. It
has been used but once in war, by
whites against a yellow race. An
atomic explosion in the Sahara could
not but intensify the intrusion of
racial feelings into atomic matters.
African reaction, since the projected
blast was announced, appears to con-
firm this. The initiative in taking
the issue before the United Nations
was Morocco’s. The governments of
Sudan, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria
have protested to Paris. “Vigorous
and profound indignation” was
voiced by the nine independent Afri-
can states meeting in special session

in Monrovia, Liberia, early in Au-

. : 7
9 hit

gust. African territories not yet free,
even within the French community,
have joined in the protest.

Several Western observers are wor-
ried about this trend. They fear that
years of efforts to erect a bridge be-
tween the “have” and the “have not”
countries, between the industrial and
the underdeveloped areas, to dissolve
racial tensions in a community of
man, will have been greatly compro-
mised by the bomb. This is not their
only fear, however.

When President Eisenhower launch-
ed his “Atoms for Peace” program
before the United Nations in 1953,
he hoped that nuclear energy would
cease being identified by the smaller
countries with terror and destruction
and come to be considered a poten-
tial source of progress—especially for
underdeveloped countries. Only then
could the awful problem of control-
ling nuclear power for war be faced
constructively and objectively. To-
day a nuclear agreement between the
United States, the Soviet Union and
Great Britain appears to be within
reach of realization. But the Soviet
Union has hinted that it might re-
sume testing if the Sahara explosion
is carried out, The present task, ob-
servers say, is to work out by patient

SPE x
thé INATION

diplomacy the conditions that will
make possible atomic disarmament;
increasing the number of nuclear
powers, they say, will make the task
insuperable. It is worth recalling that
twenty-three nations already have
the scientific and technical capability
to construct nuclear weapons. Linus
Pauling, American chemist and
Nobel Laureate, is quoted in The
Christian Science Monitor as saying
that “the possibility of outbreak of
a wat would be about fifty times
greater with twenty-three nuclear
powers than it is with only three.”

The danger that more and more
nations will join the “atomic club”
has not escaped the United Nations.
An Trish resolution still pending be-
fore the U.N. [see “Bomb Peril:
Message from a Small Power,” by
Frank Aiken, The Nation, Nov. 29,
1958] aims to freeze the club at its
present membership in the hope of
facilitating a control system that will
make it possible to outlaw the bomb
within the framework of a more gen-
eral disarmament agreement.

NORTH AFRICA’S reasons for
bringing the bomb issue before the
U.N. were not exclusively humani-
tarian. It represents a means of con-
testing France’s sovereignty over a
territory rich in oil, which is a part
of Algeria. The Algerian Nationalists
have said that they will not recognize
the validity of contracts negotiated
between France and oil companies.
The problem involved is no small
one, considering that the future of
the Sahara may become the main
issue in Africa and may affect deep-
ly the relations between that con-
tinent and Europe, Western Europe
would welcome the availability of
North African oil, which would free
it from complete dependence on the
troublesome Middle East. This is an
added reason why several nations—
Germany and Italy in particular—
look forward eagerly to a settlement
in Algeria that promises peace and
tranquillity. A test blast in the Sa-
hara, they fear, would inflame anti-
French sentiment to the point where
a peaceful solution would no longer
be possible.

Another political aspect of the
problem is the difficulties it creates
for the West in and out of the U.N.
French President Charles de Gaulle

September 19, 1959

WHAT WILL FRANCE DO? Alexander Werth

Paris
THE GENUINE warmth with which
President Eisenhower was received
here is perhaps the most significant
thing that has happened in France
for a long time. For we must re-
member that the “Algiers Revolu-
tion” which laid the foundations of
the present de Gaulle regime was
essentially an anti-American revolt
—a revolt against the “interference”
in North African affairs of Robert
Murphy’s “good offices” mission. In-
deed, the first thing that happened
on that May 13 in Algiers was the
smashing up of the U.S. Informa-
tion Center. Subsequently, de Gaulle
and his Ministers — particularly De-
bré and Soustelle — assumed toward
the United States an attitude that
was little short of hostile. The United
States was never forgiven for having
abstained in last year’s U.N. vote
on Algeria, or for its coolness toward
France’s demands for admission to
the nuclear club and to a Big Three
directorate of NATO.

Almost throughout the de Gaulle
regime, a large part of the press
here has been conducting an insidi-
ous anti-American campaign, cul-
minating in Debré’s categorical de-
mand for American and other Allied

all-out support for her Algerian
policy.
And then, rather suddenly, the

public here began to realize that
France was being isolated, interna-
tionally; and, unlike Debré, de Gaulle
had enough instinct to sense the
growing mood in France favoring an
end to the Algerian war. More re-
cently, the prospect of a defeat of

ALEXANDER WERTH, The Na-
tion’s Ewropean correspondent, ts the

author of France: 1940-1955.

has stated that his country is build-
ing the bomb for “the prestige and
the defense of the French commu-
nity.” But the accent appears to be
on prestige rather than on defense.
According to Time magazine, the
French will have a “model T bomb
for their airplanes and too crude even
to compare with recent generations
of U.S., British and Russian nuclear
devices.” Still, despite its crudity,
France could use the bomb as an
instrument of political pressure—and
the pressure would be greater against

France at the U.N. began to worry
not only the public, but the Govern-
ment. Far from being monolithic in
its determination to pursue the war
until final victory, the Government
showed increasing signs of hesitancy;
and, on the eve of President Eisen-
hower’s visit, there was (or so it
seemed) no longer a single “ultra”
left among de Gaulle’s Ministers,
even Soustelle adopting a more
flexible position. Suggestions were
even advanced that de Gaulle go to
the U.N.

One thing is certain: the appall-
ingly long period of smmobilisme on
the Algerian issue is at last nearing
an end. During de Gaulle’s last visit
to Algeria, he spoke of pacification,

but also of self-determination. But
self-determination is scarcely con-
ceivable without honest elections,

which in turn are inconceivable with-
out international control. Does all
this not mean that the concept of
Algeria being a purely “French prob-
lem” —which is what France has
adamantly maintained at the U.N.
—is being progressively abandoned?
Is not France moving toward a form
of international mediation, and will
not America again attempt to medi-
ate a peace settlement? It is the
French people’s hopes in this direc-
tion, I believe, that account for the
warmth of the welcome given to the
President.

There is, of course, the possibility
that de Gaulle’s sudden sweet reason-
ableness, and that of his Ministers,
is merely a tactical retreat aimed at
reassuring Mr. Eisenhower and the
U.N. The nature of de Gaulle’s plan
for Algeria — scheduled for release
this week — and the coming Algerian
debate in the U.N. ought to bring
the future into clearer focus.

the United States and Great Britain
than against the Soviet Union. Pos-
session of the bomb, it is argued,
would make France independent of
the Atlantic Alliance; she could al-
ways threaten to get out if her Allies
“misbehaved.”

BUT WHEN the Sahara test ques-
tion comes up before the U.N., what
can France’s principal Allies do?
Having themselves agreed to suspend
nuclear tests, they can hardly be
expected to oppose the inscription

La’

of an item in the agenda inviting
France to do likewise. At best, they

' are expected to abstain; but last
He year’s abstention by the United
y States on the Algerian issue has re-
4 vealed the heavy political signifi-

¥ cance of the gesture. Western em-

barrassment might prove still greater
if the Sahara test occurs before or
u during the U.N. Assembly, since in
that event the Afro-Asians are ex-
pected to submit a resolution to con-
demn France.

Ve The effects of the proposed test
will not be limited to Western atti-
ne tudes toward France and the Alger-
ian question. In recent years, a

my
ot : o
Fr C= . .

: a+ e
shared condition of economic under.
development has brought about a
feeling of solidarity between the
Afro-Asians and the Latin Ameri-
cans. The test, as a human tragedy,
might strengthen this solidarity and
undo many years of patient wooing
by France of Latin America in be-
half of French policy on the Algerian
question.

It is fortunate for France that so
many of its children look beyond the
Third or the Fourth or the Fifth Re-
public to the tradition that fathered
the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
In a moving article entitled, “The
Accomplices of Hiroshima,’ Domin-

‘ique-

Immense would be the power and
prestige of a France which re-
nounced, of its own volition, a bomb
which she could have _ exploded.
America, Russia and England cannot
alone solve the capital question of
atomic disarmament. The voice of
all other countries must be heard.
For this task, France is today ad-
mirably situated. But if Francé car-
ries out the tests, she merely will be
her own spokesman, a_ mediocre
atomic power of fourth rank, de-
tested by Africa... . The day France
turns into an atomic power, she be-
comes an acomplice of Hiroshima.

FEAR OF THE PEOPLE ee by Peter Bachrach

IN RECENT years the political
scientist has shown definite signs of
emerging from the confining occupa-
tion of studying the structure and
_ types of governmental forms and in-
stitutions. Now, at long last, he has
begun to probe the dynamics of the
political process, of decision-making
and the power struggle among in-
terest groups. In so doing, he finds
himself drawing upon the findings
and techniques of the allied social
sciences, so much so that “interdis-
ciplinary cross-fertilization” has be-
come a key phrase.

Superficially this is exciting, but
to the liberal it is also deeply dis-
couraging. For no matter how dis-
guised by scientific verbiage, the
analysis generally boils down to a
defense of the status quo. Brushing
aside the output of Mills, Hunter,
Lynd and Brady as either neo-Marx-
ist or unscientific, our political scien-
tists take a pluralistic view of the
political process, embracing Bentley
_and Herring’s theory of compromise,
Galbraith’s countervailing power and
- David Truman’s concepts of over-
of lapping membership and_ potential
ees They conclude that power in
the United States is widely diffused.
&: rom here they move on rapidly to a
finding” that our institutions and

PETER BACHRACH, author of
/ Problems j in Freedom, teaches polit-
ical science at Bryn Mawr College.

values are in excellent health. They
summarily dismiss as unrealistic and
naive the charge that irresponsible
power groups can exploit the de-
centralized party structure, and the
archaic checks and balances of our
governmental system, to flout the
public interest. The very concept of
public interest is regarded as a myth,
though perhaps a useful one.

In their eyes, the so-called irre-
sponsible groups turn out to be re-
sponsible after all, because of a won-
drous system of built-in restraints:
from within, the group is checked
by conflicting imterests of certain
members; from without, by counter-
vailing pressure groups. In the rare
instance where these forces do not
operate, the imbalance is soon recti-
fied. For like nature, politics (we
are told) abhors a vacuum. Organi-
zational power soon begets its oppo-
site number; furthermore, no pressure
group, irrespective of opposition, may
violate the rules of the game without
creating “potential groups” which
have been threatened by the violation
of established norms.

Their theory implies that the
strength and wisdom of our leader-
ship, indeed of our citizenry, be-
come almost irrelevant, since it is the

system which shields and preserves

us. To contemplate changing any
fundamental of the system, such as
the broader use of national planning,
would be folly. And any reform which

cOnoy e . : §4
7 ‘ - ola

significantly increases the electorate’s
capacity for direct action will jeop-
ardize the capacity of the system to
regulate itself.

However, no one has ever been
able to explain how the system will
develop an alternative to our myopic
foreign policy or how it will resolve
the burning acquisitiveness which
consumes us.

MY PRIMARY concern is not the
fact, but the reason for this deep
conservativism of the American poli-
tical scientists. It cannot be explained
by their political predilections; polit-
ical scientists are predominantly
liberal. Nor should too much weight
be given to their perhaps unconscious
avoidance of dangerous positions in
their need for recognition and status
(not that political scientists should
be expected to be immune from the
motives that engulf their fellow coun-
trymen). More important, I think,
is an ideological factor—the curious,
growing ambivalence among liberal
intellectuals, and more particularly
among political scientists, toward
democracy and liberalism.

In a reform period like the early
New Deal, the liberal intellectual
had little difficulty reconciling the
diverse principles within the demo-
cratic-liberal complex, such as ma-
jority rule and freedom of speech.

The political scientist’s vigorous
criticism of judicial review, the ay
The Nation

alevy recently wrote in’ * hie)

system, checks and balances and the
like was not surprising; these insti-
tutions stood squarely in the way
of necessary reform. Even more
important, the reform movement,
supported by the overwhelming ma-
jority of the people, was not only
safeguarding civil liberties but ac-
tually broadening them. Freedom of
speéch was used for more than eulo-
gizing freedom of speech; the under-
privileged used it as an essential
instrument in their struggle for the
expansion of socio-economic and
political rights.

ALL THIS changed with the wave of
postwar reaction. As civil liberties
wavered under the onslaught of in-
vestigating committees, loyalty oaths
and numerous statutory restrictions
on individual freedom, the political
scientist shared all intellectuals’ feel-
ing of political isolation. They felt a
disillusionment in, if not fear of, the
people. The argument that this revolt
from the Right was a product of
demagoguery was certainly plausible;
none the less, the majority of the
people acquiesced in, if they did not
support, it. The optimism of Henry
Wallace’s Century of the Common
Man and Professor Carl Friedrich’s
New Beliefs in the Common Man—
both published prior to the political
eruption from the Right—must have
appeared grossly naive to the intellec-
tual whose political beliefs were
threatened by the revolt of the
masses. Paradox notwithstanding,
democracy seemed bent on destroy-
ing any vestige of liberalism.

The political scientist sought cover
behind the walls of the Constitution.
Abandoning the traditional criticism
of American institutions voiced by
Parrington, Beard and J. Allen
Smith, he began to emphasize the
dangers of majority tyranny and ex-
tol the virtues of judicial review,
checks and balances and the pluralist
system of compromise and counter-
vailing power. He not only sub-
scribed to Madison’s theory of power,
but fully agreed with the authors
of The Federalist that the major
problem of government is to “enable
the government to control the gov-
erned; and in the next place oblige
it to control itself.” The direct con-
flict with Jefferson’s belief that in
thé last analysis it is the people

September 19, 1959

who are the guardians of freedom
did not disturb him at all.

Professor Samuel Stouffer’s study
on the attitude of Americans toward
civil liberties, and the more recent
study by Professor Robert Lane on
the attitude of workers toward
equality, seem to vindicate the politi-
cal scientist. Both studies show that
our rank and file are unimpressed
with the principles of liberty and
equality. As Samuel Lubell put it,
“Our form of government is a strong-
er bulwark of civil liberties than the
people themselves.”

Such a statement is based pre-
sumably on the assumption that
restraining political and institutional
forces, usually operative against re-
form movements, are also operative
when the political pressure is from
the Right. But this is not necessarily
true. After the first hundred days
of the New Deal, business, the press
and the Bourbon-Republican coali-
tion in Congress set up roadblocks
to the reform movement. No such
forces curbed the upsurge of McCar-
thyism. Congress remained compara-
tively free to investigate all facets
of American thought for subversive
implications and to énaet bigger and
better security measures. On the
Executive side, increasingly stringent
federal loyalty programs were adopt-
ed under Truman and Eisenhower.

And, perhaps most distressing of all,
Vinson’s Supreme Court refused to
accept certiorari on “difficult” civil-
liberty cases on the one hand, and
on the other proved willing to square
the First Amendment with the vari-
ous loyalty oaths and programs.
Over and over again the institutional
and Constitutional guarantees failed
to protect individual rights in time
of reaction.

Thus the American political sys-
tem—envisaged by the _ political
scientist as a system of balance and
compromise—operates as an effective
bulwark against the masses only
when the upsurge is to the Left, not
to the Right.

THE IMPACT of postwar reaction
upon American liberal thought has
been severe; it has shaken the basic
assumption of democracy—that or-
dinary men and women possess good
sense. As a result, the gap between
the classes has been dangerously
widened. This is not, however, a di-
vision between economic classes, but
a growing gulf between the educated
who cherish liberty as a sacred prin-
ciple, and the man in the street who
is said to be indifferent or even
hostile to it. The division is reflected
by the rash of essays in political
and social science literature making
invidious comparisons between the
educated elite and the people.
Professor Lane’s article, “Fear
of Equality,” recently published in
the American Political Science Re-
view, is typical. To discover the at-
titude of a segment of the working
class toward equality, the author
interviewed fifteen workers selected
at random from a housing develop-
ment restricted to tenants earning
from $2,400 to $6,300 yearly. The
workers interviewed were all urban,
white fathers with occupations such
as painter, plumber, oiler, railroad
fireman and policeman. Lane found
that by and large these men were
more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie.
Feeling no sense of injustice in re-
gard to their status, they believed
those lower on the scale deserve their
fate. They had no major complaints
toward our inequalitarian society.
The chief inference drawn by Lane
is that the working classes have little
affection for the ideals of freedom
and equality “in their universal

149

forms.” On the other hand, the au-
thor states, “the professional classes,
particularly the lawyers, ministers,
and teachers, often have such affec-
tion. [t is they, in the democratic
West, who serve as the ‘hard core’
of democratic defenders. . . .” And
again, “It is not to “The people’
that we must look for consistent and
relatively unqualified defense of free-
dom and equality. The professional
class, at least in the American cul-
ture, serves as the staunchest de-
fender of democracy’s two greatest
ideals.”

The pessimism and elite implica-
tions of Lane’s position—a position,
with minor variations, subscribed to
by such diverse persons as Talcott
Parsons, Andrew Hacker, Peregrine
Worsthorne and Walter Lippmann—
is, I believe, the most corrosive ide-
ological influence on the liberal
movement today, and the basis of
the conservative nature of American
political science.

THE MAJOR defect of Lane’s study
is its lack of historical perspective.
Of course, the people are narrow,
bourgeois and lacking in affection
for liberty and equality “in their
universal forms.” Veblen well under-
stood this, and anyone familiar with
the racial, religious and nativist
phobias that are replete in our history
takes it as a matter of course that
the people have little affection for
liberty in the abstract.

But there is a positive side to
this picture. The rank-and-file Amer-
ican has been instrumental in the
growth of freedom and equality in
the United States. The people
breathed democracy into the Consti-
tution by exerting continuous pres-
sure for the expansion of the
franchise; they were ultimately re-
sponsible for the establishment of
public education; and if the working
classes had not waged a long and
bitter struggle for decent working
conditions, America would be a far
less free nation than it is today.
All this is obvious, but it points up
a paradox which Lane has overlook-
ed: that people do not have to be-
lieve in freedom for its own sake
in order to work, struggle and even
die for it. To put the paradox posi-
tively, the people do not have af-
fection for the “universal forms” of

freedom, but they id do eTave he" cae

pacity, as they have demonstrated in
the past, to fight for it when the
stakes relate directly to greater
equality and freedom for themselves.

THE CRUCIAL question, then, is
not the attitude of the people toward
democratic ideals, but whether the
socio-economic and political forces
breeding demagoguery are greater
than those creating political pressure
for the eradication of evils in our so-
ciety. Within this context, the re-
sponsibility of the political scientist
and his brethren in allied fields is a
heavy one. It requires intensive work
on four aspects of the problem.
First, what are the dominant psy-
cholossaal: sociological, economic and
political trends and their probable
impact upon democracy? The litera-
ture on this phase of the problem
is indeed rich, as evidenced by The
Sane Society, The Lonely Crowd,
The Organization Man, The Affluent
Society, The Power Elite and the
like. But certainly more light needs
to be shed, especially on the political
ramifications of the question.
Second, if democratic society is in
peril, what remedial measures are
necessary? The social scientist has
conspicuously ignored this problem.
The diagnostic books cited above all
imply, or state, that far-reaching
changes must be made in the social
or economic structure. But the pro-
posed remedies, where they exist at
all, are mouse-like or ambiguous.
After painting a devastating picture
of life within the Organization,
Whyte concludes that man must
learn to live with it. Riesman says
that the economic forces in our so-
ciety have produced a_ pathetic
character, the other-directed person-
ality; nevertheless all is well, since
the autonomous individual somehow
can evolve out of other-directedness.
Galbraith’s analysis of the disequi-
librium in the economy is strongly
suggestive of a socialistic solution,
but his solution is illiberal govern-
mental gadgetry. Fromm’s advocacy
of industrial democracy as a substi-
tute for corporate and union giantism,
and as an antidote to anonymity, is
bold enough, but he does not indi-
cate how it can be achieved. Mills,
practicing his own form of scientism,
is silent as to what measures can

fad Monee ¢ to be ote

OOH the ?
power elite. . ae

Third, what vested | edione in-
stitutions, myths and ideas are likely
to be instrumental in impeding, if
not preventing, the indicated re-
medial action? Since the nature of
power is central to his inquiry, the
political scientist should certainly be
equipped to answer this question.
But he shies away from involvement
with that which might disrupt the
balance of the present power struc-
ture.

Fourth, what potential sources of
power must be tapped in order to
effectuate the necessary social and
economic changes? This brings us
again to the people, for to accomplish
such tasks in a democracy, what
source of power is there other than
the political power of the voters?
How to fire their imagination in the
cause of democracy 1s, of course, a
difficult problem. The answer lies in
a positive and concrete translation
of the task into terms of greater so-
cial and economic rights and security.
Because workers are not interested
in the abstract form of equalitarian-
ism does not mean that they would
be indifferent to compulsory health
insurance, guarantees of full employ-
ment and an effective voice in deter-
mining economic policy.

TO RELY on the educated classes—
or Lane’s professional classes—to
preserve freedom is to overlook their
record during the McCarthy episode.
Unquestionably they had affection
for liberty and equality “in their
universal forms”; they eulogized
freedom and wrote excellent books
in its defense. But they demonstrated
little eagerness to defend freedom at
the risk of personal status. University
and college professors, for example,
were overwhelmingly against Mc-
Carthy, against loyalty oaths and
Congressional investigation of educa-
tion, yet only in a few instances did
a faculty, or a group of faculty mem-
bers, prove ready to risk their jobs
to stand by a jeopardized colleague.
The record of the legal profession
is hardly better. The American Bar
Association can hardly be said to
be a staunch defender of the Bill
of Rights, and the record of some
state bar associations on civil liberties
is reminiscent of the American Le-

PLO} N

LSS tial

gion. Liberal lawyers have made a
fine record in defending liberals de-
prived of their rights, but many of
the same lawyers refused Commu-
nists as clients for fear of being them-
' selves labeled communistic.

If the paradox is true that the
people don’t believe in freedom for
its own sake, yet possess a capacity
to fight for it when it is translated

into meaningful terms, the paradox
is equally true that the educated or
professional classes believe in free-
dom for its own sake, but rarely are
prepared to fight for it at the risk
of personal status.

If it is time to abandon the myth
of the common man’s idealism, it 1s
also time that the intellectual in
general, and the political scientist in

particular, recognize that without the
common man’s active aid, liberty or
equality cannot be preserved or ex-
panded. The battle of freedom will
be lost by default if the intellectual
continues to insulate himself from
“the masses” and to rely on counter-
vailing forces, institutional barriers
and the educated classes to defend
him from demagogic leaders.

Detroit Discovers the Consumer... by Robert P. Weeks

Detroit
SINCE 1906, when United States
production outstripped that of

France, this country has led the
world in the manufacture of auto-
mobiles. Yet many Americans do
not realize that in 1958 this pivotal
American industry suffered two ma-
jor defeats: (1) more automobiles
were produced outside this country
than in it; (2) the foreign cars we
imported outnumbered the cars we
exported.

The most widely publicized inter-
pretation of these two developments
is that they are part of a winning
battle being fought by swarms of
tiny, simple, honest Volkswagens
and Renaults against the waning
oranks of pretentious, overpowered,
“clumsy American dreamboats. Ac-
‘cording to this interpretation, the
‘tiny invaders will never outnumber
the lumbering American cars, but
vill conquer, instead, by example.
fhey will force Detroit to give up
the manufacture of opulent space
ships and to start making sensible
automobiles again.

Those who support this view can
muster some impressive evidence for
it. They point to the fact that be-
tween now and December, Chevro-
let, Ford and Chrysler will each
introduce a U.S.-made small car, the

~Corvair, Falcon and Valiant, respec-
tively. And this is only the first of
several waves of compact cars that
will sweep out of Detroit. In the
fall of 1960, six new compact cars
will be introduced by Buick, Olds,
ROBERT P. WEEKS teaches Eng-
lish at the University of Michigan.

September 19, 1959

Edsel, Mercury, DeSoto and Chrys-
ler. The ultimate in compacts—
luxury models by Cadillac, Lincoln
and Imperial—will appear in the fall
of 1961, The revolution will come
full circle in the fall of 1962 when
the Big Three—General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler—finally put on
the market their versions of the VW
and Renault that will sell for $1,500
to $1,800.

According to these champions of
the European car, the Cleopatra
barge that has been Detroit’s ideal
since the 1930s will be supplanted
by a new ideal: the compact car.
It will be half the size of a 1959
Lincoln and cost half as much to
buy and run; it will be as simple
and functional as a wheel, yet as
responsive as a motorcycle. Power-
steering, power-brakes and window-
lifts will be out of place on this car;
motoring will be fun again.

FEW WILL deny that Detroit has
been the scene of some amazing and
portentous events in the past five
years. The signs of an impending
revolution have been varied and nu-
merous: the massive invasion of the
medium-price bracket by Ford,
Chevrolet and Plymouth; the sharp
decline in the sales of what had
previously been medium-priced cars
— Buick, Mercury, Dodge, et al.;
the Edsel debacle; the widespread
criticism of the style of U.S. cars;
the evidence obtained by economic
surveys that Americans are spend-
ing proportionately less on automo-
biles and more on such items as
boats, hi-fi equipment and housing;
the astonishing success of the Ram-

\ oe

bler and Lark; and the concentra-
tion of more than 90 per cent of
auto-making in the hands of the
Big Three. ,

Clearly this is a complex revolu-
tion and one in which the small-car
invasion from Europe does play a
role, but to call it the only role or
even the central one is to oversimpli-
fy and misconstrue what has been
happening to our biggest industry.
The events shaping up in Detroit
are the result of a variety of social,
economic, and _ technical changes
that have occurred during the past
thirty or forty years.

“We started with the Model T
and we’ve just perfected it,” accord-
ing to Dr, Peter Kyropoulos, Tech-
nical Director of G.M. styling. In
this process, American car makers
have made no truly basic changes in
the design or location of the major
components of an automobile. But
the half-century of labor put into
the perfecting process should not be
disparaged; if the 1959 Ford is not
fundamentally different from the
Model T of 1908, it is incomparably
more comfortable, durable, safe and
generally satisfactory as a vehicle.

Many hands were involved in
perfecting the Model T, and many
solutions were offered for every
problem. “Thirty or forty: years
ago,” E. B. White has fondly re-
called, “when a man wanted a car,
he had a fabulous assortment to
choose from — everything from a —
jack rabbit to a bear-cat. Big cars,
small cars, medium-sized cars, cheap —
cars, expensive cars, closed cars, gas
cars, steam cars, electric cars; it was
paradise.”

151

Something like this paradise can
still be found in Europe, where one
can spend from $1,000 to $24,000
for a car and can choose from among
so many different styles, sizes and

1 mechanical features that the choice
would flabbergast an American. Let
us consider the range of European
variety as it affects only one part of
a car, the engine. The European
can buy automobiles with one, two,
three, four, six or twelve cylinders,
which may be in line, arranged in a
V, or opposed to one another; the
engine may burn Diesel fuel or gas-
oline or a mixture of gasoline and
oil; it may be mounted in the front
or rear; it may be air- or water-
cooled, and may develop from thir-
teen to 420 horsepower.

The American buyer, in contrast,
has twenty-one brands of automo-
biles from which to choose, but they
are monotonously similar in_ size,
appearance, construction and _per-
formance compared with their Eu-
ropean counterparts. Again, con-
sidering only engines, the buyer of
an American car can choose only
between a six or a V-8 engine —
both high compression. And _ be-
cause domestic cars are nearly uni-
form in weight, the engines are with-
in a limited range of horsepower with
the median around 200. Moreover,
they are all water-cooled, mounted in
tha front, gasoline-fueled and of
traditional design. The sixes are
Model T engines greatly enlarged
and with two cylinders added; the
V-8s are two enlarged Model T en-
gines joined to form a VY.

WHY HAS the American automo-
bile industry limited itself — and
the American buyer — so narrowly?
Part of the answer lies in its strug-
gle to perfect the Model T. The
process of perfection inexorably
eliminated the kerosene and carbide
head Jamp, the mechanical brake,
the transverse spring, the steam and
electric car, the windshield that
opened, the outside luggage rack,
the wooden body and a whole junk-
yard full of other quaint but ineffi-
cient devices. But the drive for per-
_ fection was geared to mass produc-
tion and profits, so one of its un-
_ fortunate concomitants was the
elimination of a host of colorful,

unique and even outstanding auto-
mobiles: the Stutz, Franklin, Pack-
ard, Cord, Lafayette, Dusenberg,
Marmon, Pierce-Arrow and many
others.

As the auto industry became mon-
olithic, its products have grown in-
creasingly uniform. Some of this
uniformity is in the interests of
economy. Every GM car, from Chev-
rolet to Cadillac, this year uses the
same body shell. Ford and Chrysler
have adopted the same _ principle.
GM, with an annual output of
3,000,000 units, is understandably
interested in making them as much
alike as is feasible.

But the resemblance of GM cars
not to each other, but to those of
the Ford and Chrysler families, is
obviously not a matter of manufac-
turing economy. Critics of Detroit
like to ask: “Why can’t the Pontiac,
Dodge and Mercury be as distinctly
different as three German cars, say,
the Volkswagen, Mercedes and Por-
sche? Why must they look as if they
had come out of different doors of
the same assembly plant?” The an-
swer is that the VW, Mercedes and
Porsche are three distinct types of
cars: the small economy car, the
family car and the sports car.

This interesting variety among
European automobiles is largely a
result of two factors. The first is the
long-standing European custom of
taxing horsepower, which has given
European manufacturers an incen-
tive to develop small, efficient en-
gines, such as the remarkably small,
sturdy VW engine. Even insurance
rates, in some European countries,
are based in part on_ horsepower.
Another European custom, the road
race, has fostered an additional au-
tomotive genre — the sports car.
Some European firms like Mercedes-
Benz build both sports cars and

full-sized passenger cars. Others
build both sports cars and economy
cars, and a very few turn out cars
in all three categories. Therefore,
from Sweden to Italy, Europeans
have available to them a number
of economy cars like the Saab,
Fiat, VW and Renault. They also
have a whole stable of the world’s
finest sports cars in all sizes. And
besides these two groups, theré are
the conventional-sized sedans, two-
doors and convertibles.

While the European automobile
industry has developed in an en-
vironment that encouraged variety,
U.S. car makers have been subjected
to pressure of the opposite sort. Dur-
ing the years that the Model T was
being perfected, the class structure
of both American society and the
American economy changed. As the
American economy expanded from
the 1920s to the 1950s, our living ._
standards rose; at the same times,
the middle class began to grow at the bai
expense of both the lower and up~
per classes. The automobile, alwaysiion
a sensitive social barometer, clearly} oir
reflected these changes. From thyized
twenties through the forties, Hooks
cars became larger and more lw
urious; the Star, Overland, Whip
pet and Model T gradually gav
ground to larger, more expensiy
vehicles. Yet during the same perio
the huge sixteen-cylinder Cadilla —
and Marmons, the Packards w.—~
their graceful coachwork by LeBaron
and Dietrich, disappeared before a
herd of commonplace Buicks. In
short, for twenty years Detroit has
been engaged in the major task of
perfecting the Model T so that it is
not only reliable, comfortable, roomy
and fast, but classless. A classless
car must be large, but not too large,
expensive but not too expensive,
different from other cars but not too

~The Navion

for the governorship and, besides, had
written several chapters for Holiday
and Harper’s long before. I believe him,
but the book has an unpleasant re-
semblance to a campaign pamphlet.

Something like Voltaire’s deity, if
Time did not exist it would have to be
invented to put Nelson Rockefeller on
its cover. Public life, private life, do-
mestic life, physical appearance, hobbies
and clubs, he is the Platonic Idea of the
Cover Story Man. Not only is he the
New Capitalism personified (hyposta-
tized is the correct word), but he is The
Bad Old Days stood on their head in
two generations. Most of our Presiden-
tial timber has been processed, machine-
tooled, sandpapered and varnished by
Madison Avenue to the point where the
original substance has completely van-
ished — to the point, in fact, where I
doubt it can any longer be found, in
the case of Mr. Rockefeller’s chief rival,
even by the subject himself. Nelson
Rockefeller doesn’t need Madison Ave-
nue; he has done a far better job on
himself. Truth soars beyond reality,
into regions where dogs and mortgages
and even Architects of Victory are un-
necessary. Is he really that good? Wil-
liam Manchester certainly does nothing
to blot the scutcheon. I wonder. Maybe
he is, but I have a hunch that Lincoln
Steffens or Matthew Josephson or even
H. L. Mencken might have written a
different book.

SOMETHING is wrong, something is
out of perspective. Manchester makes old
John D. sound like a lovable curmudgeon
out of Dickens, a Baptist combination

of David Harum and Get Rich Quick

Wallingford. The Ludlow Massacre was
just an accident, an oversight, something
that happened way off in a minor bit
of property when nobody was looking.
Was it? Also, you get the idea from
William Manchester that Ludlow con-
verted John D., Jr. from just another
poor little rich boy into a twentieth-
century William Penn. Did it? Again,
Nelson was very much around when the
State Department and the New Capital-
ism, so different from the Bad Old Days
of Dollar Diplomacy, was winning the
wrong kind of friends and influencing
people very much for the worse between
the Rio Grande and Cape Horn. Man-
chester says that all these pigeons wing-
ing their way home to roost from across
the Caribbean are not now and never
have been pets of Nelsan Rockefeller.
This may be so. In fact the whole splen-
did picture may be absolutely veridical,
bona fide, authentic and indisputable,
but I do wish, since it really is a rev-
olutionary thesis, it had been just a lit-
tle bit better documented. Rosa Lux-
emburg, Hobson, Lenin or Veblen, I
don’t doubt for a moment but that they
are all getting frightfully dated, but
there is something about Holiday, even
something about Harper's, something
about the prose style they like, some-
thing about the kind of facts they like
featured — I don’t really think they are
the ideal media for such tremendous
bouleversements in sociology and econ-
omics. William Manchester can be, when
he wants, a very good writer. There is
just something about the circumstances
that makes this a slightly vulgar book.
I don’t doubt him, mind you, it’s just
that some of the turns of his prose make
my teeth grate.

ARCHITECTURE

Walter McQuade

A LONG LETTER has arrived from
the Institute of Personality Assessment
and Research of the University of Cali-
fornia, requesting “cooperation in the
study of creative architects.” An en-
closed list names sixty-four architects,
and the letter explains that a dozen
architectural editors and writers, includ-
ing me, are being asked to rearrange
these names in diminishing order of
greatest creativity, one through sixty-
four. “Since you all know each other,”
writes Mr. Donald W. McKinnon in the
letter, “may I ask that each of you
make your rankings independently?”
Forty of these architects have already
undergone weekends of testing and

September 19, 1959

psychological probing in the personality
laboratories at Berkeley 4, Calif. (One
telephoned me when he came back: “I
think my id needs reupholstering to-
day. Can you have lunch?”) In addi-
tion to architects, an untold number of
“creative writers, painters, musical com-
posers, engineers, research scientists,
mathematicians and theoretical physi-
cists” also are being tested and ex-
plored.* At the end of five and a half
years, the University of California hopes
to have learned something about what

*See “Vivisection of a Poet” by Ken-
neth Rexroth, The Nation, Dec. 14,
1957.

makes creative bombs tick. I can pre-
dict one explosion. American industrial
designers, the loudest tickers of them
all, who are also great believers in psy-
chological testing and frequent custom-
ers of testers, are going to be angrier
than springtime at having been left out
of this.

TO CHANGE the subject only a little,
another. group of selecters, The Ameri-
can Federation of Arts, recently took on
a more difficult job of rating. They nar-
rowed the architectural field to thirteen,
which, as it turns out, seems either too
few, or too many. Their selection, a
show called “Form Givers at Mid-Cen-
tury,” spent the summer at the Metro-
politan Museum in New York and will
open again for a month at the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts on September 22.
After that it will be shown at the Car-
negie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Min-
neapolis Institute of Fine Arts, the Rich-
mond Museum of Art, the Art Institute
of Chicago, and then, with perhaps ad-
ditional way stops, will move on to Des
Moines, Seattle, Portland and finally San
Francisco in January of 1961. The show,
which appeared first at the Corcoran
Gallery in Washington, includes photo-
graphs in black and white and in color,
and a number of beautiful models. May
they survive the journey.

The architects chosen were Frank
Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius,
Richard J. Neutra, Alvar Aalto, Marcel
Breuer, Wallace K. Harrison, Philip C.
Johnson, the firm of Skidmore, Owings
& Merrill, Eero Saarinen, Edward Du-
rell Stone and R. Buckminster Fuller.
Time magazine, or more specifically, as-
sociate editor Cranston Jones, got the
show together with designer Gyorgy
Kepes. Faced with awkward casting in
terms of people not included among the
thirteen crammed under the Victorian
umbrella of the title (if Fuller, why not
Nervi? If Johnson, why not Niemeyer?
If Stone, why not Yamasaki? If Har-
rison, why not Kahn? If Breuer, why
not Rudolph? etc.), they did an effective
and a discreet job.

Outstanding in the collection are a set
of color pictures of Le Corbusier’s con-
crete chapel at Ronchamp — a presenta-
tion that makes all the others in this
show seem almost inarticulate. This

WALTER McQUADE is an architect
and writer (author of the recent School-
house, a study of contemporary school
construction). This column is the sec-
ond of a new department in which he
will discuss architecture and related de-
sign subjects.

157

net Oy PRR eT oe eee we
s / ‘ ‘ * > 4

building offers a lot. It is not just intel-
lectually good; it is alive. Its inexplicable
sculptairal shape has a new beauty (Le
Corbusier says the curved roof is sup-
posed to imitate the horizon in this hilly
district, but that’s only what he says).
Its. coarse concrete walls have passionate
strength. Above all, it living
sense of one man’s creative talent. It
shows instantaneously what it is that
makes Le Corbusier’s work particularly
potent to the young architects of the

gives a.

world — its unpredictability. He is not
logical, but mysterious. They cannot
know what material he may seize next

and bring back alive, as he has bulky

concrete. He is to be watched jealously.

SOME of the other buildings shown
have the same compelling vitality as the
Ronchamp chapel, although their qual-
ity 1s not conveyed so well in this ex-
hibition. Wright’s Taliesin West, in
Arizona, long horizontal shapes wedded
to the desert, is lyrical in a magnificently
romantic way. In contrast, Mies van der
Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in
Chicago are a pair of vertical buildings
so perfectly drawn that they tighten
your jaw im admiration. They are the
modern kind of poetry: plain words,
precisely conveyed, but remote in sande
significance and very moving.

Next to these titans of architecture,
the work of some of the others in the
show seems a little self-conscious and
assertive. Even the buildings of Gropius
and his associates in The Architects
Collaborative betray the pressure that
success has put on modern architecture

to go further than it is really ready to
go as yet. Gropius’ earlier designs,
the Bauhaus at Dessau in Germany
(1926) and the Fagus Factory near Al-
feld (1911), are a dry, hard architecture.
But his newest commissions—the cam-
pus he and his associates have designed
for the University of Baghdad and the
United States Embassy for Athens, both
shown in drawings — seem to lose the
savor of the old recipe by drenching it
in sauce: pretty but forceless arches,
decorative screens, ete. Nobody will
deny that Gropius has been a “Form-
Giver,” but the point is not well made
in a show of this type. Perhaps it
couldn’t be. His contribution to modern
architecture has been even more elusive
than any kind of physical beauty; it has
been his continuous exposition and
teaching of the idea.

If this exhibition had been wider, or
crueler, in its selection of architects, it
might have given a more contemporary
message. The presence of the more ec-
centric architects is missed, the younger
designers who politely refuse the teach-
ing of any of the “Form-Givers” except
Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier —
and who influence one another. There
is more vitality mong them, if a little
less prestige. Too many of the architects
shown seem merely to be annoyed with
what they have been doing in the past,
and resolved to loosen the reins of their
functional training. Like ordinary men,
they are form-triers, not form-givers.

Three who do not show annoyance
are R. Buckminster Fuller, who is less
an architect than a visionary mechanic;

The Old Order

When my grandfather, small and neat,
Prayer shawl-wrapped, silk hat-crowned,
Faced the congregation beside the
Black-robed rabbi towering,

Cantor and choir singing,

When my small grandfather pulled the cord
Drew back the veil before the Ark

Scrolls of the Law in red velvet disclosing,
Crown of Rimmonim, shield of Tass,

Ivory Yad godward pointing,

When the rabbi raised the Sefer Torah
Its silver bells tinkling as he said,

“This is the Torah that God gave through Moses
To the Children of Israel”;
And handed the Torah to my grandfather
Who held it aloft that the standing
v2 Congregation might see, might walk
6 In the light of the Lord—
chi Then the vaulted dome in the synagogue’s roof
Filled with white radiance
And the Voice of the Lord spoke glowingly:
- + “Nicholas, my son, mark the favor and esteem
~,' In which I hold your grandfather.” ; ”

NicHoLas Bie

” ye ' 4 EN se 7 eS

4 a

Alvar Aalto, who keeps. hammering
away at his handsome natural buildings
in Finland, and Richard Neutra. Apart
from Le Corbusier, Neutra probably
comes off better than anyone else in
this exhibition. The University of Cali-
fornia’s questionnaire defines architec-
tural creativity as “the capacity of an
individual to express himself in the vo-
cabulary of architecture.” A typical
Neutra house included in the show, the
John Ramos residence built in San Pedro,
California, in 1958, is a beautifully lucid
voicing of that capacity. Neutra’s thin-
edged, exquisitely tough planes are true
to the clear architectural vision he has
shown us: for many years, and they
still cut. His structures are a triumph
of precise intuition, the creative archi-
tect’s real equipment. He underplays his
individuality, but you are strongly aware
of it in this exhibition. That is not al-
ways true of Saarinen, Breuer, Johnson,
or Stone. With them, you sometimes
have a sense of: individuality. victimized
by artistic ambitiousness.

AMBITIOUSNESS, or impatience, or
annoyance, may, of course, be the natur-
al attitude for creative architects at pres-
ent. For this exhibition indicates that
functionalism as a movement is so bored
with itself that it is slowly exploding —
like a slowed-down newsreel of the dem-
olition of a dam — without being dis-
placed by another movement or dis-
cipline. This makes the individual archi-
tect very important today, for he has
no “academy” left, only his own re-
sources. Perfect taste and detailing no
longer can produce a satisfactory design.
Gone is the restrictive awe for industri-
alism in architecture which has purified
and narrowed it for several decades, for-
bidding such elements in building de-
sign as memory, humor, the echo of na-
ture, or voluptuousness. (No wonder
Le Corbusier dropped steel for con-
crete!) The new demand is all for in-
dividual expression, but who has any-
thing to say?

The answer in this show is easy: Mies
van der Rohe, Wright and Le Corbusier,
who have always been basically personal
in their designs. Le Corbusier is like a
fine cognac, given new depth by age.
Wright’s work is as rich and lively as
the Irish whiskey he used to sample at
lunch at the Plaza. Van der Rohe has
the tang of triple-distilled gin. Neutra
and Aalto remain fine wines; and Buck-
minster Fuller is a vitamin tonic. But
while some of Saarinen’s and Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill’s work is good bourbon,
which will perhaps develop with time
into great, there is also too much ice
cream soda in this show to make it: oe
phetic in any really Recto ving way

rate.

THEATRE in MEXICO

Stanley Meisler

MEXICO CITY’S Concordia, a restau-
rant doubling as a playhouse, introduced
me to Mexican theatre. As I approached
the place, several young people were
milling about on the street in front, in-
cluding a huge ruffian with a black eye.
Spotting him, I thought that excursions
to the Mexican stage were perhaps not
for me. But, suddenly, he pushed open
the door and jumped into the restau-
rant, the others rushing after him. My
ruffian and his friends were actors wait-
ing for their cues during the evening’s
first performance of Las cosas simples
(The Simple Things), a play by a twen-
ty-seven-year-old Mexican, Hector Men-
doza.

Inside, watching the second perform-
ance, I discovered that mistaking actors
for spectators was part of the produc-
tion’s charm. The play was about life in
a diner near a college, and the Con-
cordia looked just like that. The actors
performed around a luncheon counter
and five tables in front, while the au-
dience munched their supper and _ fol-
lowed the play from the other twenty-
five tables. At times the actors moved
into the audience to borrow a_nap-
kin or ask for a match—on one oc-
casion, to kiss a bald patron on the
head. The Concordia and Las cosas
simples, which evoked a Saroyanesque
atmosphere, are not entirely typical of
Mexican theatre, but they offered a
promise that the Mexican stage bristled
with vitality. Several weeks of theatre-
going have fulfilled that promise.

Less than ten years ago, Mexico City
had only three theatres, offering a
smattering of the world’s drama, mostly
Spanish classics, rarely anything native.
Now there are about thirty theatres,
many of them comfortable, well-equip-
ped, modern houses. On any night, I
had a choice of fifteen to twenty plays.
During 1958, producers offered fifty-five
professional shows, thirteen by Mexican
playwrights, eight by Spanish and, in
translation, ten by French, nine by
American and eight by English. Italian
and Dutch plays were also performed.
A spot check of attendance six years
ago revealed the dismal total of 14,000
people attending all the city’s theatres
in a three-month period. A recent sur-
vey for the same period showed a total
“house” of 450,000.

STANLEY MEISLER is a Washington
newspaper man and occasional contribu-
tor to critical and political journals.

September 19, 1959

Three factors have triggered this
dramatic spurt. A middle class has
emerged out of Mexico’s stability in
the past few decades, and it is willing
to buy tickets for a wide variety of
plays: Shakespeare and French bedroom
farces, Arthur Miller and young Mexi-
can writers, The House of Bernarda
Alba and Make a Million. In the late

forties, a pair of producers opened a
clean, comfortable, intimate basement
theatre, which seated eighty. It at-
tracted the new audience, the idea

caught on, and small theatres began
popping up throughout the city. And,
perhaps most important, at about the
same time the government set up the
National Institute of Fine Arts, which
has built larger theatres, formed an
acting school, encouraged young play-
wrights and mounted some of the coun-
try’s most skilled productions.

ACTIVE craftsmen, not political hacks,
direct the government’s hand. I had a
talk one morning with fifty-five-year-
old Salvador Novo, the head of the in-
stitute’s theatre department —a_ tall,
affable, nattily-dressed man, who is an
active playwright, director and _ trans-
lator, both for government and com-
mercial theatre. Thirty years ago he and
other young stage people formed a
small, avant-garde theatre that tried to
tear Mexico away from its Spanish
classic tradition. They failed then, but
Novo has not forgotten his youthful
experience and, from his government
position, he continually encourages
young Mexican playwrights and di-
rectors to break new ground.

Novo is glibly optimistic about the
future of Mexican drama. He believes
that two playwrights, thirty-five-year-
old Sergio Magana and thirty-four-year-
old Emilio Carballido, are good enough
to have productions in New York, Lon-
don or Paris. American plays have had
the most influence on Magana and
Carballido; they and the other young
Mexican writers deal with the social
problems of Mexico, not in the manner
of social protesters but in the manner
of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Mil-
ler. “It is the poetical treatment of
vulgar subjects,” Novo said. He added
that Mexican playwrights cannot sup-
port themselves on plays alone. They
teach, act, direct and write for news-
papers. On the other hand, the combined
demand of theatre, movies and televi-
sion has created a shortage of actors.

Novo feels that commercial theatre has
a severe financial handicap in Mexico
City. First of all, there is a government
limit on price. No house can charge
more than 14 pesos ($1.12) for a ticket.
And there has been a steady increase
in union wages, for both actors and
stagehands. Even by offering two per-
formances a night and keeping the
budget for sets low, few producers make
a profit. Yet new plays are launched al-
most every week. Who does the invest-
ing? “Crazy people,” Novo answered,
“as in theatre everywhere.”

No play of Carballido was on the
boards during my trip, but I did catch
a revival of Magana’s Los signos del
zodiac (The Signs of the Zodiac), which
first startled Mexico City audiences
eight years ago. Magana’s play was at
the Teatro del Bosque, one of a complex
of theatres recently built by the govy-
ernment in Chapultepec Park. Besides
the Bosque, the group includes the
18,000-seat National Auditorium, a
children’s theatre, a school of acting and
the Granero, a 200-seat arena theatre,
which was offering a brilliant produc-
tion of N. Richard Nash’s The Rain-
maker. The Bosque, which seats a little
more than a thousand, has a large pro-
scenium stage and rows of orchestra
seats that ramp upward toward the
back; there are no balconies. In general,
the facades of these theatres are archi-
tecturally disappointing. They look
bulky, hastily put together, like huge
blocks of cement decorated here and
there with plate glass and neon mar-
quees. But inside the plants are effi-
cient, comfortable and active.

Los signos del zodiac, which some-
what resembles Elmer Rice’s Street

THE TWO FACES OF
RICHARD NIXON
By Guy W. Finney

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159

Scene, uncovers the interrelated lives of

several neighbors living in one of Mex-
* ico City’s patio tenement houses. But

the atmosphere is all Tennessee Wil-
; liams: a caldron of love, youth, poverty,
; vulgarity, violence and symbolism. The
actors performed realistically, without
the bombast of the old Spanish theatre.
At times they did seem to produce more
emotion than would American actors in
similar situations, but they were, after
all, portraying Latins. Since this was a
: government show, the budget allowed
+ an elaborate set designed by Julio Prieto.

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Action took place on several levels in
the various cut-out, crowded apart-
ments. All in all, I found the produc-
tion, directed by Novo, moving and
powerful, up to international standards
of professional theatre. But a young,
middle-class Mexican friend, who ac-
companied me, complained about the
subject matter. “Very crude,” he said.
Magana may be moying too fast for
some members of his genteel audience.

FOR others he may be moving too
slowly. “The Signs of the Zodiac was all
right eight years ago,” Juan Jose Gur-
rola said in a tiny coffee shop one after-
noon, “buf we need something new
now.” Gurrola is a twenty-four-year-old,
cherub-faced student of architecture
who has attracted attention with his
direction of plays for the national uni-
versity. The university offers theatre
courses but has no theatre department;
instead, it gives money to drama groups
organized by the students themselves.
Gurrola, who had had some professional
acting experience, talked some of his
fellow. architectural students into setting
up a group. With university money,
they present plays. that recerve as much
notice from the city’s drama critics as
do commercial shows..The critic in Ex-
celsior had just described Gurrola’s di-
rection as “antitheatre,” and the pleased
young director said that the word classi-
fied his work perfectly. He was trying to
break down traditional forms and create
something new. Something new, he
quickly added, for Mexico, not for the
rest of the world, which had seen his
techniques years before in the works of
such playwrights as Ionesco.

Since the university’s new theatre had
not been completed, Gurrola’s group was
presenting two short plays by twenty-
nine-year-old Hector Azar at El Cabal-
lito, a small, old, downtown house. La
Appassionata told a tragic story in
comic, exaggerated tones: a mother kills
herself and her impoverished family by
poisoning their dinner, thus prompting
her oldest son, who had died years be-
fore, to return and take everyone home
to live with him. Some of Gurrola’s ef-
fects included an unbalanced family din-
ner table that slopes upward so that
the father can sit high and face the
audience, clown-like make up, a speeded-
up recording of La Traviata as back-
ground music, and the entrance and ex-
it of the actors through the set’s painted
furniture to create the atmosphere of an
overcrowded home. Gurrola used a dif-
ferent style for the second play, £1
alfarero (The Potter), which, by a
maze of flashbacks, describes the life of

a pean born Be 1 in unwed mo ‘@

mosphere perfectly, for Mexican theatre

Color Schenie

Out here above the bay
on a crazy perch

my cottage hugs the cliff.
I watch the ship

white on a lead sea

or single slant sail

in the wind; my bed-sheet
makes another on the terrace.
The gull’s wings

cut white arcs

over slate waves.

On the voleano’s flank

a smear of snow;

my window

tufted in crevices

with cotton wads

plays its part. Only

I am aware of

dominance of gray, so white
merely smudges sea & sky
irritatingly, like stains.
Petulant, I stare

at washing flap & wing flap
& sail & snow & ship.

Harotp Norské

Veiled in shadow, the set, although
naturalistic, comprises props for three
scenes: the shack of the peasant, the
pulpit of a church and the bedroom of
the mother. I found the play dark,
heavy-handed and confusing. .

Although Gurrola advertised his plays
for the general public, the audience had
more sweaters than suits; it included
almost no one but students. At other
theatres, I found that Mexico City
playgoers generally are young, middle
class and fashionable, very similar to
the crowds at New York’s off-Broadway
theatres. There are exceptions. The small
audience that came to see Fernando
Soler in a tepid comedy seemed older
than the others, perhaps because Soler,
the dean of Mexican actors, had amassed
his following over many years. And,
surprisingly, the huge crowd at Mi bella
dama, the Spanish version of My Fair
Lady, had many people of a lower eco-
nomic class; whole families attended, in-
cluding sleeping fathers and chattering
children. The music of this American
show apparently has filtered to all parts
of Mexican society.

But the touchstone of Mexican the-
atre, of course, les in Mexican plays
by Mexican writers. Allan Lewis, a
teacher of playwrighting in Mexico City,
recently wrote that these writers “have
a sort of pre-Renaissance quality .
paving the way for a Marlowe or a Ben
Jonson.” Lewis’ description fits the at-

has a sense of turbulence and vitality,
nd even, perhaps, mot greatness,

wey ‘ 1

Crossword Puzzle No. 834

By FRANK W. LEWIS

Bo no

September 19, 1959

ACROSS:

6 down, and 27 across Evidently time
for the guard to take his stint in
solying a mystery. (38,4, 2, 3, 5)
One way to throw a body by gather-
ing around. (7)

What some people forgive in pray-
er, but not spring locks. (7)

A number to bury inside for ex-
ample. (7)

Not the most important sort of
stories. (5)

and 24 Predicaments mischievous
animals find themselves in. (8)
Should it record events for twelve
days? (4,3)

Might leave its card in extreme cir-
sumstances. (7)

Flops like some birds. (7)

and 13 Eleven’s debts might be seen
in the coming issue. (7, 5)

It’s certainly not a Western band
that starts the funeral service. (3)
Mounting assistance, perhaps. (7)
Most women hope not to be winning.
An overenthusiastic one might put
a 27 down on the 25 down. (7)

DOWN:

What a score might be used for is
completely presented. (7)

Would a pupil be forward here to
look over the festivities? (7)

Cap size, leaving no room for space.
Situation in which the clutch may
be occupied? (7)

Got a head by chance, excited by
the talk of youth. (7)

A little this may breed mischief,
according to Franklin. (7)

A nuisance in spoiled grain, queer
though it may be. (7)
Protection, generally speaking. (3)
Die with a stroke during the serv-
ice? (3)

Start in to make the crossing. (7)
Delay concerning will, when ill. (7)
Brake plug. (7)

and 30 Van can’t raise children at
either end. (5, 2,3, 4)

Its star is of Gibraltar and Malacca,
for example. (7)

Go ahead and place a bet for the
old girl! (7)

Did Koussevitzky use such mate-
rial? (5)

Liking to be eminent? (5)
SOLUTION

TO PUZZLE NO. 833

ACROSS: 1 Thorax; 4 Sweaters; 10,

16,

1 down, 5, 26, 25; 23 and 28 across

Ezekiel Saw the Wheel Way Up in the

Middle of the

Air; 11 Yielded; 12

Horse; 13 Tip; 14 Bowie; 15 Ernes; 17
Empowers; 29 Typee; 30 Dwindle; 31

Yellows;

382 Eldorado; 33 Prates.

DOWN: 2 Overrun; 3 Arise; 6 Acerb;
7 Endower; 8 and 21 Sadder but wiser;

9 Blotters;

18 Portrays; 19 Woo; 20

Reverses; 22 Untried; 24 Taproot; 27
Eider; 28 Amend; 29 Tiler.

*»

<—_s”

es 0) eae

a Mb h

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Good Idea—-Wasted

Dear Sirs: The Nation's timely editorial,
“The Munitions Probe We Haven’t
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favor with the American people, in view
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high level government officials and the
munitions industry.

But will such an investigation (one
that will truly investigate) be under-
taken? I doubt it... . No doubt you
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China Lobby; it was smothered in com-
mittee.

Guy W. FINNEY
Burbank, Calif.

In Praise of Bureaucrats

Dear Sirs: The Nation's August 1 edi-
torial, “The Success We Don’t Repeat,”
is meritorious except towards the end,
where primary responsibility for failure
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of concrete instances could be cited of
their relative inefficiency (see back is-
sues of The Nation).

There is little doubt that the next
TVA will be built and operated by a
large private corporation under a cost-
plus contract. The contract will be ad-
ministered by an_ electric-corporation
president loaned to the government for
the purpose. He and the contractor will
see to it that the cost is adequate, so

we ie. '
eo

that there will be no competition with
existing electric rates. Adequate recrea-
tional areas will be set aside for the ex-
clusive use of tired corporation execu-
tives.

If we poor and itked- around but still
méstly honest and competent engineering
and scientifie bureaucrats have actually
delayed this program, then more power
to us. I feel that The Nation’s editorial
could better have concluded with the
suggestion that all new TVAs be 100
per cent bureaucratic.

Ler Kean
Dayton, Ohio

Lincoln in Guatemala

Dear Sirs: 1 have recently returned
from my vacation in Guatemala and
count as one of the highlights of this
trip the “discovery” of the Abraham
Lincoln School at Chichicastenango,
Guatemala, founded six years ago in
honor of the Great Emancipator, caring
for 145 boys. It is poorly equipped, has
no picture of Abraham Lincoln and is
in need of books, pamphlets and other
material that could make this school
a center for Lincolniana in Guatemala.
Please direct your help to:
Director, Escuela Abraham Lincoln
Chichicastenango, Guatemala, C.A.
I. Leo Fisusern, M.D.
Miamt, Fla.

Reality and Fantasy

Dear Sirs: The New York Times of Au-
gust 27 came through with two small
stories worth pondering. One described
some press agents’ Roman antics in the
East Bronx meant to publicize “the
greatest outdoor entertainment center
in the history of man.” The reporter
spoke of a “vast wasteland . . . where,
the press agents said, a $65,000,000 out-
door family entertainment center would
be completed by next July 1. It will be
called Freedomland, U.S.A.” Like a good
journeyman with the macabre touch of
a Nathanael West describing a nightmare
Hollywood scene, the reporter caught a
whiff of what mad dogs and flacks do
in the noonday sun.

The second story described the pain-
ful odyssey of two young nurses from
New. Jersey looking for living quarters
in’ Manhattan, how they were short-
changed by relocation agents, the goon
treatment they received from wolf-pack
toughs and Peeping Toms after finding
an upper West Side apartment. This re-
porter quoted the girls as saying, “We
can’t take it,” and told of their resolve
to quit New York for their homes. . . .

Two Times stories in the passing pa-
gene one a iam rasy preven i,

i _

i Os

Dear Sirs: You are mistaken, I think, in

on realistic terms.” It is, rather, that

In This Issue

' _

ne ofr a reality Seg past be dak
gates of fantasy.

Sip ee
New York City

Wrong Lesson

suggesting in your editorial of August
29, that the lesson of Laos is that “there J
can be no stability on China’s borders §
until the United States recognizes
Peking and is prepared to deal with it

(Continued on page 173)

EDITORIALS
161 @

ARTICLES

164 @ Science Informs the Public:

Liaison for Survival _
by PHILIP SIEKEVITZ

166 @ Factory Hands in the Wilder-

ness: Alaska’s ’59ers
by O’'CARROLL COLVIN

169 ‘© My Crusade Against Preteen
ties
by WADE THOMPSON

172 '‘@ Show Business Is All Business
by RICHARD HAMMER

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

174 @ Dogmansien
by EDMUND WILSON
175 @

Comp ulaan and Creation
GEORGE DANGERFIELD

Mata to Trustee Rumi
by ALEXANDER LAING

“They Also Serve Who Only

Lie in Wait’ G
by LLOYD ZIMPEL

The Anaesthetic (poem)
by DAVID GALLER

Sunbright on a City Way
(poem)
by HAL

Films
by ROBERT HATCH

Souls Like Chisels (poem)
by M.: L. ROSENTH

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 180)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

George G. Kirstein, Publisher
Carey McWilliams, Editor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Kditoer
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music
Alexander Werth, Huropean
Correspondent
Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Sept, 26, 1959. Vol, 180, No, 8
The Nation published weekly (except for omis- |
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A. by |
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
New York 14, N. Y. Second class postage paid :
at New York, N. Y.
Subscription Price Domestic—-One year $8, Two
years $14, Three Years $20, Additional postage
per year, Foreign and Canadian $1. f
Change of Address: Three re giice is rae
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Information to Libraries; The Nation ts Inde;
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Review Digest, Index to Labor Articles, Publ
Affairs, Tae eS ‘Bervice, meee
et Ay ’ i. ‘ea H
4 4 ae.

176 '@

178 @

178 '@

179 @
SAUNDERS WHITR
180 @

180 @

aaa NT

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 9

NATION

EDITORIALS

Honesty and National Purpose

“The critical weakness of our society,” writes Walter
Lippmann, “is that for the time being our people do not
have great purposes which they are united in wanting
to achieve.” In exact synchronism, Tune (September
21), reviewing a book by one of its own editors (Max
Ways: Beyond Survival) sees the United States losing
the cold war and finds the fault not in the policy-mak-
ers but in the American people, “because the United
States has no wide-ranging sense of purpose.” More
arresting than the coincidence of expression is the fact

that each one of us can sce the essential truth of the

central observation: we do indeed Jack a national pur-
pose in the Soviet sense, or perhaps in any sense except
the individual will to survive as long and as pleasantly
as possible. Both commentators deplore the situation.
Mr. Ways ascribes it to the low state of public phil-
osophy, which he defines as a pattern of “coherent
thought connecting individual beliefs with political ac-
tion.”.We cannot, he says, carry to the world a message
that we ourselves have forgotten. Mr. Lippmann like-
wise feels that our influence as a world power will in-
evitably decline unless we regain our “sense of great
purpose and of high destiny.”

This may be so, but the situation may be one in which
exhortation is pointless. National aims cannot be synthe-
sized: they emerge at the appointed time from the vast
flux of human desire, suffering, corruption and nobility.
But if national purpose is not producible on demand,
two lessons may still be learned from the discussion.
One of these both Messrs. Ways and Lippmann have
themselves stressed, and its importance can scarcely
be overestimated: It will not do to make scapegoats of
the Communists because they possess a type of unity
which we lack and, in their version, don’t want; in the
Fascist version, we would like it as little. The other
lesson is that perhaps the clamor for a “national pur-
pose” arises from the fact that we have not meditated
lately on the meaning of freedom in the American tradi-
tion,

It was Alexander Meiklejohn who pointed out in 1935
that the meaning of this country is to be found in its
dedication to the idea of freedom. The special quality

of this tradition is to be found in the fact that it does
not insist upon, nor imply adherence to, any particular
purpose, destiny or national mission. America will al-
Ways mean a great many different things to a. great
many quite different people; but this is its strength.
It will be a dark day. indeed when the “meaning” of
America can be summed up in a slogan that would
look handsome and read well when emblazoned on the
cover of Time or that would appeal to USIA function-
aries as a salable item. We have always been able to
muster the strength we needed to meet the great crises
of the past largely because we have refused to give
way to the perennially stated demand for universal
acquiescence in some ephemeral “national mission” —
one usually defined and proposed by somebody with an
ax to grind.

Decision-Making at a Low Level

Was the decision to upset the delicate balance of
power which the 1954 Geneva agreement had achieved
in Laos made by the President and the Secretary of
State? Or do we have in Laos, as Senator Mike Mans-
“ce

field suggests, “a policy based on Executive agency

accommodation, with the Defense Department, the
CIA, the ICA, or whatever, each putting in an oar and
the State Department trying to guide the boat while
it does not really have the power to control the rudder”?
It is passing strange that such large commitments—
some of which have admittedly been indiscreet and
provocative—should have been made in an area where,
as we are now told, both the Air Foree and the Army
are strongly opposed to intervention. Military planners,
reports Brig. Gen. Thomas R. Phillips in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, “foresee that any assistance that can be
effective, other than air transport, will require the use
of atomic bombs to burn off the jungle and to make a
desert along the lines of invasion across the frontier. In
the process, as many as 100 harmless peasants might
be killed for each guerrilla put out of action,”

Senator Mansfield, therefore, is talking only the most
obvious good sense when he warns of the danger of per-
mitting critically important decisions to be made “on
a relatively low Executive level.” In Laos, the decision-
making was low level not only on the Executive scale,

EE en en

“ye i de

but on the quality scale as well. A correspondent reports
to The New York Times that despite extensive Ameri-
can aid since 1955, the only evident change in Vientiane
is the number of luxury cars cruising the three unpaved,
filthy main streets. The Laotian capital has neither
harbor nor railway, and is the one capital city in the
ri world with no water system, no sewage-disposal system
and no garbage collection. Cocktails cost $2 and the
city’s two plush night clubs import dance bands from
Manila and hostesses from Bangkok, Singapore and
Hong Kong. With the upper-crust Laotians, and pre-
sumably with their advisers, first things come first.

} “Unity” Is Not the Answer

Four years after unification, the American labor moye-
ment is faced with serious internal tension. Fundamental
differences in point of view on both domestic and for-
eign issues between the Meany and Reuther elements —
differences which unification merely concealed — have
once again come to the surface. “United” in its determi-
nation to war endlessly against corrupt unions, the
AFL-CIO is now faced with the reluctance of the ousted
4 I.L.A. locals in New York to rejoin it. James Hoffa
states that the Teamsters would reject an invitation to
rejoin the federation so long as George Meany is its
president. “Unity” has not enabled the AFL-CIO to
organize the South or to block anti-labor legislation in
Washington. In a word, labor is learning that it is not
always true that there is strength in unity; it all de-
pends on the kind of unity.

The Democratic Party has also been discovering the
limitations of “unity.” With comfortable majorities in
both Houses, the Democrats acquiesced in the “unity”
imposed by Messrs. Johnson and Rayburn and have
wound up with a miserable legislative record. At the
outset, Senators Proxmire, Clark and Morse warned
that an imposed unity could produce disastrous re-
sults; their warnings went unheeded. Liberal Democrats,
induced to mark time on civil rights until the end of
the session, now find themselves in the unhappy posi-
tion of having to explain to their constituents how a
Congress controlled by Democrats could pass an anti-
labor bill with only two dissenting votes in the Senate
— yet failed to pass new civil-rights legislation. “Unity”
on the alleged need for a “mild labor reform bill” re-
sulted in the passage of a modified Landrum-Griffin
_ bill which the International Association of Machinists
_ promptly dubbed the Kennedy-Landrum bill. Mr. Tru-
_ man, unmindful of his own experience in 1948, urged
his fellow Democrats at the Midwest Conference in
i Kansas City to “unite,” but a violent intraparty fight
ended with the walk-out of certain delegates and the
formation of a rival organization. Carmine De Sapio
has suffered a major tactical defeat in New York, but
_ in its wake Mayor Wagner calls, not for the ouster of

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De Sapio, but for “unity.” In San Francisco,

Meany blames Speaker Rayburn for passage of the
Landrum-Griffin bill and announces that labor must
abandon the notion that Democrats are necessarily
friends of labor. In New York, Louis Hollander, chair-
man of the state AFL-CIO Committee on Political
Education, rebukes the Democrats and praises Governor
Rockefeller and Senators Javits and Keating.

“Unity” is an elusive social concept. A dictated unity
is meaningless; unless based on consensus, it will not
usually survive the first hard blow. Nor is “disunity,”
if it implies an honest attempt to air real differences,
necessarily harmful. President Roosevelt did not lose
the 1940 election despite his attempt to “purge” certain
Dixiecrats in 1938. President Truman told off the Dixie-
crats and won a stunning victory in 1948.

In the case of both labor and the Democrats, the
barometric readings are similar and the forecast much
the same. Labor has not been routed nor have the
Democrats been defeated, but the gathering clouds are
a warning of defeats to come unless the notion of “har-
mony for harmony’s sake” is quickly abandoned. Both
labor and Democrats are suffering today, not so much
from “disunity” as from a lack of dynamic objectives
which would compel broad grass-roots support.

What Khrushchev Mustn’t Miss

Since every loyal American cherishes some facet of
American life which, if viewed by the visitor from the
Kremlin, will infallibly convert him to the free-enter-

prise system, we wish to make our nomination. It is

not the Girl Scouts, Cape Canaveral, hybrid corn or
Miss America, although for all these things and per-
sons we have the highest regard. Our nomination is
the horse. Of course, Nikita can see a horse, or horses,
when he goes back where he came from and the Na-
tional Review, the Hungarians, and other guardians of
the Republic, cease from troubling him; but our refer-
ence is to that special breed of horse which runs around
a track with a price on its head. A magnificent arena,
dedicated to the welfare and improvement of this noble
animal, was recently dedicated at Ozone Park, Queens,
New York. Its name is the New (capital N) Aqueduct
race track; it cost $33 million, and on the opening day
42,473 fans wagered $3,430,765; how much was wagered
illegally even the police don’t know. This emporium oc-
cupies 203 acres of valuable Queens real estate and will
hold 80,000 followers of the so-called sport of kings,
now fully democratized in the land of free enterprise.
The opening was attended by Governor Rockefeller,
Mayor Wagner and former Governor Harriman, among
countless other celebrities. Color guards from Floyd
Bennett Air Field, the Marine Recruiting Station in
New York, the First Army Base at Fort Jay and the
Mitchel Air Force Base lent patriotic tone.

)

— The Nation

yer Th

George —

Aqueduct ts, of course, only one source from which
the State of New York has derived over $500 million
since pari-mtituel betting was inaugurated in 1940.
Whether the horse gallops with a jockey on his back,
or trots ahead of a sulky and driver, racing and betting
form a perennially prosperous duo. In his race with the
United States, Mr. K. should not fail to see, admire
and love the American race horse. Until he does, all
his threats td catch up with us are an idle boast.

Decisions in Ignorance

In this issue (see page 164), Philip Siekevitz tells
of the exceedingly important and timely work of the
New York Scientists’ Committee for Radiation Infor-
mation. It may be added that not only is the ordi-
nary citizen in need of information on those aspects of
science and technology which will decide his fate and
the fate of his children, but high-level decisions are
often made with little information as to the ultimate

‘ consequences. Clement Attlee, writing in the London
Observer, cites an important case from his own. ex-
perience. He was awarc, during World War II, of the
atomic project; he knew, that is, that the aim was to
make some sort of super-bomb ahead of the Germans,
and consequently steps had to be taken to sabotage
the Norwegian heavy-water installation which had been
taken over by the Germans. But that was all he knew.
“JT knew nothing whatever about the genetic effects of
an atomic explosion,” Lord Attlee writes. “I. knew
nothing about fallout and all the rest of what emerged
after Hiroshima.” Did Mr. Truman and.Mr. Stimson
give much weight to these aspects when they decided
to use the bomb? Did they even know about them?
Did the scientists impart to them such information as
they then had? Lord Attlee thinks not: “As far as I
know,” he states, “President Truman, Sir Winston
Churchill and Sir John Anderson, manager of the Brit-
ish project, knew nothing of these things.” At this
moment decisions may be in the making with equal
lack of prescience. In this technological age, there can-
not be too much of the kind of activity which the Sci-
entists’ Committee has undertaken, and it is needed as
badly in Washington as in New York.

Not Insured

A nuclear exclusion clause has recently been added
to floater insurance pelicies. It reads: “This company
shall not be liable for loss by nuclear reaction or nuclear
radiation or radioactive contamination, alt whether con-
trolled or uncontrolled, and whether such a loss be di-
rect or indirect, proximate or remote, or be in whole or
in part caused by, contributed to, or aggravated by the
peril(s) insured against in this policy; however, subject
to the foregoing and all provisions of this policy, direct
September 26, 1959

loss by fire resulting from nuclear reaction or nuclear
radiation or radioactive contamination is insured against
by this policy.” The company. might, that 1s, replace
your property if it is ignited by a nuclear blast and burns
up (provided the company is still solvent), but if the
article is ruined as a result of concussions caused by
a nuclear explosion, that’s your hard luck. Now suppose
you are at home when disaster strikes. In Wisconsin,
at least, you are out of luck again, if you are still alive,
that is. The Blue Shield Plan of the State Medical So-
ciety of Wisconsin states among its general exclusions,
“services required because of any injury, sickness or
disease caused by atomic or thermonuclear explosion, or
radiation resulting therefrom, or any type of military
action whether friendly or hostile.” In these matters
everyone is on his own. Nothing could symbolize more
graphically the breakdown of the social mechanisms by
which individuals are protected, ‘at least financially,
against the vicissitudes of life. The irony of it is that
this particular peril is wholly man-made, wholly artifi-
cial, yet it transcends the perils of unassisted nature.

Out of Your Kitchen Burner

Most people think of helium as the gas which should
have been used in the dirigible Hindenburg, but wasn’t.
It has Because it resists

liquefaction at low temperatures, it is an invaluable

more immediate virtues.
adjunct in certain fields of technology. As a coolant,
it keeps liquid the hydrogen and oxygen used as mis-
sile fuels; and in the same capacity, it may make pos-
sible miniaturization of machines — computers, electri-
cal equipment — at unimaginable savings in power and
space. What is more, helium is one of the few valuable
resources of which — so far as known — this country
has a monopoly; 99 per cent of the world’s supply is
derived from the natural gases found within 250 miles
of Amarillo, Texas.

The government now has five extraction plants sitting
astride the pipelines leading from the gas fields. But
these plants together extract no more than 20 per cent
of the yield. So 80. per cent of the world’s supply of
helium is now escaping into the atmosphere, mainly
through kitchen gas ranges and industrial furnaces. At
this rate, the Amarillo fields will have run out of the gas
by 1980.

The Department of the Interior has been asking
Congress for a half-billion dollars with which to build
storage facilities sufficient to assure this country
enough helium until the year 2,000, But neither Con-
gress nor the Administration paid any attention to the-
request. The reason? Perhaps it is our federal legislators’
traditional dislike for doing anything which smacks of:
conservation, or their equally traditional reluctance to’
spend a dollar which will yield a profit, not to private
enterprise, but merely to the people.

163,

164

hare!

TE Raa) Pane ew OL) eae !

Peep ae in,

SCIENCE INFORMS THE PUBLIC

LIAISON F OR SURVIVAL ee by Philip Siekevitz

FOR ABOUT a year a group of New
York scientists, aware of public in-
terest in radiation problems and the
pohtical issues involved, made them-
selves available to laymen as speak-
ers throughout the metropolitan area.
The arrangement was informal — too
informal, in fact, to meet the de-
mands of a public whose hunger for
information proved unexpectedly in-
tense and widespread. A few months
ago, therefore, the scientists organ-
ized themselves into The Scientists’
Committee for Radiation Informa-
ton, with plans afoot for incorpora-
tion, an office, an executive secretary,
and the publication on a regular basis
of an information bulletin.

At this writing, the committee con-
sists of about twelve active members,
most of them from the Rockefeller
Institute in New York City, plus a
score more from all over the city who
are gradually being drawn into active
participation. The “activists” are al-
ready speaking to laymen’s groups at
least once a week, sometimes twice, in
response to eager requests which are
constantly increasing. Liaison has
been established with a somewhat
similar organization in St. Louis, the
Committee on Nuclear Information
[see The Nation, June 13, 1959] and
soundings are being taken with the
aim of founding similar bodies else-
where in the country.

The existence of the New York
and St. Louis committees, and the
response to them, point up of course
the sad lack of public information on
a vital subject. In this regard, the
government clearly abdicated its re-
sponsibility, especially for the first
ten or twelve years of the postwar
period, During that time, only gov-
ernment scientists working in govern-
ment laboratories were studying
radiation and its effects; and, given
the platitudes of the cold war, the
restricting effects of government
bureaucracy, the power wielded in

_ their time by Senator McCarthy and

PHILIP SIEKEVITZ is a biochemist
at the Rockefeller Institute, New
York.

Admiral Strauss, it was not surpris-
ing that private knowledge of this
aspect of public affairs was practical-
ly impossible to come by.

Today, the situation has changed.
It isn’t only that the curtain of offi-
cial secrecy has been lifted somewhat
(the AEC publishes the results of
much of its work, even if quite late
at times); mainly it is because quite
a large number of laboratories other
than “official” ones are working on,
and publishing articles about, vari-
ous aspects of radiation.’ The truth
is that information now is not too
difficult to obtain, if one knows
Where to look and can understand
the scientific jargon.

So it comes about that most of the
members of the New York Scientists’
Committee for Radiation Informa-
tion are not radiation “experts,” but
merely scientists who know how to
obtain scientific publications which
are not easily available to the gen-
eral public, and who by their train-
ing are qualified to evaluate the
material contained therein. Rather
than radiation “experts,” they regard
themselves as middlemen between
the scientists who do the work and
the public upon whom, sooner or
later, the results of the work will im-
pinge. The members of the commit-
tee regard this task as much a part
of their duties as that of experimen-
tal laboratory work. More and more
scientists are coming to be swayed
by this viewpoint — a good omen, I
believe, for the future of our tech-
nological society.

THERE IS another aspect of this
ingathering and handing out of in-
formation which is not so fortunate.
Most of the official pronouncements
on radiation coming out of Washing-
ton these days are in the form of
“briefings” by men who have been
delegated to the job by government.
And since all governments have an
official policy, these briefings are not
always unbiased explanations of the
results of scientific experiments, but
are usually colored — by distortion
or omission — to make the results

fit the policy. This situation is to be
expected, but unfortunately the pub-
lic does not understand that govern-
ment spokesmen, whether or not they
are scientists, are not expounding sci-
entific results, but are parroting offi-
cial policy.

Thus, members of the New York
scientists’ committee, and other sim-
ilar information bodies, have another
role — that of correcting not the re-
sults of government laboratory work,
nor the scientific conclusions drawn
from them, but the notion that the
results are necessarily identical with
the political interpretations which
are often almost flippantly derived
from them. The task is not made
easier by the feeling that many of
the interpretations are deliberate dis-
tortions which are particularly seri-
ous in the case of radiation informa-
tion because they affect the lives of
countless human beings.

Now, these distortions make sci-
entists angry, but they make the
general public only confused. Au-
diences addressed by members of the
New York committee consist of
many diverse groups: PTA bodies,
SANE (Committee for a Sane Nu-
clear Policy) gatherings, church and
women’s clubs, ever. some business
groups like the Kiwanis and Lions.
At such gatherings, the same ques-
tions always come up: “Who is right,
Teller or Pauling?” “Why does X,
the government scientist, say. this,
and Y, that other scientist, say
that?” In most cases, the conflict
arises not on matters of fact, but in
their interpretation: whether, for in-
stance, a couple of hundred thou-
sand deaths in a world population
of nearly three billion represent
something important or unimportant
in the total scheme of things. For all
scientists involved in the radiation
problem agree, more or less, on the
experimental obseryations; it is the
nuances that are different. No mat-
ter what government spokesmen im-
ply, there is no such thing as safe
radiation; the effects are all bad. The
problern reduces itself to this: how

much hazard should the citizen be

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forced to accept in this insecure

world? And I think that the chief
source of audience anxiety lies in this
question: who should decide what
should be the size of the hazard? It
should be emphasized that this is an
ethical question, to be answered in a
democracy by democratic procedures,
and not a question to be left to of-
ficial scientism.

THE PEOPLE who come to the lec-
tures do so for several fundamental
reasons. Some come from fear —
fear of an uncertain, insecure future
for their children. Some come out of
a conviction that their government
has not given them all the informa-
tion available. Some come because of
a regular psychologist’s handbag of
anxieties. But most come, I[ think, be-
cause of their interest in radiation
information. They realize that soon-
er or later, perhaps within their own
lifetime and certainly within that of
their children, a new form of energy
will predominate in the world, an
energy which we all know can be put
to good and bad use.

Of course, these audiences are not

‘a cross section of the American pub-

lic, but they are certainly a cross
section of the politically conscious
and the political doers. And one gets
the impression that many in these
audiences are somewhat ashamed of
their naiveté about radiation, that
they want to rid themselves of the
anxieties which spring from igno-
ranee and that, consciously or un-
consciously, they blame the govern-
ment for not having kept them in-
formed on these particularly im-
portant matters. The very fact that
they have to attend lectures under
private, rather than government,
auspices would seem to them proof
enough of government disinterest in
their knowledge and opinions.

The inevitable question at the end
of these information sessions is:
“What can we do about it?” What is
meant by this question is not pri-
marily, “How can we put a stop to

nuclear bomb testing?” (though, of

course, this 1s the intent of some ques-
tioners, and secondary, at least, in
the minds of others). What these
people want to know is, how can they
voice their opinions, whatever the

groups as the Scier

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the information necessary to form-
ing opinions?” they ask. The tech-
nological world has been bolting
merrily along, without a murmur of
dissent, and suddenly here is the
atom bomb, here is strontitum-90 in
fallout, and the heart is seized with
anguish. Are the people fools? No,
for this is their government at the
reins in a new revolution and, by
rights, the government should grant
them a voice in deciding the direction
the revolution should take.
Everywhere that the group has
lectured, it has been met by resent-
ment at the government because
they, the people, have been held to
have been uninterested in being in-
formed and, even if interested, in-
capable of grasping knowledge. Why?
Because the public are not experts.
And this is the nub of the mat-
ter: the thought that “experts” are
running everything. I think that the
vital, overwhelming interest that the
audiences have in atomic energy and
all its manifestations is but the re-
flection of a faith that democratic
procedures are not doomed because
one needs to be an “expert” to un-
derstand any of the many complicat-
ed facets of modern communal life.
The people resent the notion that
“there are experts and there is the
laity,” that there are no longer in-
dividual citizens, but a mass, a mob;
that the government, because it has
recruited “experts,” is hence alone
“in the know” — and inviolate.
Thus the major premise of such
> Committee
n is not the
/ concerning
dling of the

belief that in a democracy the people
can stil] obtain the necessary tech-
nical information to run their own af- i
fairs, and that the “experts,” far from
always being right, sometimes know
less what is good for the people than
do the people themselves. The prom-

ise is that eventually Americans j
will learn that they can get to know in
enough to instruct their Congress-
men in atomic-energy affairs, and in- aa

deed in all the technical probleme of
our society, and that Congressmen
need not forever be led to the ex-
ecution platform by experts who
have axes to grind. | ay i

THE audiences know that democ-
racy dies with increasing disuse;
tyranny feeds on every decision that
is not made by the representatives
of the people. Integration in the pub-
lic schools should not be left to the
Supreme Court; every legislature
should settle the matter on its books.
The uses of radioactivity, whether
for peacetime purposes or for testing
of the nuclear bomb, should be left.
not to the AEC, but to Congress.

The educating of the citizenry is a
big order for scientists’ information |
committees. Yet, remembering the
Fabians and the workérs of England,
something might come out of it; per.
haps these committees are the core
of a Fabian Society of a new revolu-
tion. And there is another reason
which ought to spur scientists o Pia
their efforts. If some holocaust s hot ld
occur, it would be the scientists y
would be damned. Scientists are ra
ing against time, in order — amon
other reasons — to save then
from being hanged.

CAR Sa ae Trek re eae

Palmer, Alaska
THE REMAINING bands of Michi-
gan’s Fifty-niners — whose treks last
spring to ‘‘a homesteaders’ heaven in
Alaska” reportedly represent the
wish-fulfillment of millions of over-
mechanized Americans — now find
themselves in a situation less like
heaven than hell.

Of the first nineteen families who
started out starry-eyed, and duly en-
shrined by the nation’s press, tele-
vision and radio, only six are still
together, precariously perched on
Jand they have staked and uncertain
whether they can stick it through
the winter. The second caravan of
twenty families, with forty-two chil-
dren among them, has split into feud-
ing groups, living in rented trailer
camps and cabins and planning to
look for jobs or return to Detroit as
soon as their joint fund of cash
accounted for.

Their dream of creating a self-sus-
taining farm community, an Alaskan
paradise free of the competition and
time-clock tensions of city and fac-
tory life, has ended in failure for
several reasons. Sadly enough, some
of the Fifty-niners will tell you the
failure is partly due to the very evils
they fled from.

“The break-up of our group began
before we were a day on the road,”
said Floyd Miller, a young welder in
the second caravan. “Speed was one
of the things we wanted to get away
from — but all the way up here
half the guys were hittin’ and honkin’
behind the other half of us, tryin’ to
make us speed up. Every night at
our meetings they were gripin’ and
bellyachin’ and name callin’ because
we weren’t gettin’ here fast. And four
of the guys kept tryin’ to take over
from our leader. Competition all over
again.”

‘His wife nodded ‘assent. “Kind
fa rmers in Canada offered us eggs at

Sc a dozen. Some of our people
f grabbed all of them, leaving none for
the ones who didn’t get there first.
The same old rat race!”

Like most in the second caravan,

walter and his wate, 2 a ‘drill-press

ul. So aula

FACTORY HANDS IN THE WILDERNESS.

ALASKA’S 59ers eo by O'Carroll Colvin

The Nation’s editors asked O’Car-
roll Colvin of the Anchorage, Alaska
Daily Times, to report on the thirty-
nine Michigan families that last
Spring sought to establish new homes
in Alaska. Her manuscript was ac-
companied by the follozwing letter.

Palmer, Alaska
September 2
Dear Sir: On August 10, I gave the
original of the enclosed piece to John
Corey, the school teacher at the In-
dian village down the lake, to mail
for me from Homer, over on Cook
Inlet. There’s daily air-mail connec-
tion from Homer to Anchorage and
I wanted to get it to you sooner. To-
day, on my neighbor’s radio, I heard
that Corey’s body had been washed
up on the shores of Cook Inlet. ...
I’ve no idea whether he ever made it
to Homer, whether you have had this
piece for weeks now.

There’s been no mail or other plane
in here for two weeks of flood rains
and wind storms, which have only
begun to subside today. If the week’s
mail plane can get in here on floats,
and if a boat can make it up to the
post office, from which I’m now
marooned, this will get out tomorrow.

After five days and nights of un-
ceasing rain, our river has turned in-

operator, had quit their jobs and
sold all they owned for their stake.
With four other families, traveling
in trucks or cars with trailers, they
had ended up in this camp site in
the Matanuska Valley, fifty-five
miles north of Anchorage. “I went
up with other men here to Willow,
where another group from our cara-
van is camped,” Miller said. “We
heard there’s plenty of open farm
land there. We tramped around i

the brush for ten miles but there’s
no timber there for our cabins. Then
some of us went up — across that
godawful river — to see if we'd join
the Fifty-niners in the first group
homesteading in the Susitna Valley.
But without a bridge across that mile
of boiling currents and shifting sand-
bars — well, none of us want to go
there.” “‘

ny a '

to a churning Niagara. Ripping out
thousands of eight-foot spruce trees
and barrel-sized boulders: like match-
sticks, it swept away the. steel-cabled
extension bridge that was my link to
the air strip and to the post office
six miles away. ... The water be-
hind me has been rising until it ts
now a foot from the back of my cabin,
and the lake in front is three feet
away.

But the rain seems to have slacked
off since last night. If it hasn’r, or if
the wind should swing to the west
and batter the big, drowned trees
against my thirty-year-dld, sagging
cabin, I’m set to get away. I'll head
for the high land half a mile back
with the one-armed trapper and his
family whose home is marooned with
mine. His canoe is tied to a tree at
his back door with sleeping bags,
tent, cook stove and grub ready. If
we have to go, I'll take this with me.

If you get this carbon copy by
Friday, September 11, you'll know
that I haven’t had to, and that this
little crisis is over.

O’CarRoLL COLVIN
Epiror’s Note: 7'he original, “hard”
copy of Miss Colvin’s manuscript was
never received. The carbon copy, with
its attached letter, reached our of-

fice on Friday, September 11.

Miller said he would look for a
welding job in Palmer — twelve
miles away from his present camp site
— where he could rent a house for
$100 a month. “At least our child
could go to school there. Homestead
on my own? I don’t know a thing
about farming — and all I'd have to
take into the woods would be my
guns and fishing gear and chain saw.”

A carpenter and his sick wife and
three children were hunched over a
bare wood table in the cabin next
door. “This is crazy,” he said. “We're
heading back just as soon as I find
out what, if any, I can get back from
my $525 — the amount each family
put into our equipment fund. Where
the land and timber are available, it
isn’t just privation you face. With-
out roads or communications, it’s a
question of your igri s survival.

His wife paused, stacking the sup-
per plates. “We’re lucky we didn’t
sell our house back home — only
rented it a year for $85 a month.
That’s $5 less than we’re paying for
this,” she said, looking at the sagging
beds, the single light bulb, the water
supply in two pails carried from a
nearby tavern. “Back home we have
six rooms, contemporary ranch style,
with wall-to-wall carpeting, rose
bushes and landscaping, the school
bus a block away.”

The families gathered outside in
the sunshine, the children spreading
out to play. The men looked over
at two battered old trucks loaded
with rusted tractors, sawmills, power
generators and farm machinery
bought secondhand with money
from their common fund. “Maybe we
can sell that junk and split what we
get for it,’ one of them said. “At
least three fathers — one with seven
children — haven’t the money to
get home.”

FORTY miles away, near Talkeetna,
in a big box the clergyman-elec-
trician whom the group called “the
deacon” had fashioned for living
space on the back of his truck, he
and his family clustered around a
bench holding a gas- -powered lamp
and a shallow tray containing a dime-
store turtle and a six-inch plastic
palm tree. “I guess I'll have to get
out my tools and go look for work
in Anchorage,” the deacon said. “I
guess only a group inspired by a
shared religion and sharing all their
earthly goods can succeed in this
kind of a venture.”

“We didn’t think it would be any-
thing like this,” his wife whispered
fiercely. “No roads where we could
homestead in a group, no school to
get to. Our child must not miss this
year of school. But God led us here
and He will show us the way.” This
last sentiment was repeated.

“The way” for the six Fifty-niner
families actually attempting to home-
stead together has been unguided
and unaided. It remains beset by
ignorance, isolation, poverty, geog-
raphy and bears.

Wrecks, breakdowns and dissension
had marked their snow-clogged 4,600
mile route last March when, with
thirteen other families, they reached

September 26, 1959

the Kenai Peninsula. The center of
Alaska’s current oil explorations, now
spreading 250 miles south of An-
chorage, this was the area chosen by
their advance scout and they found
it much as he said it was. “Like an
indescribably beautiful painting un-
rolling against a backdrop of cloud-
capped mountains, whispering prairie
grass and abundant timber, with a
good climate and streams full of
salmon ready to leap into your fry-
ing pan.” But to their consternation
they also found what he neglected
to tell them: not a single block of
its good farm land, near a road and
big enough for ten to twenty home-
steads, was not already filed on.
They also learned that it costs
$150 to $350 per acre to clear land
in Alaska, that its few hundred farm-
ers face extremely tough competition
from giant outside shippers, that
loans to beginning farmers are al-
most non-existent, that even newly
cleared tracts must be heavily fer-
tilized from the first year, that short
summers endanger many crops and
make others impracticable, that
heavy snows and harsh cold preclude
winter ranging of cattle, that adjust-
ing to the primitive conditions of

Willow

- susitnay Matanusk3e (Palmar

homesteading in the wilderness 1s
hardest of all on city dwellers ac-
customed to even the simplest ameni-
ties,

These were some of the reasons
they discovered, during three con-
fused weeks on the Kenai, why only
a tiny fraction of Alaska’s home-
steaded lands are farmed, why at
last count over half were unoccupied
or abandoned, why some tracts have
been filed on as many as seven times.

The cruel truth sundered the nine-
teen families. Some set back for
Michigan, some searched for jobs,
three filed on separate homesteads
on the Kenai. But the six remaining
families — with not a farmer among
them — resolved to make a try to-
gether despite the calamitous handi-

caps. After expensive air trips to
other prospective areas, they wake
on the Susitna Valley. To reach i
they had to drive. back to tahoe
and, at a cost of another $500, load
their three trailers, two trucks, one
car and one jeep onto Alaska Rail-
road flatcars and travel north 112
miles to Talkeetna. This, their last
link to the outside world, is a mori-
bund village of one hundred whose
general store offers fresh milk

XN Syed 5
DW 4 “hn ES. ES

We \)
Vex Valdes, Uf

Re FAIRBANKS

a Sen

167

(shipped in once a week) at 50c a
quart, frozen chicken at $1 a pound
and gasoline at 75c a gallon.
Unloading their equipment in Tal-
keetna’s mud and slush, the little
band had to haul it through the
village and across a mile-wide ex-
panse of rotting ice where three
rivers meet at the village edge. One
of the women described the frantic
ordeal: “The men worked day and
night for four days, trying to get
everything — the drums of oil and
gas, the tents, the livestock, the
thousands of pounds of food and gear
across while the ice stiil held. We
women tramped back and forth car-
rying cartons of stuff in the snow
and ice. We were wet up to our hips
and scared stiff. On the fourth day,
before we got the third trailer over,
the ice broke. One boy fell in but we
fished him out safe from the freezing
water.” The end of the journey was
six miles further — down a desolate,
narrow, snow-choked road, where the
white wilderness swallowed up these
nineteen men, women and children.

FOR TWO months their tent and
trailer homes remained on the road
while the men ripped out seventy-
foot spruce and birch trees and at-
tacked the chest-high undergrowth
to make the first clearings. (“The
only patch of sky we could see was
the little strip over that lane.” )

By August each clearing, about a
hundred feet square, was still a hap-
less chaos. Trees lay where they had
crashed akimbo between gaping crat-
ters, and the reddish earth was ripped
into twisted ridges. Stumps and their
roots uptilted six feet in the sky in
jagged balls of soil, and great mounds
of gravel and clay, hauled up in
buckets by rope and pulley, were
piled where wells were being dug by
hand. Some wells were down thirty-
two feet without reaching water. The
men had not yet succeeded in erect-
ing cabins for themselves, much
less a shelter for their livestock, or

even outhouses. What a frontiersman
could do with ease in a day took.
_ these city men a week or two by

borious trial and error. Framed by
e dark, dense forest and the raw
clearings bogged in mud, the hud-
" ples of family pomessions looked

," F Re :

Pah k
met bedsprings and mattresses,
clothes wringers, wash tubs, water
barrels, rugs, record albums, cartons
of canned goods, of flour, coffee and
sugar, of books and bathroom tiles,
drums of oil and gasoline, tanks of
propane gas, suit cases, tools, bicycles
and broken umbrellas.

On Gerry Donaldson’s clearing
(Donaldson said he quit his job with
the Detroit bus system after nine-
teen years, when the company
changed its retirement time from
twenty-five years of service to the age
of sixty) a small truck garden show-
ed modest promise. Standing in a
drizzle of rain, Mrs. Donaldson was
feeding wood to a massive and cur-
licued stove, bought secondhand en
route, which stood on planks over
the mud near their. trailer. In her
wide-brimmed white straw hat veil-
ed in black net — cut from her petti-
coat to shield her from mosquitoes
— she made an insouciant figure as
she baked biscuits and fried salmon
while the rain bounced off the stove
top. Inside the trailer, freshly ironed
pillow slips — pressed with a stove-~
heated iron — and wild flowers on
the table betokened her high spirits
despite each day’s new problems.

That day’s problem was a goat
belonging to a fellow settler. Its eye
had been gouged out by the horn
of a heifer. Peroxide had been pour-
ed into the wound, but no one knew
if this was the right treatment. Prob-
ably too late to save it, they learned
next day that it wasn’t.

Also imperiled that weekend was
a cow belonging to another family.
While the young mother washed dia-
pers in tubs rigged on a mud-swamp-
ed platform — in water which Don-
aldson had trucked in barrels from
a creek eight miles distant — her
husband described the sick cow’s
symptoms. The next day Donaldson
drove twenty-eight miles to seek the
advice of an old-time homesteader
who has befriended the newcomers.
“That cow has mastitis — probably
had it when he bought her last week
— and if it’s not taken care of right,
like I’m tellin’ you, her milk will
dry up,” the old sourdough told him.
“Look, I’m tellin’ you fellahs all I
know — for your own good and the
good of this country,” he went on,
* “Now you say you 1 want to get a

td
, *
» °

. z ~ mY i ,* ri Yr
horse to pack out moose for the

hunters this fall. Know anything
about horses? Know the first thing
to do when you look at one?”

“No,” said Donaldson uneasily. —

“The first thing you do 1s lift its
tail. If the horse slaps it down quick
and hard, you know it’s a young
one. Now, you take its teeth —”
Donaldson looked more and more
worried as the old-timer tried to
initiate him into the expertise of
the horse trader.

Driving back to his clearing, Don-
aldson stopped for a look at a few
acres of oats the Fifty-niners are
sharecropping. Unless the weather
holds up for the harvest, Don-
aldson said, the owners of the three
cows, four heifers, two goats and
thirteen chickens among them
couldn’t afford to buy winter feed
for these animals. Potatoes on part
of the two more sharecropped acres
were doing well, but most of the
other vegetables were choking to
death because of crowded planting.

In the first three months, three
disasters had been avoided. When a
gravely ill child had to be gotten to
the Anchorage hospital, a prearrang-
ed emergency-signal of dynamite
blasts had brought the boatman
from Talkeetna. (From there the
boy was flown by bush pilot.) When
a trailer and perhaps the valley were
threatened by a brush fire lit by a
greenhorn, everyone came running
in time to quell it. When bears twice
ripped up one tent home, by good
fortune its tenants were absent.

Even if such luck holds and their
buildings are up before winter hits,
the men are worried about finding
jobs to help carry them. The stakes
they had counted on to last a year
wouldn’t, at Alaska’s prices. Resi-
dents of less than a year are not
eligible for welfare aid.

LIKE THE prospective homestead-
ers who came with them, most of
these men are skilled factory and
construction workers. But even in
the construction trades they have
virtually no chance of using their
skills here this year. A statewide
carpenters’ strike which began June
27 and stretched into September
paralyzed the short building season.

_ As construction — mostly military

js Alaska’s number one industry,
the halving of its estimated $85,000,-
F payroll this year is a body blow
to all business. With a population of
60,000 to 70,000, Anchorage and its
environs can probably provide jobs
of some sort for the Fifty-niners,
but if most of some 7,000 applicants
‘who filed on land in the year ending
“July 1 are newcomers who will look
for jobs here this winter (no statistics
are available on their status), the
prospect is a grim one.

THE NEW state already faces very
serious problems in helping its job-
less this winter, By July 1, when nor-
eaulg the unemployed are fewest,
“the number covered by the state’s
“insurance program had increased by
about 20 per cent over the same pe-
riod the previous year. The Anchor-
age office alone accounted for a

total of 2,261, which was 607 more
than the same period in 1957. With
the fishing scason expected to yield
little more. than half of last year’s
disastrous returns, with furs, lumber
and mining in the doldrums (mining
last year dropped 30 per cent from
its 1957 figure), Alaska’s people fore-
see a winter of hardship.

An economic survey published
last February by the Seattle First
National Bank closed with the flat
statement: “The last thing Alaska
needs at the moment is more people.”

Alaskans themselves seem to be
on the horns of a dilemma on this
question. They know they need new
settlers by the thousands to create a
prosperous state, but this means
creating thousands of new jobs to
support them. They know that even
if there is a major oil strike, oil
production itself will not create many

jobs. And though the Japanese have
taken some first steps, there is no
evidence that big investors are rush-
ing in to exploit the great potentials
in hydroelectric power, in bottom
fishing, in iron ore, perhaps, and in
pulp and timber. Until they do, and
until roads link Alaska’s million or
more acres of agricultural land to
thriving markets, prospective home-
steaders would do well to ponder
these words of farm officials: “By
the time land is cleared, a home and
barn built and animals and equip-
ment acquired, a homesteader in

laska may have to put $65,000 and
ten to twenty years of hard labor in
his undersized tract of 160 acres.”

Today there is no evidence that
the state or federal government is
forming new land-development poli-
cies to replace those which are sowing
hardship and heartbreak.

4
‘
ig

“Frat” is a contraction that is no
longer in good usage. It is correct
only in connection with Greek-letter
high school and non-collegiate socie-
ties and then only as an expression
of contempt.—From the Pledge
Manual of a great national fraternity.

TO ANYONE who has better things
to do than to poke his nose into the
_ idiocies of educational institutions,
this account of fraternities and their
frailties may seem like a sour fan-
tasy—something spun out of the
morbid brain of a disgruntled college
professor who has nothing better to
do than to play with words and
_ distort facts. T can only promise the
_unbeliever that I record every word
_with gruesome sobriety, with malice
_ toward none and strict justice and
_ charity toward all. Motivated solely
_ by a sense of wonderment at human
i behavior, I bring to the task a pon-
_derous, porous and pedantic mind,
! through which I have squashed all

WADE THOMPSON, whose “My
_ Crusade Against Football” (The hae

tion, April 11, 1959) was anyway a
succes d’estéme, teaches literature at
Brown Umiversity.

tember 26, 1959

jae

My Crusade Against Fraternities

facts, statistics and quotations in the
best scholarly manner. (To preserve
objectivity and strict impartiality,
the terms “frat” and “fraternity” are
herein used indiscriminately, with no
pejorative connotations put upon
either word.)

1 was drawn abruptly to my
scholarly duty toward fraternities the
other day whén [ accidentally stum-
bled over an issue of the National
Interfraternity Conference Y earbook
—in this case, a record of the forty-
eighth annual meeting of all social
fraternities. This particular meeting
Was exceptional in that it was blessed
by a wild kick-off from Dr. Ralph
W. Sockman, a noted New York
pastor. Dr. Sockman obviously knows
his way around a pulpit, and I’ll bet
he has scared the living hell out of
more people than Norman Vincent
Peale can ever boast of. His address
to the forty-eighth National Inter-
fraternity Conference proved to be a
real masterpiece, a positive sym-
phony of high sentiment. Starting
with a tender, pleasant pianissimo,
he gradually and gracefully intro-
duced a few contrapuntal themes,
smoothly crescendoed to a grand cli-

e by Wade Thompson

max, and ended with a smashing
major key resolution. I have time
to replay only a few climactic bars
of Dr. Sockman’s composition:

America is showing something
superior to the Kremlin at the mo-
ment....

We are the style-setters morally
for the world. That is not boasting.
It is just humble recognition. We
are.

These great college fraternities—
sixty-one of them in this group—
are style-setters under God for the
world at large. .

Now men of the cloth are of huge
heart and prodigious faith, but some-
times their very goodness disqualifies
them to speak on certain subjects
which they clearly wot not of. It
behooves men of crasser and meaner
composition to straighten them out
occasionally, lest they inadvertently
turn their ministerial cannon in de-
fense of some other worthless cause.

It is in this spirit that I point out
to Dr. Sockman that a frat boy
wouldn’t know what a moral style-
setter was if one came up and goosed
him, “These great college frater-
nities,” as Dr. Sockman calls them,

169

that no one else has looked for far enough to find...

are the silliest, stupidest institutions
invented since the intussuscep-
tion of the chastity belt. They have
no more moral “style” than a collec-
tion of Mafia gangsters, D.A.R. girls,
Army generals or ladies of joy.

WHEN A young man is chosen to
enter a frat, he is known as a frat-
pledge, and he must pass through a
period of pledgeship—roughly cor-
responding to an apprenticeship peri-
od for knights or bricklayers. As a
frat-pledge, he is expected to undergo
certain trials and to learn certain
lessons, for which purpose he is given
a Pledge Manual. The lessons he
learns are three in number: (1)
Sentiment—or how to love his
brother; (2) Smoothness—or how .to
conduct himself; and (3) Ritwal —
or how to perpetuate the old frat.
So far as Sentiment is concerned,
I cannot do better than to quote
from a Pledge Manual of one of our
most famous fraternities. (There is
no point in getting thjs stuff second-
hand.) On page 76 appear detailed
instructions on how a frat-boy. feels
toward his brother: é

I love you not only for what you
are, but for what I am when I am
with you.

I love you not only for what you
have made of yourself, but for what
you are making of me. 7

I love you because you have done
more than my creed could have done
to make me good, and more than
any fate could have done to make
me happy.

170

Arline Willar
“T love him for drawing out into the light all the belongings

”

I interrupt this tender lyric to as-
sure the reader, who may have be-
come confused at this point, that
this is brother-to-brother sentiment,
and not advice on how to seduce a
maid or woo a wife. I go on, and
now the rhetoric really begins to
steam:

I love you for the part of me that
you bring out. (Part not specified.)

I love you for putting your hand
into my heaped-up heart and passing
over all the foolish and frivolous and
weak things that you can’t help
dimly seeing there, and for drawing
out into the light all the beautiful,
radiant belongings that no one else
had looked far enough to find.

T turn off the steam here to assure
the reader that I am not treacherous-
ly divulging sweet sentimentalities in
contempt of an understandable re-
quest for privacy. On page 94 we
learn that the frat-boy is urged to
let his “Mom” and “Dad” read his
manual, so that they too can appre-
ciate the nobility of feeling and
smashing tenderness of regard which
frat-boys harbor toward each other.
If Mom and Dad can stand this, so
can we.

One more taste of the joy-juice:

I love you because you are help-
ing me to make of the lumber of my
life not a tavern, but a temple, and
of the words of my every day not a
reproach, but a song.

I love you for closing your ears to
the discords in me, and for adding
to the music’ in me by worshipful
listening.

~ 4
-

Boy, oh boy! That is sentiment like |
mother used to bake. Actually there —

is more, but the rest of it is, I’m
afraid, just a pinch too much even

for Dad or Mom.

AFTER THE frat-pledge has been
dunked sufficiently in this vat of
Sentiment, he must steel himself—
it takes courage to join this outfit—
to endure a lesson in Smoothness.
Smoothness is a quality so devoutly
to be desired that no fewer than
forty-six brilliant metaphors are ex-
pertly mixed, amid incantations and
mutterings, to insure its miraculous
conception.

As the heavens are high above the
earth, so is God above His subjects,
and so am I far above any feeling
of contempt for a frat-pledge who
volunteers to be smoothed up. Like
a rough and uncouth diamond, the
brave boy must be chipped and
sanded and polished before he can
submit to be worn on his lady’s
finger. Fully 47 per cent of the Pledge
Manual is devoted to a detailed de-
scription of the process. Time is
limited, however, so I shall deal in
the next paragraph with only one of
the milder forms of smoothing—the
Dinner.

The unassailable Saint George him-
self, during the great dragon-carnage
of 744 A.D., could not have felt
more trepidation at the prospect of
battle than the modern frat-pledge
must feel as he scrubs his face and
lips in preparation for Dinner at
the Frat House. The manual warns
him that “the dining table is the
Waterloo for those who don’t know”
—a terrifying proposition surely and
one not calculated to allay the ten-
sions and fears of the frat-pledge.
Like a_ knight-fledgling in King
Arthur’s Court, he is instructed with
hair-raising minuteness on the strat-
egy of the diurnal battle of Water-
loo: “The spoon must be held some-
what the same as a pencil, but at a
different angle, of course, the handle
passing between the first two fingers,
and the thum [sic] resting on the up-
per side.” And even if he gets his
thum-sic firmly on the upper side,
he now has the grim task of trans-
porting the victuals while at the same
time engaging in Conversation.
(“Conversation at the table should
be in a moderate tone and should be

‘ ov"
ie as =

as I

confined to agreeable and reasonably
refined subjects. . . . Discussion of
women should not be indulged in at
the table.”) But even if he leaves
out women, he must know that
many a mess has been made between
the platter and the palate, and that
one drop of a pea could mean the
loss of the entire battle.

But let us suppose he wins the
battle; he now has to learn his Ritu-
al, most of which is so fantastic that
it would put to shame the master of
ceremonies of a Polynesian fertility
rite. I personally was once privileged
to witness a full-scale, nationally or-
ganized, recondite and highly esoter-
ic ceremony — done up with full
scenery, costumes, tears, nobility and
appropriate moanings — so I know
whereof I speak. I shall spare the
reader any details: suffice it to say
that the whole thing was excruciat-
ing; every last word, every last ges-
ture, was drawn out, tortured and
buried publicly to the unutterable
misery of everyone present, so there
is NO point in trying to reproduce the
affair on paper. Besides, all present
had been enjoined to keep it secret
(I can easily see why). It went on
for two hours and fourteen ghastly
minutes.

Beware of an organization that has
to douse itself constantly in ritual
and high nobility. Any enterprise
- worth its weight in salt can be shot
heavenward with just a couple of
ripping prayers and a handshake or
two. It’s the lame-brain outfits that
traffic in high mumbo-jumbo and
creep through their existence with
the vitality of a snail: the D.A.R.,
the American Legion, the Society
for the Admiration of Charlie Wil-
son. All such collections of dolts re-
quire enough ceremony to bore the
archangels — as wel] as the cheru-
bims, seraphims and ordinary angels
— and enough nobility to bore Ralph
W. Sockman himself.

WHY DO fraternities exist? Their
demerits are so numerous, their short-
comings so short: they codify snob-
bery, they pervert values, they corm
rupt decent instincts. They eat on ex-
clusiveness, they thrive on intoler-
ance, they presume to stratify peo-
ples and beliefs, they gorge on
stupidity and inanity, and they dis-
gorge heartache and _ viciousness.

| September 26, 1959

What amazing secret do they possess?

One popular myth has it that they
have some remote relation to schol-
arship — that they actually promote
it. This is so foolish as scarcely to
warrant comment, Even deans and
frat-boys know better. Any frat that
can keep its scholastic average even
close to the average of non-frat
students for as long as six months is
so rare that it can confidently ex-
pect to be pelted with plaques and
trophies, and people will stand
around and marvel at it.

No, the answer lies elsewhere, and
if | may be pardoned for momentar-

Arline Willar
“I love him for putting his
hand into my heaped-wp heart... .”
ily departing from stringent objectiv-
ity, I offer my own speculations.
A true education is a harrowing
experience. A student who wants to
be educated must be courageous in-
deed. He must expect all his com-
forts and illusions and complacencies
to be ruthlessly ripped away. He
must drink the cup of humility to its
last lees and dregs. He must have
the courage of a man about to sit
in an electric chair; he must be pre-
pared to watch his toenails curl and
his flesh sizzle. In one sense, this is
a lonely ordeal. Not that he can’t
communicate his experience—he can,
of course — but he can’t delegate it.
He must feel it himself. The experi-
ence is intensely personal and in-
dividual, charged with pain and
thrills, with glory and terror,
Not: many people can stand this
experience. Even fewer, I’m sure,

Yi
‘ é “Y

want it. But the danger that it will
happen to a few students is always
present, so long as there are good
teachers and’ good books lurking
about. Frats offer the student an easy
protection against electrocution.
There is safety in a group, particular-
ly if the group is identified and sur-
rounded by inanity. The group says,
in effect, let us all stick together
and nothing much will happen to
any of us. And nothing very much
does.

I KNOW whereof I speak, for I my-
self have tasted the divine nectar of
fraternal brotherhood. It happened
at the University of Chicago, shortly
after the last war. At that time the
entire university was infested by in-
tellectuals and would-be intellectuals
— with the result that frats were
finding it mighty rough weather in-
deed. Frat chapter after frat chapter
was forced to fold its tent like. the
Arabs and as silently sneak away for
lack of patrons. The few that. did
manage to survive did so primarily
because they offered a place to.live—
and places to live were then hard to
come by. The result was that these
frats found themselves occupied by
the most unlikely and unfraternal
brothers in creation — most of whom,
like myself, had just been released
from the armed services, and had had
our fill of stratified idiocy. I confess
the impurity of our motives, but I
will say we gave the old frats every
chance to endure, if only they had
been endurable. At least I can speak
for the one I belonged to. We even
went through the ritual as prescribed
— a minor duplication of the ritual
I described earlier — although I
admit we speeded it up considerably.
Indeed we got so good at ripping
through it, that we reduced the time
to two minutes and fourteen seconds,
and I am convinced we could have
cracked the two-minute barrier if
only we could have gotten over that
lumber-temple-tavern business with-
out faltering.

Now it so happened that the head-
quarters of the national fraternity
were in downtown Chicago, and the
permanent cadre of the frat were
mighty suspicious of us. Once we
took in two Jewish boys, and they
swooped down upon us and gave us
a terrifying sermon on the dangers of

“mongrelization.” Then one day one
of the national brothers spotted a
couple of Negroes in the house—and
that did it. Brotherhood had gone
too far, and the whole intention of
this great moral style-setter was
being subverted. The chapter was
abruptly and unceremoniously closed,
the house sold and the heretics were
perforce scattered far and wide.

I mention this incident for two
reasons — one personal and the other
philosophical-historical. Philosophi-
cally-historicaliy, the incident simply
hasn’t been recognized — even Al-
fred McClung Lee in his Fraterni-
ties Without Brotherhood (Beacon

a Sara

Press, 1955) does not-mention the
matter — possibly he didn’t even
know about it,

Personally, I was not on the scene
when the climactic bit of anti-mon-
grelization took place, but I submit-
ted a letter of protest to the Awful
Powers, and announced my resigna-
tion. This seemed to me the only
fraternal thing to do. A couple of
days later I received, to my utter as-
tonishment, a reply from the nation-
al headquarters to the effect that
my request to resign was completely
out of order, and that I should con-
sult Section 7 of Article XV of the

fraternity constitution before writ-

ing any more letters of protest. 1 con-

sulted the vital section, and literally
rubbed my eyes to see that “no
member can voluntarily sever his
connection” with the organization.
The whole force of the revelation hit
me. You can’t get out! Like joining
a penitentiary — you stay in till they
put you out.

For seven years now I have been
enduring, waiting, suffermg — but
always hoping, hoping, hoping that
my misconduct will be heinous
enough to warrant expulsion. If this
article serves to reduce my sentence
by even one day, it will have been
worth the writing-—if not the reading.

Show Business Is All Business..

ON THE FACE of it, it would al-
most seem that the Broadway The-
atre has never been in better health,
economically at least. With the num-
ber of new plays arriving each year
pretty well stabilized over the past
decade at about seventy (compared
with 260 thirty years ago), and with
the number of theatres holding at
thirty-two (against - eighty only
twenty years ago), box office re-
ceipts and audiences have been
mounting. During the 1958-1959
season, in fact, 11,720,000 theatre-
goers paid more than $40,150,000 to
see seventy-one Broadway dramas,
comedies and musicals — an au-
dience increase of 863,000 and a box
office boost of $3,000,000 over the
1957-1958 season. What’s more, for
the first time in the history of the
theatre, last year saw weeks in which
more than $1,000,000 passed into
the till — and not one such week,
but eight.

This is the outward face of pros-
perity; behind it hes the inner face
of trouble. For, despite the record
audiences and gross, the season as
a whole ended up $500,000 in the
red, And, as usual, five out of every
“six shows were Anencinl flops (the
‘percentage of artistic failures was

RICHARD HAMMER has written
on the theatre for The Economist
(London) and other publications,

even higher). Costs of everything
continued, and_ still continue, to
mount. To bring a straight drama
to a Broadway house now involves
an outlay of $100,000 or more (three
times as much as twenty years ago,
twice as much as ten years ago),
while the cost of producing a musi-
cal may run to the astronomical
total of $350,000 to $400,000. Merely
to keep pace with operating expen-
ses, without doing anything ‘at all
toward paying off the original i
vestment, a straight play must gross
$20,000 or more every week at the
box office. This means, in terms of
audiences, 60 per cent to 70 per cent
of capacity at every performance,
with the entire orchestra floor sold.
The needs of a musical are even
greater. Little wonder, then, that
only smash hits last for more than
a few weeks and that few producers
take a chance on anything new or
with a potentially limited audience.
In some cases, certainly, there are
legitimate reasons for increased
costs: the salaries of supporting and
minor actors have at last reached
a livable level, as have those of
backstage personnel. The costs of
materials — scenery, lighting, cos-
tumes, advertising ahd the like —
have gone up not only in the theatre,
but all over. But where some cost
rises have been int a and even
desirable, others are in a. different

? a es , ( eg > lane
é Sao ie rr’ ae La? yy:

by Richard Hammer -

category. Theatre owners, with sey-
eral plays competing for each of
their houses, now demand a larger
share of the receipts, higher guaran-
tees against losses, and sometimes
even reductions in their share of such
expenses as stagehands, advertising
and the like. The stagehands? un-
ions, watching the decline in the
number of playhouses and the re-
sultant contraction in available jobs,
have demanded, and gotten, regula-
tions establishing a minimum num-
ber of jobs for each theatre and
carefully limiting the functions of
each worker. And because these are
strictly minimum regulations, a show
which has a higher budget or a larg-
er cast is required to hire more
stagehands —- even if the additional
men have nothing to do but sit back-
stage and play poker.

Designers, lighting men, costumers
and other technically creative peo-
ple, working toward what they call
“perfection,” demand the best pos-
sible materials, regardless of budgets.
The experience of one producer in
this respect is particularly illuminat-
ing. Just before starting work on a
new play, he had spent the summer
watching a Connecticut neighbor
build a new home at a cost of $25,000.
At the theatre, that fall, his set de-
signer asked for $40,000 to put up
an impressionistic frame house on

the stage, “Would it be pote 8

_
~

he tse: finally” naaet ‘in cer.
t fon; “if we installed real plumb-
ng?”
_ As long as everyone else is getting
heirs, the stars and the playwrights
are not to be denied. Top stars
can now command a base salary of
$2,000 or more a week against a
ercentage of the gross. In some
ses, this brings their weekly income
to $7,000 or more — a high price
to pay for talent on any terms. And
the authors, long the forsaken men,
have at last come into their own,
argely through the intervention of
their agents. Not only do authors
draw their legitimately handsome
royalties, but they now have gained
a veto right over stars, cast, di-
rectors and other aspects of the pro-
duction. While not too important to
he authors themselves, this power
vives the big agents a hold which is
learly apparent.

THE MAN on the spot, then, is
the man trying to put on the show:
the producer. While meeting the de-
nands of stars, the theatre owner
and the unions, he must also try to
‘protect his investment and that of
‘his angels (still relatively easy to
find). The easiest way for him to
‘meet these financial pressures is to
crease the price of tickets and deal
with people who will buy them in
‘huge lots. Thus, musicals this sea-
‘son will have a top of $9.90, while
‘seats for straight plays will cost up
to $7.50. At these rates, almost
‘everyone except the expense-account
‘boys and the theatre parties is priced
‘right out of the audience.
That ubiquitous institution, the
‘theatre party, has come to the rescue
‘of many a producer in the last couple
‘of years. With its aid, he can come
into New York with an advance sale
‘of $500,000 to $1,000,000 or more,
knowing that he’s going to run for
‘a good, long time and very probably
turn a profit — or, at least, break
even. .
Bc rianpements for the theatre par-
ties — there are thousands every
year and the number is growing —
e handled by any one of twelve
jid iifferent theatre-party agents, who
ge 6% per cent of the price
0 pack ticket. In

some ways,

producer; in- others, more difficult.
If the producer has something the
agents think will sell, then he’s all
set; they will work to get as many
organizations as possible interested,
and sell as many tickets as they can.
But if the agents think the producer
has a lemon, or a show which won’t
interest their clients, they will sit on
their hands. (The tickets they handle,
of course, go to organizations which
in turn sell them at high premiums,
which are tax deductible. Thus, the
audience brought in by the agents
don’t generally go to the theatre be-
cause it is the theatre: they go be-
cause the $25 or $50 they pay over
the ticket price make it a tax-de-
ductible evening. )

The power of the party agents is
obvious. With their control over vast
audiences, they can break or make
a show by their recommendation or
lack of it. Only recently theatres were
forced to call off a plan to experiment
with an early, 7:30 P.M., curtain
on Wednesday nights because agents
had already booked 120-odd parties
for these midweek nights.

UNDER all of these pressures —
mounting costs which mean _ higher
ticket prices which mean reliance on
theatre parties and expense-account
crowds — the New York theatre, at
least on Broadway (and increasingly
off-Broadway, too), is losing its real
audience. A love for the theatre is
something that is built early in life
and lasts a lifetime. But today, the
newly-married young people, the
kids out of college, just cannot af-
ford to go. This potential audience
doesn’t exist any more; and the
steady, every-week theatregoer has
become a thing of the past.

With producers reluctant to take
a chance on anything but pure en-
tertainment, the vitality that was
once New York theatre is gone. The
effect is sometimes as baleful upon
the critics as upon the theatre. Now-
adays when an occasional producer
does show a spark of vitality | by
puting, on. something e ven a little

ned to praise
mpt to

Hie In ‘their desperate a
save the theatre for the
critics, too, along wi
else, seem to have los

enough for a play; there must- be
artistic merit as well. The theatre
isn’t going to be saved by praising
its every valiant failure.

What becomes obvious about the
Broadway theatrical scene is that
art and economics have become one
and indissoluble. In order to try
to make money, the producers pro-
duce only what they think the
majority want. Even the serious
drama is generally only pseudo-seri-
ous, but since it is “different,” it is
greeted with praise, may make some
money (which Shakespeare fale
does ), and presents a general 1 1
pression that things are returning to
greatness. But the impression is only
fleeting. The total impression of the
theatre in the United States today
is of gloss and polish and technical
finesse; of an art form without art;
of a vital aspect of life without

vitality.
LETTERS

(Continued from inside cover)

there can be no stability there—or in
a number of other places—unless the
United States keeps out, instead of try-
ing to impose unpopular governments
on other peoples.

I would recall, in this connection, that
the Geneva Conference of 1954, which
was the only international conference
since the end of World War II which
achieved a positive, and generally satis-
factory, result, was one in which China
participated, without being recognized
by the United States, and at which the
United States was represented only by
an observer. In his speech as chairman
of the closing session of that conference,
Mr. Eden remarked: “The agreements
concluded today could not, in the na-
ture of things, give complete satisfaction
to everyone, but they have reduced in-
ternational tension at a point of instant
danger to world peace. All will now de-
pend upon the spirit in which they are
observed and carried out.”

The present troubles in Laos would
not have arisen unless the Royal Laotian
Government had committed grave in-
fringements of the Geneva Agreements,
and of their supplement, the Vientiane
Agreement, wane in relation to deme
cratic rights and freedom for its c
and had been encouraged, if not ac
inspired, ‘in, this policy by the oe

see ij? Jeon
ee

E. P. Youre

—

na NP oD Oe

D
re,

fi ae

BO O K “ a nc tho k RTS

Nee SUPERMANSHIP, or How to Con-
Bo tinue to Stay Top Without Actually
ae Falling Apart. By Stephen Potter.

ey! Random House. 128 pp. $3.

, Edmund Wilson

IT IS astonishing that Stephen Potter
should have been able to sustain this
joke so long. Supermanship, the fourth
volume of the series that began with
Gamesmanship, is in no respect inferior
to the others. It begins with a report on

r : :

ye the progress of the Lifemanship Corres-
ia pondence College of One-Upness and
ha Gameslifemastery. The college has now

a new building, “actually smaller” but
“infinitely more modern,” which “partly
; derives from the Chapel of the Second-
} ary Ausverfleischenhiiltz.”

School at
P There have also been changes in person-
oy nel. G. Odoreida, whose “unethical” prac-
D tices had always presented a problem,

was, it seems, dropped four years ago,
and has started a spurious school of his
” own. On the other hand, three new
\ members have been added to the Life-
manship staff. C. Sticking has a “pri-
mary attack,” “extraordinarily difficult
to counter,” which mainly consists of a
laugh, “big and Falstaffian, blowing
away “a happy guilt-free

cobwebs,” “a ¢
laugh — ‘gloriously sane,’ little Effie
Weeks called it.” He was able to remain
“top man” for fourteen months till de-
posed by the Lawrenceman, who is
“small, pale, intent, serious, with rather
large plastic features in a small face, and
a big dark beard, round and soft and
soggy.” They never knew whether he
had actually read Lawrence (D. H.),
but he had somehow picked up from
him a formidable method. It was found
that he could stop Sticking dead in his
tracks by shifting the conversation to
a level where one found oneself groping
with primitive symbols and_ profound
psychological insights. Both, how-
ever, were put to rout by J. Cannery —
who seems to combine something of
Angus Wilson with something of John
Betjeman. Cannery was invariably. de-
lighted with everything that was said
and done because — a specialist in the
history of lift styles — he was a con-
noisseur in the ideas and architecture
of the middle class day-before-yesterday.

EDMUND WILSON’s Apologies to the
Iroquois will be published in January
by Farrar, Straus G Cudahy.

J A ‘a
ode Ce ; io Yew
; a ;

_ dal world, the

Donmanship

If Sticking said, “Progress...,” for exam-
ple, the Lawrenceman would say, “In
what sense?” But Cannery would block
them with, “It’s dead right for period.”
What is so good in these books of Pot-
ter’s is the brevity and compactness of
the presentation. As in any practical
manual, the principles are stated and
concisely illustrated. Nothing goes on
too long.

This opening section is followed by
discussions of the Lifemanship of Babies;
“How to be good at the piano without
being able to play much really”; “How
to be Top Christmas”; Reviewmanship;
Carmanship; and the ploys and counter-
ploys in use among lecturers and chair-
men. The chairman, to undermine the
lecturer, may have little notes sent him
from the audience and reply with dis-
tracting signals; or, in sitting down after
his introduction, cross his legs in such a
way as to reveal that his right sock does
not extend much above the shoe, thus
diverting the attention of the audience
to “this large white naked ankle.” The
lecturer may resort to the Distinction
gambit by waiting till the house is quiet
and “taking one small tablet out of a
green glass bottle from which a very
long tail of cotton-wool has to be pulled
before the tablet will come out, and then
be stuffed back after,” thus suggesting
that he is “plucky to be there at all” and
that it is only the burning spirit that
gives him the strength “to raise the
chalk to the blackboard.” There is, also,
a ploy-by-ploy guide to the ways in
which Supertown and Supercountry may
score off each other when playing host.

I HAD supposed that the kind of covert
dueling which Potter has been satirizing
—though of course it goes on everywhere
—was a phenomenon that, in this viru-
lent form, was particularly characteristic
of English life in the period since the
last war—in which a fierce competition
of pretenses has been stimulated by the
recent lapsing of actual prestige and
wealth. But a rereading of Thackeray’s
Book of Snobs has shown me that this
habit is of very long standing. The
fakery of Supercountry, as well as other
themes of Potter’s, appears here in more
pompous and brutal terms. Of the pre-
tenses that are satirized by Thackeray,
winemanship survives in Potter; but in
Potter’s more impoverished and less feu-

if Wie a) Ls

When, later, 1 had been reading John
e can hardly be any

question of having the grocer brought
in to play butler.

THERE IS one aspect of Potter’s sub-
ject which I have been looking to see him
deal with but which he has so far un-
accountably neglected: one-upmanship
in academic -circles. This seems strange
in view of the fact that Stephen Potter
began as a scholar and must know the
academic life. It is to be hoped that he
will eventually deal with it; but, in the
meantime, since he has not done so, [I
should like to add here a few notes that
I have collected in this department. The
commonest and most primitive kind of
competition that goes on among Amer-
ican professors is to top one another in
reading. I was once told of a conversa-
tion between Irving Babbitt and some-
one else of equal competence in the field
of romantic literature which soon re-
duced itself entirely to an exchange of
the titles of books. In this game, the
opponent is supposed to show by a
brief appropriate comment that he has
read the book named by the other. Of
course it is easy to cheat if one’s op-
ponent does not press one too far, One
may know something about the book
without having actually read it, and so
risk a non-committal response that can-
not be too wide of the mark. But if the
question is cleverly put and searchingly
followed up, it may reduce the opponent
to a confession of ignorance. One of the
high scores is driving one’s opponent —
this is quite difficult to do — to a con-
fession that he has not only not read the
book but has not even heard of it. The
highest points of all — and I have heard
of this happening at Harvard — are
scored by inventing a non-existent book
and getting the other man to pretend he
has read it. The most reliable way, I
should say from my own experience, for
the non-academic person to counter a
well-equipped scholar, who has scrutin-
ized and read more than he has, is to
cut in with some opinion, offhandedly
and freely expressed, which is quite out-
side the scholar’s gambits and will cause
him to gasp and sulk. I discovered this,
entirely without malice, through a series
of incidents in conversing with profes-
sors. In talking to the late Tucker Brooke
at the time he was working on Marlowe,
I referred to T, S. Eliot’s theory that
The Jew of Malta was meant to be J
comic. It turned out that Eliot on Mar- |
lowe was completely out of bounds. }

Ford, I

Vista
ai

expressed to another Elizabe an
2 th et. Oy a é i ;
ai

|. Ege NATIO)
hy, He

7
‘J

PP Ae a Pare

PP TOS

ye >

expert ee) seemed td ms ‘Hie harmless

opinion that Ford, when he strove to

_ be fancy and fine, was imitating the late

Shakespeare. This elicited the sharp re-
joinder that this had never been said by
anyone, that no statement of any such
opinion could be found in the literature
of the subject. | now exploit these shock
tactics deliberately.

Bur all this is crude enough work in
comparison with the refinements of one-
upmanship which are practiced in the
English universities. A book can be ban-
ished from the conversation by saying,
“Oh, do you really?” and changing the
subject. John Strachey has an excellent
story of meeting in the street at Cam-
bridge, in his undergraduate days, his
older cousin Lytton, to whom he express-
ed his enthusiasm for Freud. Lytton soon
put an end to this by saying simply
“Does that interest you?” There is also
the more piquant method of behaving in
such a way as to suggest that the author
in question is a pariah for reasons too
vile to mention. Either ploy is effective
in preventing one’s opponent from know-
ing whether the author has been read or
not. There is also the more commonplace
trick of concealing one’s ignorance of,
say, Wells's novels by admiring his sci-
entific fantasies (which one may well not

Compulsion

NEUROTIC DISTORTION OF THE
CREATIVE PROCESS. By Lawrence
S. Kubie. University of Kansas Press.
151 pp. $3.

Ceorge Dangerfield

“T KNOW well what such men are,”

said Trollope’s Theodore Bolton in The

—_—

Claverings — he was talking of Cam-
bridge dons — “and I know the evil that
is done to them by the cramming they

-endure. They learn many names of

things — high-sounding names, and they
come to understand a great deal about
words. It is a knowledge that requires
no experience and very little real
thought. But it demands much memory;

and when they have loaded themselves

in this way, they think that they are
instructed in all things. After all, what
can they do that is of real use to man-

kind? What can they create?”

One would hardly go to Theodore Bol-
ton, or for that matter to Anthony Trol-
lope, for subtle insights into contempo-

_ GEORGE DANGERFIELD is the au-

thor of The Era of Good Feelings (win
ner of a Pulitzer prise in 1953), View

had a tendency to pros

toria’s Hii, = aes ace

have read either) or of Shaw’s plays by
praising his dramatic eriticism.

But the feats | admire most are the
Oxford-Cambridge devices for remaining
inexpugnably on top of one’s subject.
| used to be told that the approved
procedure was to go on being known all
one’s life as an authority on some sub-
ject without ever publishing anything.
You were supposed to know so much
about it that no one dared to bring it
up in your presence. Phen you died,
leaving nothing but notes, which you had
bequeathed to some other scholar, who
would never do anything with them.
But I believe that this gjuiet method is
now rather out of date. Instead they
have a marvelous new double ploy. You
work a long time on gome aspect of,
say, Milton, of whom — to the conster-
nation of people who think highly of
him and are eager to hear about him —
you speak with utter!contempt: “A
randy old Puritan who ‘hated women”;
or of Voltaire: “A professional cad.”
But then when your bpok appears, it
turns out that you haye treated your
subject with deep reverence and perfect
discretion. You have thus scored smart-
ly twice: first by shocking people, then
— after the shock has Worn off — by
doing what they hadn’t expected.

and Creation

rary dilemmas, Yet here they seem to be
saying that erudition js not wisdom,
that the merely erudite can be immature,
and that repetitive diseiplines are not
creative. As a man who-had a miserable
education at two great English public
schools, Trollope could have added — if
the idea had been available to him —
that repetitive disciplines have an un-
happy similarity to neurotic processes.
He could have, but surely he wouldn’t
have. Considering those mechanical work
habits on which he prided himself, and
the endless drowsy repetitions which he
dearly loved and which seem to drug his
genius, one can only suppose that the
old boy would have rejected the idea as
unmanly, Yet on his own confession he
was deeply and permanently wounded
by his experiences at home and in the
school,

Dr. Kubie’s rear all little book put
me in mind of Trollope b ecause Trol-
lope’s - Autobiography begi ns with the
destructive influences of «
Dr. Kubie’s book ends
with education — with
that education so far in

e, to encourage imm
‘rather than to releas

creative potential of the human -race.
This suggestion (it is hardly more than
that) rises inevitably from the two
fundamental propositions in his book.
The first is that the creative and the
neurotic processes are universal, “be-
cause both arise in early childhood, not
out of exceptional circumstances but out
of simple and ubiquitous human ex-
periences.” The second is that these two
processes “are intertwined but mortal
enemies,” and that there is no truth
whatsoever in “the ancient cliché...
the culturally noxious assumption
that one must be sick to be creative.”
How ancient the cliché is may be a
matter of argument. I should have
thought that ic could not be found be-
fore the nineteenth century; that it is
essentially Romantic. Of its endurance
into this post-Romantic era there may
be less doubt. Out of a long experience,
Dr. Kubie maintains that many psy-
chologically ailing artists, writers, musi-
cians and scientists refuse therapy from
a fear that “in losing illness they will
lose not only their much prized ‘individ-
uality,’ but also their creative zeal and
spark.” In short, it, is somehow not their
creativity that matters; the neurosis,
rather, has become unique. And yet, in
reality, the neurosis (Kubie says) is the
most banal and undistinguished com-
ponent of human nature.

IT IS a little hard to accept this,
partly because the symbolic language
of neurosis is apt to appear rich, com-
plex and inventive; and partly because
it is difficult to discard the belief that
there is something usable in neurosis.
We are certainly able, in theory at least,
to accept the idea that it is quite wrong
to try to define an artist in terms of his
neurosis; but we may still feel, if neu-
rosis is universal, that his relation to
his neurosis is what counts. If he can
picture it or objectify it in some way so
as to make it accessible to others, has it
not then served a creative purpose?
Dr. Kubie agrees that to “express our
own illness is not merely a privilege: it
is a supreme duty, a calling, and a
destiny.” But he would add that we can
hardly express our illness, our profound
contemporary concern with the neurotic
in human nature, unless we have some
less confused idea of what neurosis is.

To describe it as a conflict between the —
ego and the destructive forces within: :

the psyche is to give it a heroic qual
which

denies that it ever has.

says that normal and paychapath-
ior differ in this way: nor-

that

set it in mo-

Dr. Kubie, if I understand him,

i ible to. freedom
Same in neurotic be-

“To make free use of analogy

tion predetermine its automatic repeti-

tion, and this irrespective of the social

or personal consequences of the act.”

‘The more behavior approaches the nor-
mal, the more flexible it 1s; the more
neurotic it is, the more rigid and repeti-
tive it becomes.

The construct of the Mind, then, as
Dr. Kubie sees it, is such that neurotic
processes never work for, but invariably
creative-inventive processes. It
is such that illness always and every-
where blocks and corrupts invention. He
describes our mental processes in terms
of a symbolic spectrum, One end of this
dominated by the Con-
scious, where the mental processes are
anchored to reality “by their precise
and literal relationships to specific per-
ceptual and conceptual units.” The other
end is dominated by the Unconscious,
which is anchored to unreality because
it contains only memory traces of past
unresolved conflicts, and because its
symbols, when they present themselves
to conscious inspection, both portray
and disguise the conflict they are con-
cerned with. The intermediate space is
dominated by the Preconscious, which is
the source of creativity.

agaist

spectrum is

THE Preconscious is not a term orig-
inal with Kubie. Freud, for example,
recognized it as one, part of the tri-
partite Mind. But Kubie gives it a far
greater emphasis and, infend: assigns it
an entirely new role in the release of the
creative potential of the human race.
In his interpretation, the Preconscious
is a psychological system, concurrent
with the other two, whose function it is:
and al-
legory, superimposing dissimilar ingredi-
ents into new perceptual and conceptual
patterns, thus reshuffling experience to
achieve that fantastic degree of con-
densation without which creativity in
any field... would be impossible.” The
Preconscious is cogitation, in the spe-
cial sense of co-agitare, “to shake to-
gether”; the Conscious is intelligence,
in the special sense of interlegere, “to
select from among.” The Preconscious
is capable of thinking, indeed cannot
help but think, more than one thought
at a time; the Conscious, to achieve
clarity in communication, which is its
purpose, must think one thought after
another. The first is analogical and in-
credibly swift; the second is logical,
and relatively very slow.

‘To be healthy, therefore, implies a
flexible interplay between the Pre-
conscious and the Conscious; to be un-
healthy implies that the mind is

dominated by the rigid and distorting
rule of the Unconscious, or the some-

what less but too literal influence of the

4M, ‘ ge

Conscious. I realize what damage I am
doing to Dr. Kubie’s ideas by these
over-simplifications. But it would be
fair to say that, although they are the
result of close observation and long
practice and of the study of a mass of
clinical data, they are still in the realm
of diagnosis rather than of cure; that
they are more hyp othetical than practi-
cal,

In any event, they awake in the
reader — or at least awoke in this reader
—some of the apprehensions they would
wish to dispel. Dr. Kubie says, for ex-
ample:

The influence of this [unconscious |
rigidity can be observed in_ the
stereotyped repetitiousness of form
and content in the works of the
musician, of the artist, of the writer,
and of the scientist. How often is it
said that a man has painted the same
painting over and over again, told
the same story, composed the same
music, ground the same scientific
ax? Were it not for this fact, it
would be impossible for the special-
ist in the arts\to recognize a man’s
paintings from their technique and
content, or his music without hav-
ing to be told who the composer was.
|The italics are mine.| It is the
artist’s unconscious which leaves a
personal signature on his work as on
his handwriting; and like a finger-
print left by a thief in the night, it
it unmodifiable and therefore non-
creative, All this is the price
we pay whenever unconscious pro-
cesses hold the upper hand... .
Does he not here point, after all, to a

Memo to Trustee Ruml

MEMO TO A COLLEGE TRUSTEE.
A Report on Financial and Structural
Problems of the Liberal College. By
Beardsley Ruml. McGraw Hill Book
Co, 94 pp. $2.95.

Alexander Laing

SWATHED in a crackling thunder-
cloud, a senior loomed up in my office
to demand an explanation of his grade.

“What’s the complaint?” TI asked,
wishing I could recollect ever having
seen him before, or the research paper
with which he was menacing me.

“T thought I was right on top of this
one, sir. | beat my brains to shreds on
it, for two solid weeks. And what do I
woth Ae lousy hag | oncinti

(Hook, in the academic j jargon, meant
a C minus.) a)

Ve went ‘th his: paper poseanits

aie on 7

_ Educational Services Adviser. Mr, Laing

ane ‘ ‘ * eyes

/ rita ee a,

vital relationship between neurotic ps
cesses and the artist’s “personal signa-
ture,” his visible creative identity, that
which distinguishes him from other
artists? If this is so, then I should cer-
tainly hesitate, if [ were an artist, be-
fore I asked for therapy.

Elsewhere he says: “Occasionally
one encounters a man or a child whose
preconscious learning processes, through
some happy accident, operate freely.
He learns effortlessly. . . . Yet because
he has done this with Seven League
Boots, and at the speed of all precon-
scious processes and without laboring
through all the intermediate steps, he
is unable to explain to anyone else how —
he has done it. Nor can he teach.” But
suppose that it was not a happy ac-
cident: suppose that education, heeding
Dr. Kubie’s criticism of it, succeeded
in making preconscious processes avail-
able in a way that is not possible to-
day. What then would be the state of
communication, if one could neither
explain nor teach?

But the private mind like the body
politic, when it meets with some new
concept, is apt to prepare the stake and
the faggots. Nothing is safer than to
be left in error. Nothing, on the other
hand, is more exciting or more consol-
ing than to accept the possibility that
one may be in error. Dr. Kubie’s book,
as far as it goes, certainly makes this
possibility acceptable. I regard it as a
brief, learned, lucid and modest prole-
gomenon to a_ lifework which, as it
develops, may well prove of inestimable
help to us all. And heaven knows we
need it.

paragraph by paragraph: one, as it
proved, graded in the final free evening
of Christmas vacation. (Free evening.
Vacation, More academic jargon, mean-
ing something else.) As usual, IT had
decorated the margins of the first sixty
papers too liberally and had had to
skimp the last few. When the many
criticisms which I had not had time to

ALEXANDER LAING, a professor at
Dartmouth College, divides his duties
about evenly between teaching and ad-
ministration. He is chairman of a stand-
ing committee of the faculty and was a |
member of the committees that devel- —
oped Dartmouth’s courses in Great Is-
sues and Humanities, He is at present

is the author of some iieent books,

mainly fiction,
a RS ts ays ah Nae 7 fi i

in a |

. .
4 LA P an
te Se, ho ea Tee

N A >
jot down all were spoken, my. visitor
wus silent for a while. Then he swung
toward me in a different kind of anger.

“Three and a half years,” he said,
“washing a million dishes, slapping black-
top on the roads in the summer heat,
for an education! Why did I have to
wait till the middle of my senior year
for somebody to take just one hour of
his precious time to show me why I’m
a C man?”

“The C man’s a myth,” I admonished
him.

“You’re looking at a myth, then,” he
said. “You gave me the right grade,
don’t worry. Sure, I got some A’s in
high school, or I wouldn’t be here. But
in college it’s been C plus, C minus, all
the way. Why didn’t I get this close-
up treatment from somebody, before it
was too late?”

What could I give him but the truth
of the matter, which should be repeated
now to an inquiring, imaginative trustee
of the college where this took place?

“We haven’t enough teachers here to
do the job that all of us as individuals
would like to do.”

BEARDSLEY RUML has made an en-
during notch for himself in the wallets
of his countrymen as the begetter of a
scheme for forcing everybody to buy
what nobody wants, ahead of time, on
the installment plan. Once more, in
Memo to a College Trustee, he offers
a numerical scheme of ruthless simplicity.
He would boost our student-teacher
ratio from 10:1, the traditional opti-
mum, to 20:1 — and, in the inevitable
shake-up, tear out a clinging network
of pedagogical inefficiencies. Few of us
would question his catalogue of defects
in the liberal college. They are common
knowledge among us: the anarchic de-
partmentalism, the delegations of func-
tion that pose as devices of democratic
choice, the ponderous and wasteful com-
mittee system, the coalition voting that
protects vested interest by frustrating
imaginative change.

Mr. Rum rightly perceives much that
is out of kilter. His remedy is suspect
because his analysis is partial. He has
consequently missed a principal reason
why such absurdities persist. Looking
downslope from the peak of the academ-
ic pyramid, he seems to perceive a pro-
cess which can be at the same time
lamentably disorganized in its methods
and satisfactory in its results. His cure
involves the holding of faculties to their
present sizes until student enrollments
have doubled. From an unchanged tui-
tion rate we shall then get twice our
current pay. The work load, under an
increasingly efficient organization of the

curriculum, will be no larger. While
continuing to do a satisfactory job, we
shall recover from our wasteful ways of
doing it. Inferentially, a decent. salary
level will lure back our renegades, who
have left us to develop more bang for
a buck, or to advise Detroit (what De-
troit has ached to hear) that you and
I are fin-loving Rover Boys. What luck
for our students if we could persuade
these people to return!

But Mr. Ruml’s view from the peak
is too sanguine: most liberal arts col-
leges are not merely inefficient, they
also are seriously unsatisfactory in their
accomplishment. Recollection of my non-
mythical C man festers like a thorn in
my conscience as the symbol of our
failure. In the inward view from a lower
step on the academic pyramid it seems
plain that our faults of organization,
which certainly ought to disturb a con-
cerned trustee, result from the under-
manning of our faculties. We spend far
too much time in committee, seeking
more effective ways of using too few
new or refurbished course
may emerge. For a year or two the
dedicated do well in it, until the load
proves too great for them,

Periodic shake-ups of the entire cur-
riculum make way for exciting new ex-
periments. But for these we need schol-
ars with special training or novel talents.
The keepers of the purse sadly point out
that nothing of this sort was provided
for in the budget. The shaken pieces
settle back into a superficially altered
pattern, within which the same teachers
soon are purveying much the same ma-
terial in the ways which they regard as
time-tested. Each man’s ancient problem
is still with him: Shall I direct my
limited energies toward a few reward-
ing students, or toward those who are
most in need of my help? How much do
I owe the many who seem content to
wangle a degree with the least effort?

teachers. A

THE C MAN of my anecdote was not
typical. He cared enough about his edu-
cation to speak up at last, too late for
a real rescue. But many more, if we
could reach them in time, might be saved
before they slip into the sad rut of
middling accomplishment. This is where
we fail. Shorthanded; we have been
driven all along to the very remedy Mr.
Ruml now prescribes: the creeping com-
promises such as the large introductory
course, which presents the elements of
a discipline too slowly for those who
are to major in it, yet fast enough to
develop an abiding distaste for the sub-

‘ject in as many more. This endemic ex-

pedient conserves instructors’ time for
the intimate courses of the major. Mr.

Ruml’s own college offers both regular
and intensive versions of a few intro-
ductory courses, an efficient procedure.
Two such, both of excellent repute, have
now been recombined. The given reasons
are complex, but a saving in instructor-
hours is a factor.

Why then are teachers resisting the
Ruml formula, which promises more
small course sections than ever? Pre-
cisely because it is played out already.
It holds no future hope within a mixed
economy of ideas and methods, which
is the significant mark of the liberal ‘col-
lege. We could rid ourselves of many
inefficient compromises with the aid of
a few more teachers.

A humane third of this small book,
entitled “Achievement of the Possible,”
was written by the late Donald H. Mor-
rison, Much of it reads like a warning
against the proposals in which it is im-
bedded. Provost Morrison notes that if
a teacher “has been brought in to help
with a seetioned course, he has a strong
case for at least one course of his own
simply to relieve the monotony.” If
teachers find such compromise courses

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monotonous, are we to blame the stu-
dents for being bored by them? -
Where does this leave us? With an
uneasy inference that one trustee has
not informed himself concerning the
essence of the teaching process in a lib-
eral setting. He wishes to preserve the
liberal college, but this singular phe-
nomenon merits preservation, in. an
over-organized culture, only if it con-
tinues to be singularly itself: a place
where men and women of integrity, as
well as of talent and learning, can seek
and impart—not the other fellow’s truth
—but each his own truth. Perhaps this
essentially anarchistic enterprise can
exist only in a state of advanced ineffi-
ciency. This may be the exact cost, even

if there is no place for such accounting
on a balance sheet.

As he nurses his main idea around the
cautionary remarks of Provost Morri-
son, Mr. Ruml emphasizes two signifi-
cant points: first, that the ultimate de-
cisions do and'must le with the trus-
tees; second, that there is no other way
in sight of raising the money. The board
of which Mr. Ruml is an ebullient mem-
ber has recently conducted a successful
capital funds campaign. Eighteen per
cent of the proceeds was earmarked in
advance for faculty compensation. A
comparable campaign, at an institution
no better off for buildings, has been
undertaken entirely for faculty compen-
sation.

“They Also Serve Who Only Lie in Wait’
Lloyd Zimpel

MANY POETS reach all of the au-
dience they are capable of handling in
editions. of, say 200 ‘copies.’ These are
the wild but genuinely talented artists
(thousands of amateurs are hereby ex-
cluded) whose meszage, style, wit, vigor
or lack of it, intelligence or lack of it,
hamper communication with all but a
few fellow poets and the occasional critic
with a reddened but friendly ear to the
underground. From such small begin-
nings is the word, if it is worthy, spread.
Collections from these poets are wholly
unlikely to interest publishing houses of
any business persuasion. It falls to the
fiercely devoted smal]! one-man presses
in unlikely corners of the country to
bring such work attractively to print.
These cbscure ‘little operations were
never so plentiful as they are now —
probably because many of the most
significant little magazines and quarter-
hes — tradition2]l outlet for the yeasty,
half-baked and wildly-talented — are
regrouping around writers of fashion,
both academic and beat. The unpopular
poct has recourse only to the small
press where, depending on his faith in
himself or lack of ability to interest a
kindly editor, he can always pay for
the printing of the work himself — al-
though there are almost enough small
presses to insure that the interesting
poet’s work will be printed, but probab-
ly not read, with no more cost to him
than the anguish of creation.

One of a dozen of the most honorable

LLOYD ZIMPEL has contributed to
the Chicago Review, the Northwest Re-
view and other critical journals, He
lives in San Francisco, -

such one-man. publishing houses was
the just-demised Jargon Press in High-
lands, North Carolina. By presenting
their work in superb editions, publisher
Jonathan Williams warmly supported
some important poets—-Robert Creeley,
Charles Olgon, Robert Duncan, Irving
Layton. Like many other small press
owners, Wilhams is a fine poet and
published his otvn work. In addition he
backed the influential Black: Mountain

7 ‘ y, . i
‘i ret Be oe A
4 i te)
bY

: , >.
Review. Although the operation finally [ft
failed, it did so gallantly and for the
best of small press reasons—no public
support, even though Williams berated
and implored on all sides with uncom-

mon fervor.

UNDER intelligent and long-suffering
editorship, Jargon was one of the best
small presses: one of the biggest is Law-
rence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books
of San Francisco, whose success with
beat poets, and now with a book of
recipes, threatens to squeeze it out of
the literary small-press category. For
we can best recognize a small press
by the fact that, while its owner may
gamble his unemployment check .on
breaking even, he cannot with a pure
heart dream of profits. When, as hap-
pens very occasionally, new work for
limited audiences brings cash returns,
the venture at once becomes basically
commercial and curious desiderata be-
gin influencing editorial choices. Still
other small presses, less known but
passionately serving the worthy writer
all the same, are Inferno Press in San
Francisco, Hennypenny Press in Los
Angeles, Motive Press in Taos, Olivant
in. Miami—all neaded by poets.

One of the latest and most active to
join the field’is Hearse Press in Eureka,
California, an off-shoot of a brazen
and frequently outlandish two-year-old
quarterly magazine uncompromisingly

The Anaesthetic

My eves are shut. A weak glare from the sky
Throbs in the bare black tree, I cannot feel
My clothes, my skin, but I am warm,

If it is morning, J should be moying on.

Tf nightfall, should be coming to somewhere soon.

Snow flaking around my face appears

Some distance off... . It is a blizzard now,
Obscures the trees and stones. White gyres expand
Before each other, then fan out:

A steady falling screen. It is as though
T and the distance have run arm in arm
For a long time; now, it is good

To simply stand in snow, gasping, occurring.
Have reached a place where I can begin to plan.
At once, before me, a window blurts

Its beam in blinding invitation. A dog
Barks at my side. | snap my head, I see
Tt wag its tail. A lane—the other

Side—so near—I almost stand upon it,
A group in high spirits, approaching. Behind,
The forest from which | must have fled

Lies deep, but not unkind. ‘The snow falls slowly.
‘Tired, | seek a drift. One branch is trembling.

Too black for me to ignore its whiteness.

Davin GALLER ~

The NATION
fi ee b

called Hearse: A Vehicle Used to Convey
‘the Dead. in the eighteen months since
its inception, the press has brought out
five “chap-books”: Arrows of Longing,
Carl Larsen; The Papers of Professor
Bold, Gil Orlovitz; A Legionere (sic),
and The Constipated Owl, Mason Jor-
don Mason; and A Darkness in the
Earth, Alden A. Nowlan. Each is a
sixteen or twenty-four-page offset or
letterpress booklet, decently printed in
editions up to 500; three bear excellent
cover illustrations by Ben Tibbs. Their
price tags of 50c to $1 are largely a
formality, since a good part of each
‘edition is simply given away to sym-
‘pathetic people who the publisher hopes
‘have influence. (Arrows of Longing
‘was advertised some months after pub-
lication as having sold only seven
copies.) As with most small presses,
printing costs are absorbed by the pub-
lisher, but Hearse’s E. V. Griffith has
shad the great fortune of uncovering a
small band of individuals—mostly other
poets—whose contributions get them
“patron” listing on a front page in the
booklet they choose to sponsor.

Such lists furnish quaint evidence—
besides their mere existence—of one
small-press characteristic never found
‘in a_sober-sides commercial venture.
‘This is the puckish, screwball humor
with which the items are edited: in the
list of patrons for three of these five
booklets appear a “Jacques Strapp” and
a “Jasmie Dadi”—two names surely not
found in any city directory. Such will-
ingness to amuse, or insult, the reader
—along with the recognizably real pa-
trons and the author as well—is a sport
most money-making publishers would
never permit themselves. However, it
fits Hearse, for it is a way of disclaim-
ing any high purpose, and helps the
‘press establish its own terms.

FROM the outset Hearse Press has
regularly half parodied the literary un-
‘derground from which its readers and
writers come. Whatever aims it may
presently have (because a measure of
success—by small-press standards—has
possibly imposed greater self-conscious-
ness in the editing), the press began
with no more hope or plan for survival
‘than its name suggests. Attitudes of
(tongue-in-check cynicism and a kind of
jovial perversity give the project the
‘air of Mad magazine become sourly in-
'tellectual. Except for an apparent taste
\for bawdiness, the press—and the mag-
‘azine particularly—seems to have few
guiding standards whether aesthetic or
‘commercial, little respect for tradition,
mo desire to align itself with a school
‘or movement. In this it is quite unlike
so many small presses which ride an

eptember 26, 1959

unwise editorial policy straight to de-
struction.

The closest Hearse comes to a con-
tinuing policy is its concern with the
vague cultural rebellion that has
become rather unexcitingly familiar in
the pages of the little magazines. Of
the five Hearse titles so far—and sev-
eral more have already been announced
—all are pitched to the shrill note that
signals a cry from the underground
against the phony, the righteous, the
pretentious, the foolish, the dreary, the
ugly—all the problems that confront
man on mental, moral, political, social
and physical levels. . . . With scarcely a
pause for breath.

Of the four poets here, all cry out
earnestly enough, but with consider-
able variation in effect. Some of the
work of Larsen and Nowlan reveals too
much study in the stylized verse of
protest—Larsen in the artlessness of
the flat statement; and Nowlan in the
hot rhythms of familar emotions. Gil
Orlovitz’s wit, and the attenuated, sur-
real half-images of Mason give the
poetry of these two special interest;
for them the poem exists more as poem
and less as a construction from which
to blurt obvious statements of fact. At
the same time, a disciplined reader may
put down The Papers of Professor Bold
feeling that the poet is all too smash-
ingly clever and that he, the reader,
has been rather cunningly used. Along
with Mason, Orlovitz shows ribald pre-
occupations; ingeniously he turns his
wicked puns, while Mason’s broody
sense of tragedy leaks out in dead-pan
humor that underscores reality’s most
obscene side. All four poets fondle the
experience of the poem with, generally,
heavy-handed irony that furnishes a
frame of poetic meaning to their bloody
protests and incisive accusations. All
four stand about half. way between
scatter-brained nihilism and insensitive
organization. Their protest is spread

Sunbright on a City Way

Sometimes I have recognized
The bright aloneness of a man.

He stands sunbright on a city way;
He asks me, quietly,

“What street is this—

Is this Sixth Avenue?

Where will I be
If I go south from here?” —

I see him grown—

And lost—

And beautiful

And more familiar to me
Than he knows.

Hat Saunpers WuitE

so broadly as to be thin in any one
spot. But the important point is that
they care. “Don’t suck me/ into that
lonesome/ life,” says Mason; and Or-
lovitz: “They also serve who only lie
in wait.”

In short, perhaps the similarity of
the poets Hearse has supported is that
they share one of the prevailing moods
(of which so many are available). This
particular one belongs to the undecided,
the uncomfortable group of younger
men not so far removed as to be beat,
yet not so optimistic as to write letters
to editors. They are all half-engaged,

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willing enough to stick their necks out,
but only for the rare, decent reason, As
an entire group they seek a form of re-
bellion devious enough to slip past the
authorities and officials—and one un-
familiar enough so that it will not be
recognized, quickly labeled and at once
absorbed—as has happened to the pro-
tests of some of their contemporaries.

Whether these poets and their fel-
lows will find the sly new voice they
seek is still a question. But if they do,
certainly it will be heard first in some
tiny collection from an obscure small
press.

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180 |

“fT ST Aloe ae

FILMS

Robert Hatch
A MAGICIAN may be 4 shabby fraud

and still perform wonders —- it is re-
quired only that the society on which
he operates also be fraudulent. Then
love potions distilled of swamp water
will release concupiscence, hypnotic
passes will uncover rancid truths and
the obsessively rational man can be re-
duced to the hysteria his heart craves
by disembodied -hands and_ shattered
mirrors. In a world of fakes, the faker
prevails.

That is the sour theme of Ingmar
Bergman’s The Magician. In the time,
approximately, of “Murders in the Rue
Morgue,” Dr. Vogler, necromancer and
mesmerist, is traveling the Scandinavian

‘provinces with his wife (disguised as a

youth); his grandmother, a witch; his
Micawber-like business manager and a
fresh-faced young coachman. Dr. Vogler
wears a priest-of-darkness make up over
a bleak Northern face somewhat re-
calling the face of T. E. Lawrence (the
part is played by Max von Sydow, who
was the crusader in The Seventh Seal).
The unsavory reputation of the troupe
precedes it and when the wayfarers
reach a certain city they are haled to
the house of a local nobleman, there to
be questioned and tested by the chief
of police and the principal doctor, a
disciple, one judges, of Diderot. The
troupe is conciliatory, ineptly harmless;
its interrogators are scornful. But the
presence in the great house of the mere
semblance. of superior powers shatters
the polite order of the establishment from
master’s chambers to scullery. At the
close, Dr. Vogler and his acolytes are
summoned to perform before the king —
with what consequences the audience is
free to imagine for itself.

Anyone who has seen Mr. Bergman’s
other films (The Seventh Seal, Wild
Strawberries) will recognize this as cloth
cut precisely to his taste—-not surpris-
ing, since he cut it. It was measured too
precisely, perhaps, for it plays not only
into his talents but into his weaknesses

CORRECTION

The statement in Donat O’Donnell’s
review of The Diaries of Roger Case-
ment (September 5) that ‘a Dublin
handwriting expert has since examined
the documents and declared the passag-
cs to be forgeries” was inserted by the
editors on the basis of an Associated
Press dispatch. Mr. O'Donnell informs
us that this dispatch was incorrect,

H :

0 - ' “1 ie

yh ee

‘ ay he } aN or ld i

‘as well: Bergmait relishes atmosphere for

its own sake — poisonous mists rolling
through demented forests, portentous
starting of the eyeballs, symbolism that
sometimes seems more an escape hatch
than a guide to deeper vision (it is hard
to pin a man’s meaning down when he
resorts to Delphic utterances). Bergman
does not readily abstain from Gothic
flimflam and he teeters on the edge of
morbid cliché. Yet he is really possessed
of a caustic, impatient mind, and_ his
approach to human situations, though
humane, is incisive and corrective.

This crisp mind yearning for opera
capes can make Bergman’s touch un-
certain when he moves into the border
area between windy melancholy and
acrid satire. The two sides of his coin
become blurred, the sentimentality of
his characters is not readily separable
from his own sighs and one becomes
baffled by a polished raconteur who can
so unpredictably allow his voice to turn
yeasty.

By all usable standards, The Magician
is a Superior film — superior in idea and
in execution: if it were not, | would not
be thus speculating on it. No one today }
uses the camera with more individuality }
or holds the spectator more slave to his
will. Bergman is a great artist; also, I |
suspect, a self-indulgent one. In The
Magician, I feel, he has been tempted
by misty gewgaws to soften his art.

THE THEATRE where it is playing
won't let you come in during the last
half hour of Back to the Wall. 1 ap-
prove of seeing pictures the right way
around, but when the management posts
that sign you may be sure that you are
going to see a machine. This French
conundrum is a fair example of jigsaw |
homocide, a cat-and-mouse revenge tale
of ingenuity and implacability that pulls
the suspense thread exceedingly tight. I
was too much aware that it had been
built in reverse from the smashing trick
to lose myself in goose flesh, but it is |
well enough constructed to keep your
eyes attentive while your mind roams. |

Souls Like Chisels

for dD. G.

Chisels, to work!
Body is but rock.
Dionysus, Evos —
Free the damon!
Break the hymen!
Make the poem!

Souls like chisels!
Karth, Air, Mind, Heart —
Prepare for form!

M. L. RoskNTHAL,

Crossword Puzzle No. 835 |

By FRANK W. LEWIS

ACROSS:

| Orphaned Alabama master, asso-
ciated with America’s cities? (9)

6 and 9 See 11

10 Outlaw ruler in safekeeping? (7)

11, 9, 6 across, 17 and 22 down What

comes around midnight? (It might

eall for aspirin!) (8,7, 5,3, 5,6)

Song that suggests a worker’s gath-

ering. (6)

and 27 Medicine, when it gets old,

is spoiled. (8)

Powder, but no charge with it. (4-4)

It takes a weapon pointed in the

wrong direction to get something

valuable. (6)

Snub, or incite a person secretly. (6)

Followed after the fish, if not paid

for. (8)

Like one in Pisa which didn’t quite

ring? (6)

25 Swift subject of a tale, however
read backwards. (3
28 It might describe movement of

everything, for example, forward or
backward. (7)

Canal boat? (7)

Relieved of such a chore as edit-
ing. (5)

Tender tea leaves begged for an
answer. (9)

DOWN:
1 If one does, the thing given is right
inside. (5)
.2 The stifling condition of unmelodic

BERBER: E:
P| a ee
g i ee

Pa ig hs !

musi¢? (7) :
Where Napoleon claimed victory in
the Battle of the Windmill. (6, 4)

4 and 23 Is it recommended for the
family for the purpose of procuring
the lady’s cape? (12)

5 A wild bear is likely to prove dan-
gerous. (6)

6 A near relative of the tuna. (4)

7 Staff officer obviously capable of

wrapping things up. (7)
8 Watch, and certain industries might
have to be. (9)

14 The dividing of the Incas, under an-
cestral rule. (10)

15 Form a 14 by returning the ring?
(9)

17 See 11 across :

19 Hurvries around with stern Victorian |
appearances, (7)

21 How carriages proverbially waited?
(8)

26 The stigma of trade? (5)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 834 -
ACROSS: 1, 6 and 27 across The Turn
of the Serew; 5 Flounce; 9 Tresses;
10 Integer; 11 Least; 12 and 24 Im-
passes; 14 Yule log; 16 Drastic; 18
Turkeys; 21 and 13 Blessed event; 26
Obi; 28 Stirrup; 29 Gaining; 31 Press-

er. DOWN: 1 Totally; 2 Eyeball; 3 Up- |
set; 4 Nesting; 5 Flipped; 7 Neglect; |

8 Erratic; 15 Lee; 17 Ace; 18 Transit;
19 Respite; 20 Stopper; 21 and 30 Bring
up the rear; 22 Straits; 23 Dowager;
25 Serge; 27 Shine.

b Printed in the U. 8. A. by RCR Publication Printers Corp., N. ¥. GC, —

September 26, 1959 ! ojos

eo
j - 4 » 2 = »*

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Key to Indo-Chinese Tension

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ae Michael Brecher
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LETTERS

Comment on an Ad

The Nation took a full-page ad in
The New York Times of September 17
to reprint two recent editorials on the
Khrushchev visit: “Is This Public Serv-
ice?” (The Nation, Sept. 19) and “Tt’s
Only Nikita, After All” (The Nation,
Sept. 12). Following is a small but rep-
resentative selection of the enormous
correspondence which the advertisement

evoked. —Epirors

Dear Sirs: Having been a subscriber to
The Nation for many years, may I take
the liberty of entering a protest against
your full-page advertisement in The
New York Times.

In this advertisement, you reprint
editorials from The Nation of September
12 and 19. In the first, you seem to
find it strange “that the Russians were
unconcerned about the visit of Vice
President Nixon and the witchcraft he
might work on them and their institu-
tions” while in our country some con-
cern has been expressed about the visit
of Chairman Khrushchev.

Is this not highly misleading. . . ?
After all, Mr. Nixon traveled as the
representative of a government that has
no disposition to impose its political,
social or economic philosophy on any
other country. Mr. Khrushchev, on the
other hand, comes here as the head of
a government whose avowed purpose is
the destruction of some of the most basic

and essential values of our Western
civilization.
In the second editorial, you criticize

an advertisement of the Allen-Bradley
Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
which had appeared in The New York
Times on September 10. May I say at
this point that I had never heard of
the Allen-Bradley Company before and
as far as | know J am unacquainted
with anybody connected with it. But
what is the drift of your criticism? At
one point you say a possible explanation
of their advertisement is that they manu-
facture “quality motor controls and
quality electronic components” and
that, according to the trade press, it
is estimated “that at least a third of
the output of the components branch
of the electronic industry is produced for
pe government under defense contracts.”

This at the very least is suggestive,
but la ater on, you take more positive
ground. You say, “In effect, it (the
Rilear Bradley, Company) is trying to
_ sell hate and fear because hate and fear
_ stimulate ‘the sale of electronic com-

ponents.” Do you not realize that in
this you are merely parroting the Soviet
propagandist line to the effect that big
business in this country is eager to keep
the cold war alive because of the profits
it draws from defense orders?

This is, of course, the most arrant
nonsense. We all know that in the event
of a material easing of tension between
the United States and the Soviet Union,
our economy would be faced with a
period of readjustment. Yet we all know
that there is so much constructive work
to be done here and elsewhere that we
would make the transition without much
more than a temporary setback. Can
you doubt that even the most benighted
industrialist would prefer this to the
abysmal and catastrophic destruction
which will continue to threaten all of
us until and unless the masters of the
Soviet Union can be brought to under-
stand that, in this age of atomic and
thermonuclear weapons, we have a com-
mon and overriding interest in laying
the foundations for a just and durable
peace?

New York City
(See editorial on page 182—Ep.)

Frank ALTSCHUL

Dear. Sivs: A breath of fresh air from
your ad in today’s Times cleared the
stench which resulted from the reading
of Allen-Bradley’s ad. The Russians and
the Communists hold no appeal to me,
but unless our President and his associ-
ates can be given the opportunity to sit
down with these people — and all of us
get the opportunity to learn about each
other without the sort of stuff that has
been “broadcast” in some of the “wild”
ads I have been reading — we'll have
nothing happen but hate, distrust, war
mongering and worse!

SAMuEL E. Gotp
Maplewood, N.J.

Dear Sirs: Hearty congratulations to
you on your Times ad, Your editorials
were wonderfully put and indeed throw
some light on the motives in back of
the shameful ads that have appeared
in our press. From discussions in our
office, with friends, neighbors, etc., my
conclusions are that most Americans
are in agreement with your point of view.

Esturer H, Davipson
New York City

Dear Sirs: Apropos the question why
Allen-Bradley was wi to spend its
money to awaken Foie at people
to the dange er of ha Mr. K. visit
us, don’t overlook the ct ‘that Allen-
Bradley i is not really spending its money.

It is spending your money—our money
—to the extent of 32 per gent of the cost

ws . .
of home ads. This j is eel it can’ de-

e re P ‘
vr t-2 - a heed sith doe

duct, as advertising expense, the full
cost of the ads on its income-tax return.
On the other hand, if an internal
reyenue agent, examining the return of
Allen-Bradley, were to disallow this de-
duction, I would just love to listen to
Allen-Bradley defend the deduction on
the ground that it was “an ordinary
and necessary business expense.”
Jacos GoLpBERG
Chicago, Ill.

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
181 @
ARTICLES

183 @ Key to Indo-Chinese Tension:
“Five Fingers of Tibet”
by MICHAEL BRECHER
185 @ The Captain Quotes Confucius
by C. P. FITZGERALD
187 @ Democrats Seek New Faces
by GODFREY SPERLING, Jr.
188 @ Walpurgis Night at Carnegie
Hall
by NOBEL E. PARMENTEL, Jr.
190 @® The Happiness Rat Race
by GEORGE P. ELLIOTT
ROOKS AND THE ARTS
194 @

Dragnet for Proust
by MINA CURTISS

Stories, Songs and People
by VIVIAN MERCIER

Art
by FAIRFIELD PORTER

Theatre
by HAROLD CLURMAN

Films
by ROBERT HATCH

Yes, as a Look Springs to Its

Face (poem)
by ROBERT DUNCAN

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 200)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

QUANT

George G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, Editor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Editor .
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts :

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, Buropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager

The Nation, Oct, 3, 1959. Vol, 189, No. 10
The Nation published weekly (except for omis-
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A. by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenw
New York 14, N. Y. Second class postage pal d
at New York, N. Y.

Gapesrinticr rlee Do!
eae re ta Bet ele

shat without the old “of aes ase

Information to Libraries; The Nation is indexed
in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book
Review Digest, Index Estetor Articles,

rage Toformation &

“il

ant

196 @

199 @

200 ®@

200 @

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 10

NATION

EDITORIALS

The Visit

“We might as well face the sorry prospect,” wrote a
Daily News columnist on September 15, “that Comrade
Khrushchev’s U.S. junket is likely to give Russia the
biggest propaganda coup it has had in years.” The wist-
ful hope that Mr. Khrushchev would be unilaterally
purged of his “misconceptions” was already evaporat-
ing when the columnist uttered his lament. In this view,
the trip was all loss to the United States, and no gain.
Most Americans, however, will probably see it in a dif-
ferent light. Mr. Khrushchev’s propaganda harvest 1s
only one aspect of his trip. It is reasonable to suppose
that he learned more than he let on. Anyone so ob-
sessively given to gratuitous comparisons between his
nation and another must be impressed by the achieve-
ments of the competitor, or why should the subject be
constantly on his mind?

What should not be ignored, also, though our enter-
tainment-news media chose to ignore it, is the educa-
tion that the visit has afforded us. In six years of un-
remitting propaganda we have been treated to various
pictures of Khrushchev: the monster of deceit and
treachery, the drunken peasant, the mass killer, and so
on, What we actually saw was a Communist politician,
as opportunistic and long-winded as any of his capitalist
counterparts, but wittier than most, and a horse trader
from head to toe. Gradually, as he quipped and _ har-
angued his way across the country, the public took his
measure. No discerning observer had ever taken him
for a Hitler, but now the public could see for itself that,
though certainly no friend of the free-enterprise society,
this character was less of a menace to it than some of
its loudest proponents. His professions of peaceful in-
tent, credible simply as a matter of self-interest, were
not belied by his looks and speeches. Most important,
he emerged as an antagonist who could be dealt with
at the conference table.

The American public showed its essential level-head-
edness in its response to Khrushchev. It did not exhibit
any fulsome enthusiasm, but as his image reappeared
on the TV screens most observers came over to the view
that he and the 200 million other Soviet subjects could
probably be endured on the same planet. The change
from horror to casual friendliness came about in a

symbolic time and place, as the visitor passed over the
mountain ridge between the region which always man-
ages to show off our silliest traits, to the city which,
with equal consistency, makes the best. impression on
both the foreigner and the civilized native.

The Nugget of Truth

One of the least advertised glories of our vast, com-
plicated, expensive, far-ranging system of mass com-
munications is that, if one is patient enough, digs long
enough and deeply enough, it is usually possible to dis-
cover the nugget of truth about the important issue of
the moment. Such a nugget is the report of the Com-
mittee on Government Operations on conditions in Laos
(June 15, 1959, House Report No. 546). Here are a few

conclusions, as summarized:

1. That American aid was pumped into Laos faster than
the economy could absorb thereby causing (a) an ex-
cessive foreign-exchange reserve, reaching at one point
$40 million, equal to a year’s aid; (b) inflation, doubling
the cost of living from 1953 to 1958; and (c) profiteering
on a vast scale.

2. Much of the overspending was the direct result of
a determination to maintain a 25,000 man Lao Army
despite contrary recommendations by the Joint Chiefs
of Staff (the decision was made by the State Department).

3. American aid was concentrated in the area around
Vientiane and other centers of population despite the fact
that Laos is a nation of villages and the subsequent en-
richment of Vientiane merchants tended to discredit the
entire program as “unrealistic” and “corrupt.”

4. Neither the director of the U. S. Mission nor -his
successor ‘showed any awareness of the real state of affairs
‘in Laos.

5. Minor items include: ‘proof of the acceptance of
bribes by American officials fron’ American firms dedling
with the mission; the emergence of American personnel
from the mission as officials of contracting firms shortly
after. they. had participated in awarding lucrative con+
tracts to these same firms; petty pilfering, as when the
former director of the American mission, on returning tu
the States, sold his Cadillac for an inflated price to a
firm which held contracts with the mission, ete.

This is only a sample of the charges. In a word, the
chaos in Laos is, in no small measure, a direct con-

{
7
:

sequence of a misguided, incompetently administered
and, in some respects, a corrupt American economic-
and military-aid program. A nugget of truth, the report
can be obtained from the Government Printing Office,
Washington, D.C. One can only regret — and wonder
why — it was not published in full by the American
press when the current difficulties in Laos began.

Pie in the Sky?

Total disarmament within four years — Mr. Khru-
shchev’s proposal before a.hushed audience at the
United Nations — received no applause when made,
although there was polite hand-clapping at the termina-
tion of his speech. The proposal was received without
enthusiasm not because the people of the world reject
the idea of disarmament, but because they don’t trust
the good faith of Mr. Khrushchev. “The same old prop-
aganda stuff,” said newsmen.

Later commentators rediscovered the wonderful no-
tion that tensions between nations, not armaments,
are the cause of wars. This school of historical analysis
found a voice in Secretary Herter, who said, “Nations
will insist on going to war with each other, even with
knives.” Perhaps so. Speaking subjectively, we would
greatly prefer to fight a war with knives than with
nuclear bombs. And we challenge the “arms don’t make
wars” school of history to name quickly the first five
wars that come to mind where totally unarmed nations
went to war against each other.

Is “total disarmament within four years” the same
old stuff? Perhaps. But let’s test it. We know how many
submarines the Rusians have and we make no secret
of what we have. The Russians have, in fact, about
twice as many as we do. Let’s offer to sail all of ours
to a neutral port and turn them over, for destruction,
to a U.N. commission — provided the Russians do
likewise. Soviet reaction would go a long way toward
revealing whether Khrushchev’s speech was indeed the
“same old stuff.” But until we make some such counter-
proposal, as radical as Khrushchev’s and yet practical,
the world is likely to remain in doubt.

By Way of Clarification

Two issues raised in Mr. Frank Altschul’s thoughtful
communication in this week’s Letters column (see in-
side front cover) call for clarification. The Nation’s

_ editors would, of course, agree that “even the most be-
-nighted industrialist” would prefer the most severe eco-
- nomic setback to the catastrophic destruction that a
nuclear war would bring. But this does not dispose of
_ the point in our editorial to which Mr. Altschul ad-
_ dresses himself. While no responsible American wants
war, a great many Americans feel that war is more or
_ less inevitable despite our efforts to avoid it. They con-

182

clud e, therefore, and quite logically, that even a tem-—

porary reduction in tensions would be dangerous, since
it might iead to a reduction from the level of prepared-
ness which they regard as essential. And the same as-
sumption leads to a corollary conclusion, namely, that
any negotiation would be dangerous almost to the degree
that it was successful. We do not believe, nor have we
ever implied, that those who share this assumption
want war.

On the second issue, Mr. Altschul contends that the
transition from a high level of armament expenditures
to the lower levels to which disarmament might lead
could be made “without much more than a temporary
setback.” This may be so, but a large number of Amer-
ican industrialists do not agree. Alfred D. Cook, editor
of Electronic News, reports (September 21) that “a
halt in defense production would most certainly affect
the industry and call for adjustments of a major type”
in the view of the leaders of the industry. “The cutback
of a major missile program,” asserts Dr. Alan M. Glover,
a vice president of Radio Corporation of America (Wall
Street Journal, September 15), “could put this [semi-
conductor] industry into a tremendous reorganization
period.” Senators Humphrey, Cooper and McCarthy,
among other Senators, have recently voiced their con-
cern that “any change in the military program, or re-
duction in defense procurement will have a serious effect
on employment.” In forty selected industrial centers
where there were 1,500 or more aircraft workers, this
industry accounted for 30 per cent of the job loss from
May, 1957, to May, 1959 (Congressional Record, Sep-
tember 3, 1959, p. A-7687). The cancellation by the
Defense Department on August 11, 1959, of contracts
with five companies to develop a high-energy aircraft
fuel resulted in the loss of an estimated 2,000 jobs.

It is true, of course, that the effects of arms cutbacks
can be offset by intelligent planning and timely action,
but the magnitude of the problem is self-evident (see
“The Economic Hazards of Arms Reduction,” The Na-
tion, March 28, 1959). We have no doubt, at least in
theory, that the transition can be made, but we agree
with Senator Humphrey that the question of disarma-
ment “cannot be treated in a vacuum when two-thirds
of the federal budget is devoted to defense spending.

The Siren Call

When the authorities in Chicago turned on the air-
raid sirens to celebrate the victory of the White Sox in
the American League pennant race, they admitted more

han any critic of the civil-defense setup had ever

charged. The worst that had been said was that air-

raid drills were a form of conditioning for war. It was
generally assumed, however, that officials involved in
such drills took their jobs seriously. In Chicago at least,
this is obviously too charitable a view; the sirens pa

i The Nation

‘

i:
*

off, and under the circumstances it does not seem. im-
‘portant whether the order to use them came from civil-
defense authorities or — as it is alleged — from the
Fire Department. The only conclusion one can draw
is that the people in charge don’t believe a word they
say, and the system itself is just another boondoggle.
As for the nervous citizens who swamped the tele-
phone lines to inquire whether the Russian bombers
were coming, evidently those responsible felt they
should have been rejoicing over the fame and glory
which had come to the city, instead of succumbing to
morbid fancies over an imaginary enemy.

Small Beer

The State of Tennessee, or parts thereof, has been
gunning for the Highlander Folk School of Monteagle
for years. The school has been called subversive, im-
moral and conducive to riotous behavior; it has not been
accused of practicing and advocating racial integration,

though that it does so is what really riles its neighbors.

KE Y TO INDO-C HINESE TEN. SION

~ Most renal, the State Attorney General, A. F.
Sloan, petitioned to have the school padlocked on the
grounds that it engaged in buying, storing and selling
beer and whiskey, and had been the scene of disturbing,
boisterous and disorderly conduct and of lewd, immoral

and unchaste practices. On September 16, after three

days of hearings, Judge J. J. Chattin, presiding in the
circuit court, threw out all but one of the allegations on
the most basic of grounds: “no proof at all whatever.”

It is clear that the Highlander people most unwisely
sold some beer, the proceeds going into a “revolving
fund.” That was against a local law, and the adminis-
tration building in which the sales took place will be
padlocked, temporarily, until November 2, when At-
torney General Sloan will again return to battle.

Judge Chattin, summing up, said: “Sometimes 1
shudder at what I have to do to enforce the law as a
judge.” It was an apology by an honest man to a group
whose tribulations stem, he recognizes, from» their in-
sistence on obeying the Constitution and the Supreme
Court.

‘FIVE FINGERS OF TIBET’. .. by Michaet Brecher

THE YEAR‘1959 marks the end of

“domestic affairs.”

an era in Sino-Indian relations. No
longer are delegations from Peking
greeted with the friendly chant,
“Hindi-Sint pone Hindi-Sim
Bhai-Bhai.” No longer is the Indian
Ambassador accorded the privileged
status held by Sardar Panikkar in
the dark days of the Korean War.
The Chinese Embassy in Delhi has
been the scene of hostile demon-
strations. The press of both coun-
tries, which had long extolled the
virtues of Panch Sheel (the “Five
Principles”), now hurl charges of ag-
gression at each other. On the eve
of the tenth anniversary of the Com-
munist conquest of power in China,
the relations between the two giants

cof Asia have reached their nadir.

The key to the rapid deterioration
of Sino-Indian friendship is Tibet,
that remote, fabled land in the
ee which, for centuries, had

“MICHAEL. | RECHER, author of
Nehru: a Political Biography (Ox-
ford), teaches political see

-M cG1 a

performed the important function of
buffer state between China and India.
Its status in international law was
almost as vague as its territory was
inaccessible, though Chinese suzer-
ainty was acknowledged — by the
Tibetans, the British Raj in India
and the Russians — in return for
a Chinese assurance of Tibet’s au-
tonomy. The actual relationship of
Tibet and China can be described
thus: whenever the central govern-
ment in China was strong and united,
the suzerainty clement in the for-
mula was stressed; when China was
weak, the autonomy element came
to the fore. In 1949, Lhasa expelled
the Chinese Nationalist Mission and
hoped its autonomy would be re-
spected. The following year, how-
ever, a victorious Communist regime
asserted its control by force and,
in the process, clai

elgnty.

This was the fir:

India, a blow that

Pe cing’s charge of

& we

people wi

In the larger in-
terests of both countries, however,
the friction was abated; the Chinese
acknowledged India’s special in-
terest in the fate of Tibet, along
with Lhasa’s historic claim to au-
tonomy; India, for its part, affirmed
Chinese suzerainty over the huge,
sparsely populated “Roof of the
World,” which has great strategic
importance for both countries. All
this was embodied in a_ Chinese-
Tibetan agreement of 1951 and again
in the Sino-Indian treaty of 1954
which first set down the Five Prin-
ciples of Coexistence as the basis of
relations between the two countries.
The friendship was strengthened by
Nehru’s visit to China in 1955, ee
En-lai’s three visits to India in 1954
and 1956, India’s help in ma king
China respectable within the A
family of nations, and their mut :
f the idea of coexis tence

onder, then, th:
ere taken unawares be e

a last pe d the

tainous land to the North East
Frontier Agency of Assam — an area
that was to occupy the center of the
stage six months later. It is well to
recall the events of 1950-51 and the
Lhasa uprising in early 1959, for it
is only in that context that the bor-
der clashes can be understood. In-
deed, the crucial role of Tibet in
the larger scheme of Indo-Chinese
tension is most strikingly revealed
by the harsh tone of Chinese allega-
tions last spring, compared with their
conciliatory attitude in the present
border dispute.

While the Dalai Lama was eluding
Chinese troops, Peking Radio ac-
cused India of complicity in the re-
volt by harboring “imperialist
agents” in the frontier town of Kal-
impong. Adding insult to stupidity,
it warned the Indian Parliament
not to discuss the Tibetan question.
It also openly attacked Nehru’s
daughter and his sister. The Prime
Minister’s reaction was swift and
sharp. “We shall discuss whatever
we wish,” he retorted. He also ex-
pressed sympathy for the Tibetans
and rebuked the Chinese for violat-
ing their pledge, in the 1951 treaty,
to respect Tibet’s autonomy. For
weeks this exchange continued. Pek-
ing persisted with the absurd thesis
that the Dalai Lama had been ab-
ducted and was being held in India
under duress.

Even the Indian Prime Minister
was not spared Peking’s anger, which
was expressed in an_ 11,000-word
article entitled “The Revolution in
Tibet and Nehru’s Philosophy.” The
tone, for the most part, was restrain-
ed, even respectful — “We feel great-
ly distressed at being forced now to
argue with Mr. Nehru” — but the
substance was unmistakable: “China
enjoys full sovereignty over the
Tibet region. ... No interference. . .
under whatever pretext or in what-
ever form will be tolerated.” Omin-
ous was the implied threat to India’s
territorial integrity, expressed in the
form of a question: “Could not a
people’s committee to support Assam
be set up... under the pretext of

ancient religious and cultural links?”

This article was published early
in May, 1959. By the beginning of
August, border clashes in the North
East Frontier Agency of Assam her-

NORTH-EAST
FRONTIER
AGENCY

alded a further assault on the grave-
ly weakened ties of friendship be-
tween Delhi and Peking. Viewed in
this context, the current tension in
the Himalayas is not an unexpected
eruption, but an outgrowth of the
Tibetan imbroglio.

THE HIMALAYAN frontier be-
tween Asia’s two Great Powers ex-
tends for almost 2,000 miles, from
Sinkiang to the northern tip of Bur-
ma. As long as Tibet was free from
Chinese occupation, India’s “North-
ern Wall” was secure, for there was
no direct contact with China proper,
except in the uninhabited Kashmir-
Sinkiang area. Since 1950, however,
the strategic map of “inner Asia” has
changed, to the marked disadvan-
tage of India. Chinese troops have
held the “Roof of the World” and
have stood at the gates of the Indian
subcontinent. The suppression of the
Tibet revolt last spring and the de-
terioration in Sino-Indian relations
which followed only made this geo-
political fact more significant.

The spark to the current phase of
tension was a series of three incidents
in the North East Frontier Agency,
the forbidding homeland of primitive
Naga tribesmen, some of whom were
engaged in rebellion against Delhi
for the right of self-determination.
What gives these skirmishes special
interest is the fact that present
Chinese maps show 22,000 of the
30,000 square miles of NEFA as
Chinese territory. They also give
parts of Bhutan and Ladakh to
China. Delhi has long been annoyed
by what it terms “cartographic ag-
gression” and has repeatedly request-

peri

j + a ie

_—
’ ¥ ee ee
et Pie th day elite M5

mune ee ae
vie oy 1 hha

ed the Chinese to revise their maps, _

but to no avail. Beyond this, Nehru
told Parliament, there was mounting
evidence of China’s bad faith.

The historic gate between India
and Tibet has been virtually closed
since the summer — to both trade
and pilgrims. Furthermore, the
Chinese built a military road from
Tibet to Sinkiang — across the
Ladakh part of Kashmir — without
India’s permission, and even arrested
an Indian patrol in the area. In
Lhasa, the Chinese have encircled
the Indian Consulate, with the result
that Indian citizens are unable to
seek its protection. Finally, the Chi-
nese appear to be attempting to de-
nationalize long-time Indian resi-
dents of the Tibetan capital by dis-
puting the continued validity of their
Indian citizenship. All this, coupled
with concern for the security of the
three weak border kingdoms, Nepal,
Sikkim and Bhutan, led to anxiety
among officials in Delhi.

China’s links with these states and
peoples—“the five fingers of Tibet,”
as Chinese expansionists call them —
provide ample reason for concern.
The Ladakh region of Kashmir be-
longed to Tibet until 1840, and the
majority of its people are Buddhists
who Jook to Lhasa for cultural in-
spiration. Nepal paid an annual trib-
ute to Peking until the middle of the
nineteenth century. Bhutan, too, was
long a tributary of China, and half
its people are Buddhists closely tied
to the Tibetans. Moreover, even
now it can be reached by land only
via Tibet. (A hasty decision to con-
struct four roads to India was taken
in Delhi in mid-September.) As for
the NEFA area of Assam, the Chi-
nese have never formally accepted
India’s claim to ownership, based
upon the McMahon Line.

THE BORDER kingdoms now fall
within India’s sphere of influence. In
Nepal, the largest of the three, with
a population of about ten million,
Delhi has established a position of
predominance. It controls all Nepal’s
airfields, an Indian military mission
trains the two-division army, Indian
leadership in foreign policy is ac-
knowledged; and the party in power,
the Nepali Congress, draws its ideas
from its Indian counterpart. New
The Nation

+ ian
& fi i ie Lab

roads ipinects ¢ Nepal ci ith India

facilitate the rapid deployment of
O Geilifary aid. Chinese diplomatic ap-
proaches in the past few years have
been firmly rebuffed, and there is no
Chinese mission in Katmandu. Sik-
kim has been an Indian protectorate
since 1949. Delhi provides its 140,000
people with civil servants, roads,
economic aid, military security and
even a Prime Minister.

India’s hegemony in Bhutan has
been established by a 1954 treaty
under which Bhutan accepts India’s
“advice” in foreign affairs. The plan
to build link roads to India, economic

wera LAT A
’

and military aid, and the loan of —

civil servants, has cemented the re-
lationship.

At the very outset of the current
border tension, Nehru proclaimed
India’s determination to defend
Bhutan and Sikkim against any for-
eign encroachments. Peking appar-
ently took him seriously, for in a
note to the Indian Prime Minister
on September 8, Chou En-lai accept-
ed the territorial integrity of the two
principalities and India’s special, i.e.
paramount, relationship with them.
Nepal, too, may be deemed a de facto
Indian protectorate, in the light of

THE CAPTAIN QUOTES CONFUCIUS . .

Canberra
THE People’s Republic of China and
the Indian Republic find themselves
today involved in a dispute which is
not of their making, but directly in-
herited from their imperialist pred-
ecessors. In the year 1908, the
Manchu Empire, then in the last
stages of decline, gave a sudden
flicker of imperial power. In that
year a certain official named Chao
Erh-feng was appointed Imperial
Resident in Tibet, took command
of a small but relatively well-armed
force (armed with rifles) and rapidly
conquered Tibet, which was a nomi-
nal tributary of the Manchu Throne.

Chao Erh-feng was a Chinese Ban-

~ nerman, that is to say the descendant
of one of the Chinese families settled
in Manchuria who had submitted to
the Manchus before the latter con-
quered China within the Wall. The
reason for this sudden incursion into
Tibet was to counter the steady in-
crease in British influence to which
this country had become subject.
The Dalai Lama, the temporal ruler
of Tibet, fled to India, thus setting a
precedent which his next Incarnation
was one day to follow.

Tibet was occupied by a Chinese
army, the administration was reor-
ganized on Chinese lines, and placed
in the hands of Chinese officials.

Having settled the affairs of Tibet,
the new Resident, Chao Erh-feng,
next turned his attention to the
frontiers, which then, as now, were

only vaguely drawn and not de-

C. P. FITZGERALD teaches at the
Australian National University and
is the author of Revolution in China
(Praeger) and other books.

marcated on the ground. He began
to push out patrols towards the bor-
ders of the Indian province of Assam,
and soon the British government of
India decided that these border pa-
trols were trespassing. The British
also sent out patrols, under the
command of experienced officers, to
establish border posts and contest
the Chinese incursions, peacefully
if possible. One of these patrols was
commanded by a Captain in the
Indian Army, an Englishman who
had a remarkable knowledge of the
Chinese language.

THE COUNTRY is wild and difficult.
High steep mountains descend al-
most vertically into narrow valleys,
in which there is no flat land. The
rivers can rise with sudden spates
sweeping away everything in the val-
ley. After traveling for several days
in this dangerous region the British
patrol came upon a small piece of
land flat enough to make a camp.
And there they found, newly erected,
a fine granite boundary stone, marked
“The limit of the Great Ch’ing Em-
pire set up by the Viceroy Chao
Erh-feng.” It was, in the British
view, many miles within India.
The question of just where the
frontier was, and how it was to be
identified, was then engaging the
leisurely attention of British diplo-
mats in Peking and their opposite
numbers from the Tsung Li Yamen,
the Imperial Foreign Office. British
Indian border patrols had been in-
structed not to try to drive out
Chinese patrols by fo ce, or use any
violence, but to
tivities. So the n
be moved; yet it v

Nehru’s Cees as s early as 1951,
that “We cannot allow the eimaley:
an barrier to be penetrated because
that would be a risk to our own
security.” It is also clear from
Nehru’s statements to Parliament
last month that the intrusion of
Chinese power into Ladakh is not
regarded as serious, for this territory
has never been clearly demarcated
from Sinkiang.

The nub of the dispute, then, is
the legality of the McMahon Line,
which extends for 800 miles from
Bhutan to Burma. It was drawn in,
1914 to demarcate the frontier, be-

hy C, P. FitzGerald

to have come so far and found such
an interesting proof of Chinese tres-
pass without in some way recording:
the fact. The British captain therefore
ordered his Sergeant-artificer to
chisel certain Chinese characters onto
the back of the Chinese boundary
stone. They read, in translation,
“What a pleasant thing it is to wel-
come strangers from a far-off land,”
—a well-known Confucian saying.

The British patrol then marched
back to base in Assam. Before long,
Chinese scouts having reported their
presence, a Chinese patrol later ar-
rived on the scene to find out what
the British had been up to. Highly
intrigued at the new inscription, they
made a rubbing of it, and ‘sent this
to the Viceroy Chao Erh-feng. Like
all Confucian scholars and _ officials,
Chao Erh-feng appreciated a joke,
especially if it was a Chinese literary
joke, and he in turn sent the rubbing
up to Peking. Soon the diplomats
had new material for negotiation, and
the question of whether such tamper-
ing with boundary stones did, or did
not, amount to cultural aggression,
was smilingly debated.

The question was never resolved,
for a few months later the Chinese
republican revolution broke out;
Chao Erh-feng was murdered by rev-
olutionaries in Cheng Tu, his army
in Tibet isolated by a Tibetan re-
bellion and the revolution behind
them, and no further Chinese forces
approached the Indo-Tibetan border
for fifty years. The incessant land-

slides and frequent earthquakes of
this region have no doubt long sinc

buried the famous boundary stc
but it does not seem that the
lem itself ey yet been interred.

eee ae ee a ee

tween India and Tibet and was for-
malized by the Simla Convention,
an agreement between British India
(represented by Sir Arthur Henry
MeMahon, for whom the line was
named), Tibet and China. The legal
difficulty arises from the fact that
while the Chinese delegation initialed
the the Chinese Gov-
ernment of the day did not ratify it.
Now, forty-five years later, Peking
terms the McMahon Line “a_his-
torical leftover,” a product of Brit-
ish “ageression against the Tibet re-
gion of China” and, as such, unac-
ceptable to China without further
investigation “in the light of historic
relations and present realities.”

Nehru was annoyed by what he
termed Chinese rigidity, arrogance,
the claim to Indian territory, and
the imputation that India has- in-
herited “imperialistic” policies. More
in sorrow than anger, he told Par-
llament on September 10 that the
Chinese Premier had assured him in
a conversation in 1956 that while he
didn’t think the McMahon Line
was valid, China would recognize it
because of long usage and in con-
_ sideration of Sino-Indian friendship.
(Foreign Minister Chen Yi later in-
formed the Standing Committee of
the National People’s Congress that
Nehru had “regrettably” misinter-
preted Chou En-lai’s remarks; they
were, he said, that while China could
not recognize the McMahon Line,
Chinese troops would not cross it.)
Obviously hurt by what he termed
Chinese double talk, Nehru lashed
out: “How has China grown so big
and great? Did it spring from the
head of Brahma or was it by Chinese
imperialism?” Lest Peking have any
doubt about his policy, he reaffirm-
ed his commitment to the Mc-
Mahon Line (with possible minor
adjustments) for it is “right by us-
age, right by treaty and right by
geography.” At the same time
Nehru ruled out war and offered to
settle the dispute by negotiation.
Chou En-lai agreed and proposed
maintenance of the status quo (with
China in possession of the disputed
frontier post at Longju) pending a
settlement of boundary differences
“methodically, step-by-step” through
peaceful négotiations, Thete the mat-
ter stands,

convention,

Peking’s conciliatory attitude co-
incided with a most unusual inter-
vention from Moscow. On September
9, Tass called for a quick and peace-
ful solution of the border dispute.
It straddled the fence on the vital
issue of Indian and Chinese claims
to the territory, termed the tension
deplorable and accused certain West-
ern interests of trying to use the
incident to fan the flames of the cold
war. Coming on the heels of Nehru’s
invitation to Eisenhower to visit
India and on the eve of the Khru-
shchey tour of the United States,
the Soviet move had two objectives:
to stave off a likely Indian move to-
wards a more pro-Western policy and
to create a healthy chmate for the
Washington talks. The latter goal
seems to have been achieved, for all
is quiet in the Himalayas. The So-
viets were undoubtedly annoyed by
Mao’s probing of India’s “Northern
Wall” at this time. Moreover, they
are not prepared to antagonize the
key to the uncommitted world over
some useless mountain terrain. In
any event, the Soviet mediation ef-
fort destroys the view of many in
North America that the Himalayan
border tension was hatched in Mos-
cow. Indeed, everything points to
its source in Peking.

WHAT, then, caused the Chinese
to antagonize their most powerful
neighbor and their most steadfast
friend in the non-Communist world?
Many attributed it to Chinese cha-
grin at the Khrushchev-Eisenhower
talks, to the fear that Chinese in-
terests might be sacrificed, and to the
desire to undermine the informal
summit meeting. Hence the timing
and the choice of India, the only
neighbor large enough to cause con-
cern in the West and possibly pre-
vent the talks from being held, or
at least from being fruitful. This
thesis must now be discarded in the
light of the conciliatory tone in Pe-
king and the lull in the Himalayas.
There is no evidence, either, to sup-
port the view that China’s probing
operation represented a diversion
from economic problems at home.
Rather, the explanation must be
sought in terms of the Tibetan re-
volt, India’s grant of asylum to the
Dalai Lama and 13,000 Tibetan ref-

5} = oy

' wee
ev

Nn oe, en Ta ae
ugees, and the further annoyance
with Delhi stemming from the Dalai
Lama’s political activities. The fact
that Nehru refuses to raise or sup-
port the Tibetan case at the U.N. is
insufficient. Peking is angry that he
does not curb the Tibetan God-
King’s contact with foreign states
through their embassies in the In-
dian capital. Marshal Chen Yi stress-
ed this point in his statement to the
Standing Committee.

The current dispute will not lead
to war between India and China.
Indeed, India continues to recognize
Tibet as part of China and con-
tinues to support Peking’s admission
to the United Nations, despite the
border tension. But something has
changed. The mutual trust and har-
mony of the past ten years have been
seriously undermined by the Tibetan
revolt last spring and even more so
by the thrust into the North East
Frontier Agency. This process is
likely to continue.

IT WOULD be rash; however, to as-
sume that fundamental changes in
Indian foreign policy are likely to
occur in the near future. The view
that neutralism has been revealed as
an illusion is wishful thinking. More,
it is a dangerous misreadimg of the
reasons for India’s non-alignment.
Suffice it to note India’s geo-political
position in Asia, its proximity to the
Soviet Union and its lengthy frontier
with China. It is also worth noting
that India’s leaders are convinced
non-alignment fulfills a historic role
as a bridge between East and West.
It is not a flimsy, ephemeral for-
eign policy to be swept aside at will.
It is a policy rooted in Indian thought
and calculated to serve India’s vital
interests and, it is believed, world
interests as well. The latest evidence
for this belief is Nehru’s reaffirma-
tion of non-alignment as the basis
of policy during his visits to Afghan-
istan and Iran. And yet, greater cau-
tion vis-a-vis China is a certain out-
come of the present tension.

One other observation is in order.
Whatever the motives for China’s
action, it would have been much
more difficult for it to cause tension
were Peking fully accepted in the in-
ternational community and subject
to the pressures of the U.N.

ihe Th N. YT IC iN i
‘ a are © he
* _

ohh

ye ;

et Pee
nocrats ©

Kansas City, Mo.
“IT PREDICT,’ Governor G. Men-
nen Williams of Michigan told his
fellow Democratic leaders at the re-
cent Midwest Democratic Confer-
ence, “that there will be a Republi-
can President in the White House in
1960 unless the Democratic Party
presents a genuine liberal alternative
F to zig-zagging Republican middle-of-
the-roadism.”
; In a sense the Governor, although
_ undoubtedly seeking to further the
Presidential ambitions of an eager,
as yet unannounced liberal candidate
by the name of Williams, was putting
_ his finger on the astonishing dilem-
~ ma in which his own party now finds
itself: Barely a year after its sweep-
_. ing Congressional victory of 1958,
it is already ridden with frustrations.
The Williams prophecy was taken
lightly at the conference, probably
_ because the Governor himself is taken
lightly as a candidate. But some

ually another and more popular lib-
_ eral candidate — Senator Hubert
Humphrey. “Neither Williams nor
Humphrey is acceptable to the
South,” is the perfunctory way these
two men are disposed of by Demo-
cratic leaders who will have a lot
to say at the convention. But this
is only the beginning of the party’s
difficulties. Chats with many Demo-
crats of various persuasions reveal
that there isn’t a single possible can-
didate liberal, semi-liberal, or
conservative — who at this time is
generating genuine and wide enthu-
siasm in political circles. True, it is
early yet; but one senses, listening
to Democrats talk, a basic indecisive-
ness that may carry over to the
: convention itself. Many Democrats
; are already talking about the possi-
bility of the convention reaching a
deadlock.

What if a deadlock occurs? Talk
persists that, in such an event, Adlai
E. Stevenson may be drafted. But
understandably, from the point of
view of the professionals, there is

GODFREY SPERLING, Jr. is chief
of the Central News Bureau of the bir 1

Christian Science Monitor.

Democrats are treating just as cas-

eek New Faces . a by Godfrey Sperling, Jr.

little enthusiasm for elevating a two-
time loser to the candidacy.

One measure of the problem —
hinted at in the prophecy of Gov-
ernor Williams — is the surprisingly
open Democratic respect being ac-
corded to one of the Republican’s
possible candidates, Governor Nelson
Rockefeller. To the press at the Mid-
west conference here, former Presi-
dent Truman spoke glowingly of
Rockefeller. “I like him,” he said.
“He used to work for me. He’s a very
fine gentleman. He has only one
handicap — he’s a Republican.”

Then a big Truman smile. In another
press conference, Senator Sym-
ington tossed an accolade toward a
man he might conceivably be oppos-
ing at the polls next year: “Rock-
efeller is a fine gentleman,” the Sen-
ator said.

Implicit in these remarks, and in
those of many other Democrats
these days, is envy of a Republican
Party that has such an appealing
new political figure to draw upon
next year — whatever, in the end,
the Republicans decide to do with
their “new face.”

THIS points to the most significant
political development of the Mid-
west Democratic Conference. In the
corridors, the need for a “new Demo-
cratic face” was talked about serious-
ly for perhaps the first time at any
Democratic conclave. A few of Stev-
enson’ Ss past supporters are mention-
ing the name of Ch Bowles. The
argument for Bo ;

pal ake

he is a liberal who might be accept-
able to all Democratic factions.
At this point, Mr. Bowles can
boast support among only a few
“eooheads,” all of them lesser lights ,
in the Democratic Party. But the ae
mere mention of his name is startling ae
when contrasted with the protracted a
absence of “new-face” candidates "
since Governor Meyner was. talk-
ed about in that context some time i‘
ago. rs
Today, Meyner can be included
in the long list of Democratic pos-
sibilities who fail to evoke the sort
of national enthusiasm that the 3
Democratic Party is looking for.
Kennedy? Symington? Johnson?
Humphrey? Brown? A case can be os
made that there is at least one major o
political objection to each of these
men. With Kennedy and Brown there
is the religious question, which may
or may not be a weakness at the polls.
With Johnson, the weakness is unac-
ceptability in the North; with Hum- :
phrey, it is unacceptability in the :
South; and with respect to Syming-
ton, there is the growing suspicion
that although the Missouri Senator
is rated No. 2 among the Democratic
Presidential possibilities throughout
much of the United States, voters
generally will never accept him as No,
1. Several Missouri Democrats, who
say they like Symington personally
and feel he has been a good Senator,
have said to me, in effect: “I’m sor-
ry, but I can’t see Symington as
President. Outside of defense, what
does he really stand for?”

ON THE eve of a Presidential year,
the Democratic Party appears to be
measurably off balance. This can be
seen in the in-fighting between Na-
tional Chairman Paul Butler and the
Democratic majority leaders in Con- |
gress; it can be seen in the political
frustrations that have accompanied |
President . Fisenhower’s “veto con-
trol” of a Democratically controlle
Congress. (Mr. Truman said of
phenomenon: “This has made i
pear that the Congress —
Democratic majority — has, in f ’
sustained President Eisenhower. *Mi

i on to say that ‘this

4 d (5 87 "

case appearances were deceitful, but
his admission, in itself, undareebted
the inability of the Democrats to
make much political capital out of
their Congressional majority. )

The way things looked in the fall
of 1958, the Democrats were expect-
ing to roll right on from their smash-
ing Congressional victory into the
Presidency. After all, “Eisenhower
the unbeatable” would no longer be
around. Furthermore, there were
more registered Democrats in the
country than there were Republicans.
The year 1960 looked like the big
chance for the Democrats to come
back in. And it still may be. For de-
spite the unforeseen frustrations of
the moment, the Democrats may well
be able to rally behind an “old” or a
“new” face attractive enough to de-
feat any Republican opponent.

But the fact that the Democrats
are experiencing doubts at a moment
when optimism might well have been
expected 1s a political development
of no little consequence.

Granted, most of the views ex-
pressed herein are of Midwest origin.
But, as Democratic strategists on the
national level admit, this is the area

! . if
that will have the strongest voiee in

o
«i

Also reflecting the Midwest’s new

naming the party’s Presidential can- ascendancy to power in the Demo-

didate.

Political strategists will point out
that it is here in the Midwest that
the great Democratic upsurge in
the last decade has taken place. The
fact is reflected spectacularly in the
count of Governors from the thirteen
states represented at the Midwest
conference: ten Democrats and three
Republicans. This is the area that
once was known as the cradle of
Republican Presidents. Today even
Ohio has a Democratic Governor and
two Democratic Senators. In place
of Jenner of Indiana, there is Hartke;
where McCarthy once ruled in Wis-
consin, there is now Proxmire; where
Bricker once held sway in Ohio, there
is Young,

IT IS HERE in the Midwest, too,
where much of the Democratic cam-
paign money will be spent in 1960 in
an effort to maintain this upward
trend. Fully 50 per cent of the “mar-
ginal” Congressional districts (those
where 5 per cent or less of the vote
separated the candidates in 1958)
are located in these thirteen states.

cratic Party is the candidacy of
Stevenson in the past two elections
and the fact that the party’s leading
functionaries and leaders — Butler,
Truman and Stevenson — all hail
from the Midwest.

Thus, in the end, the Democratic
Party’s Presidential nominee in 1960
is likely to be either a Midwesterner
or one who has the enthusiastic bless-
ing of this powerful bloc of states.
And if indecision on the 1960 stand-
ard-bearer turns out to be mainly
centered and most pronounced
among Midwestern Democrats, per-
haps the talk here of the need for a
“new face” will ultimately turn out
to be not altogether idle.

But whatever takes place at the
Democratic National Convention, the
fact remains that late in the threshold
year, the Democrats are haying some
unexpected troubles. It is said, of
course, that Democrats love to get
into shape for fighting Republicans
by fighting each other first. If this
is so, the Democrats should be razor
sharp for the battle of November,
1960.

Walpurgis Night at Carnegie Hall..

WHILE Nikita Khrushchey was be-
ing feted by Rockefellers, Harrimans,
Watsons and other arch agents of
capitalism, and greeted by the aging
gilded youth of Santa Barbara, a
gallant little band of intransigents
tossed a semi-private Totentanz (two
of them, in fact) in Carnegie Hall,
protesting the Presence upon our
shores. ‘The first, sponsored jointly
by the Crusade for America and the
National Review, was a real hoot-
enanny; the second, hosted by the
American Friends of the Captive
Nations, laid something of an egg.

Despite the black flags and black
arm bands, hawked like Yale pen-
nants along with the collected works

NOEL E. PARMENTEL, Jr. com-
ments upon American politics, man-
ners and morals for this and other
magazines,

188

of Whittaker Chambers, Joseph Mc-
Carthy and James Burnham, there
was, for the first of these occasions,
an almost festive air around the
hall. The gang was, after all, all here,
as a quick glance at the bar would
prove. I ran into old friends from the
Christian Nationalist Crusade, the
National Renaissance Party, Free-
dom Fighters, Inc., and the Ameri-
can Jewish League Against Com-
munism, as well as new-found ones
from the Crusade and the Captives.
It was, to understate the case con-
siderably, a most curious frente po-
pular. Many of the tickets had been
sold in blocks, a fact which brought
about a good many interesting ethnic
juxtapositions in the audience. [
noted one group of earnest young
Jews, apparently college students,
sandwiched uncomfortably between
a gang of Yorkville toughs and a

Noel E. Parmentel, Jr.

phalanx of those grand old men of
the religious tolerance movement,
the Polish and Lithuanian émigrés.

Unable to choose among the hall’s
various delights, I settled for a
quickie with a friend in the bar, then
rushed up to a press box where my
immediate neighbors were Bill Buck-
ley, Mrs. Joseph McCarthy and an
Orthodox priest who looked like a
road-company Archbishop Makarios.

On the speakers’ platform were
such stalwarts as C. D. Batcheller,
the Daily News cartoonist; Dr. J.
B. Matthews, an alumnus of the
House Un-American Activities Com-
mittee who had had the perspicacity
to discover that the Protestant clergy
was sowing the seeds of subversion;
and Roy Brewer, the old Hollywood
denouncer. Brewer looked somber
most of the evening, but brightened
eventually when the heart-warming

The Nation

news reached him that such movie-
land intellectuals as Ronald Reagan
and Adolphe Menjou had refused to
break bread with The Butcher.
(Ward Bond also found that his du-
ties on Wagon Train would prevent
him from greeting the Soviet Pre-
mier.) Also introduced were a former
counsel to the American Civil Liber-
ties Union and the editor of the
N.A.M. News. | had missed the name
of one man on the patform, a model
of distinguished boredom, and asked
a neighbor, who had been identified
as “a patron,” if the gentleman in
question might be Ham Fish. I got,
for my pains, a dirty look and the
information that Ham Fish had
turned traitor by joining Eleanor
Roosevelt and others of her stripe
in welcoming Khrushchev to the
country. The ennui-stricken dais-
sitter, who turned out to be Chris-
topher Emmet, never did gain in-
terest, but he did add a little badly
needed tone to the platform. This
group was joined later on by Dr. Bela
Fabian, the professional Freedom
Fighter and pirxieish picket, who
played counterpoint to Mr. Emmet
on the tonal scale. While these forces
gathered on the platform, someone
who might have been Ethel Smith,
but wasn’t, rendered some jazzbo
hymns and dirges on an immense
organ.

William Rusher, publisher of the
National Review, opened the meet-
ing, and when | noted the name of
“this outstanding clergyman” who
was about to give the invocation, |
knew that things were off to a roar-
ing start. The man of the cloth was,
of course, Rabbi Benjamin Schultz,
indefatigable head of the Jewish
‘League Against Communism. Ben
was in good form and gave The
Butcher what-for.

WHEN BEN is at the top of his
form, following him to the rostrum
is like coming to the plate after Babe
Ruth, and who today remembers
Myril Hoag? This was Daniel Buck-
ley’s lot. Buckley, who has no visible
connections with the National Re-
view clan, formerly worked for the
Jenner committee and is now execu-
tive director of Crusade for América.
He tried gamely but lamely. Ben
had the indian sign on him, and he
was reduced to little more than

October 3, 1959

urging continuation of the cold war
and saluting the dentists of America
for their brave hold-out in the Wal-
dorf ballroom. (He had, presumably,
forgiven or forgotten Dr. Irving
Peress, the “subversive” driller from
Jackson Heights.)

The next act, a real rouser, got
the nod from me as the high point
of the evening. “Dr.” Ruth Alex-
ander, Washington, D.C., columnist
for the New York Mirror, would have
been, I think, the event’s star per-
former in anybody’s book. She at-
tacked the Eisenhower, Truman and
Roosevelt administrations, called
F.D.R. a “rainy-day plutocrat,” and
referred to Eleanor as “his buck-
toothed bride.” The audience cheer-
ed. As lagniappe, she called Karl
Marx a dirty old man “who used to
scratch himself in the British Mu-
seum” instead of getting a job like
an honest man. She was a real show-
stopper, and |, for one, was sorry to
see her finally trip down from the
platform.

IT WAS, however, time for Bill
Buckley, the National Review's
young, controversial and rather en-
gaging editor. Buckley possesses that
thousand-mile stare cultivated by
all zealots, and can be a real stem-
winder, but there were few fire-
works on this oceasion. He delivered
a speech rote, even to an “aha,”
from an editcrial in his magazine,
and stood on tippy-toe during the
entire recital, a disconcerting habit
at best. He did warrant a few laughs,
mostly at the expense of New York’s
Mayor Wagner (who had refused to
greet King Saud but tossed a civic
reception for Khrushchev), but lost
a good part of his audience when he
declared that Jews in Russia were
no more discriminated against than
any other religious group. (This was
an error, both factual and tactical,
but Buckley’s saving grace is his vis-
ible honesty. )

Buckley speaks a sort of standard
Grotonese, even as EDR did, al-
though there are those on both sides
(including, I feel suré, Buckley) who
will consider thé comparison odious
in the extreme. I have been rather
impressed by his eléverness in dé-
bates, but this was searcely an im-

pressive speech. He may have been

off his feed, |

Damon, in the person of Buckley,
gave way to Pythias in the form of
one L. Brent Bozell, Buckley’s friend,
confidant, collaborator and brother-
in-law. If Buckley sounds like Roose-
velt, Bozell looks like a healthier,
more cornball Harry Hopkins; his
manner can best be described as
“painfully sincere.” He had not much
to say, and said it none too well,
but he did make the pitch for the
collection. During this churchly in-
terval (complete with organ music ),
I headed for a drink, rather sheep-
ishly until I discovered that even
the faithful were cutting out for the
bar instead of facing the unknown
perils of the piate. After dodging the
bite successfully, my fellow freeload-
ers and I ambled back to our seats
in time to hear the guest of honor,
Joe Mc@arthy’s widow. Once an ex-
tremely pretty girl, now verging on
the bovine, she seemed tired and un-
sure of herself. She received a stand-
ing ovation and made a short, stand-
ard speech. Although her value as a
rallying point for the extreme Right
is rather limited by her lack of
dazzle, Jean McCarthy has come a
long way from the gauche little girl
who once traded on the slender fact
that she and Margaret Truman had
been sorority sisters.

THE FINAL PUNDIT was Clarence
Manion, former dean of Notre Dame
Law School and one-time head of
the government Reorganization
Commission. His speech, meant for
a shocker, reached an audience that
was more or less drifting toward the
door and the late train home. He
advocated the good life and the good
death, which is achieved while fight-
ing godless communism. Other speak-
ers had held out for a cold war, but
Manion, no parlor Brown, was hold-
ing out for a hot one. But the evening
had gone on too long, and the au-
dience was too apathetic to cheer
this advance.

While Manion was speaking, I
tried to buttonhole Bill Buckley for
his own impressions of the brouhaha,
He had been hovering backstage, a
la David Belasco. But when I finally
spotted him, Pythias had not only
his éar but his rapt attention. He was
bending down to light Buckley’s
cigar, so I went out into the audience
to have a look around, and: got to

189

chatting with a striking-looking pair
of gentlemen toward the rear. One
was an Arab, an Iraqi late of Bagh-
dad who had found it convenient to
leave his (captive?) land after Kas-
sim seized power. The other, whom
I had at first taken for a Valiant
Hungarian, turned out to be a Free-
dom-loving Romanian. They were
in the oil business. The Arab mourn-
ed the days of Nuri Pasha, a “strong
friend of freedom.” The other blamed
his country’s troubles not particular-
ly on Khrushchev, nor even on com-
munism. When I inquired who the
culprit was, he pulled one right out
of the hat. “Madame Lupescu,” he
murmured. “A Jew, you know.” None
the less, this pair felt good tonight,
and I left them with gleams of nos-
talgia in their eyes, the one possibly
for the Baghdad Pact, the other
probably for the good old days of the
Iron Guard pogroms in Bucharest.

BY THIS time a Father Braun, who
had once had a parish in Moscow,
was delivering what he called the
benediction. He waved the bloody
shirt and incited to riot for some ten
minutes, but he was no more a match
for Ben Schultz than Daniel Buckley
had been. Outclassed.

It had been a gathering of a group
with no place to go. The offering and
the ticket receipts will presumably
help to finance the Crusade for Amer-
ica or some other band of leaderless,

PN ee , ES ee EG, aR

movement that was, at its most pro-
pitious moment, unable to fill Car-
negie Hall: a collection of has-beens,
have-nots, fanatics, neurotics and
trouble-makers. Buckley, the only
one among them with any real lead-
ership quality, falls far short of the
mark as a New Man of Power. They
are as boring as the American ex-
treme Left, riddled with narrow sec-
tarianism and split by cliques. Some
of them are ugly customers, making
up what they lack in direction with
sheer venom. Among the prominent
Americans publicly insulted and
hissed by this ragtag, bobtail band
were President Eisenhower (cries
were heard for his impeachment),
Vice President Nixon, Mayor Wag-
ner, Governor Rockefeller and Sen-

- ator Fulbright. The New York Times

also came in for a nice, full round
of boos.

But while Dick Nixon was booed
and the name of Ham Fish made to
sound like an epithet, Senator Paul
Douglas and George Meany were
lustily cheered. Well, it was a topsy-
turvy week all over: Mr. K, himself
was “thanking God” and offering to
swear on the Bible; Harry Truman
was seeing Cardinal Cushing and
breaking bread with George Bender
to save Matt Connolly’s scalp. Khru-
shchev was lunching with Zsa Zsa
Gabor and I, for one, would not have
batted an eyelash to hear that they

Lowell Birrell in Brazil.

On the way out of Carnegie Hall,
I ran into Allen Zoll, an amiable Na-
tionalist from Texas who was sport-
ing a Squadron A rosette. He was
beaming and seemed pleasantly sur-
prised to see me. I asked him to count
the house, and he said 3,500, a figure
the late Joe Jacobs would have called
“euphonious.” A more accurate fig-
ure, 2,700, was given to me by an-
other friend in the house, a comic-
book publisher from Connecticut.
(Over too many gin-and-tonics, he
began berating me for spoofing the
Crusade. I eventually got him on a
train to Darien, but he was back for
Sunday-night turkey cooked up by
Christopher Emmet’s Friends of the
Captive Nations.)

As we filed out, Ethel Smith’s
stand-in gave us a rousing chorus of
“Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and I
overheard a couple of the Jewish col-
leagues complain of the absence of
tact. That note, one of bungling
cross-purposes, was the note that set
the key for the whole revival. Going
out the door, I bumped into Makar-
ios again. “A goot evening,” he of-
fered. I wasn’t certain whether this
was a greeting or a comment but, de-
termined to give as good as I got, I
countered with “You ain’t just a’
whistlin’ Dixie, Padre.” Perplexed,
but not entirely unhappy, he left.
And so did I.

THE HAPPINESS RAT RACE...

THE FAMOUS, inalienable error
is proclaimed in the Declaration of
Independence. Jefferson might have
been expected to write, in the Lock-
ean spirit of the age, “life, liberty,
and property,’ but I suppose the
hypocrisy of that was so crass that
it too harshly echoed a black un-
dertruth, “life, bondage, and being
property.” Something high-sound-
ing and sincere was needed. It might
have been tacked on as fourth, but

GEORGE P. ELLIOTT is the au-
thor of Parktilden Village (Beacon
Press).

slogans thrive on triads; so “proper-
ty” made room for a more com-
fortable phrase. Even a slave pur-
sues happiness if it salves you to
think so, a nice shiny banjo-banging
slave: “life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness”: much more comfort-
able.

There’s so much unmanageable
luck to happiness that it won’t be
held on to any longer than it wants.
“Count no man happy,” the chorus
said of Oedipus, “till he be dead.”
Indeed, the moment you grasp hap-
piness like a possession, it alters.

“He,” said Blake, “who binds to

| ly ¢ na
h ® ea ie! 8

by George P. Elliott

himself a joy/Does the wingéd life
destroy,/But he who kisses the joy
as it flies/Lives in eternity’s sun
rise.” To Sophocles and Blake, the
world is unreasonable, and the gods
meddle in our affairs as it pleases
them, not as it pleases us. And
Aristotle — who was like our Found-
ing Fathers in that if a god should
speak through his lips, his ears
would refuse to hear more than
human words, and the universe was
as reasonable as he could make it —
all the same Aristotle defined happi-
ness not as a thing to be sought
directly but as the result of a life

The Nation

sn EP al

' ‘ F ny iy, v Hy 7 7 mw Pr re) Cv } re
dispirited and futile souls. It is a had run_ off together and joined — ,

. ve

lived in accordance with virtue and
blessed with good fortune.
_ If you live as you ought and if
you’re lucky, then the adjective
“happy” may be applied to you.
But our FFs turned it into a sub-
stance for us to chase like a bird.
What to do with the bird of hap-
piness once it’s caught? Cage it (“A
robin redbreast in a cage/Puts all
heaven in a rage”). Eat it. If you’re
a scientist, dissect it. But catch it,
; catch it, that’s the big idea.

One who thinks of happiness as a
_ thing, can be and wants to be per-
suaded that there are things for sale
to catch it with, prepackaged, worth
the money: Listerine, Mum, Joy,
a Cadillac, a wall-to-wall split-level
ranch-style fully-mechanized $28,000
home, those who care know it costs

‘a few cents more, don’t let your

i loved one suffer from seepage, a
gold-plated shower-nozzle for the

man who has everything, My Sin,

~ — Miltown.

% So, since more citizens of this
country now have money to buy

these snares with than ever before

— whether in this or in any other

country, this or any other age —

it follows that a lot of us ought to

be happy. From the point of view

of most men, it may look that way;

they usually do not have even enough

to eat, nor do they know the statis-

tics of our despair, our rates of

suicide, divorce, alcoholism, juvenile

delinquency, murder, mental illness.

Certainly from the point of view of

such people as the Russians, who

want what we have only more, it

must look that way. Amazing, half

the world wants to be Los Angeles

— the Hollywooded dream, that is,
not the actual place in a smog.

_ Happiness is an official U.S. prod-
uct all right. We used to promise it
wholesale to the poor, the homeless,
the huddled masses (from the right

countries, that is — beware any
; symbol which is aesthetically as ugly
| as the Statue of Liberty): Nowadays
we quota that promise rigorously,
but we are generous with our know-
how in devising happiness snares
and cages. We export do-it-yourself
kits or completely ready-made snares
to any country (any Russia-hating
country) that wants them.

-eeatn an ae

We also have plenty of custom-

ject.

made items for the domestic trade.
The D.C. publicity department says
Washington is a summer festival.
As Herbert Gold reports, for the ad-
men this is an age of happy prob-
lems. According to The Native Sons
of the Golden West, God created
California to be a paradise for the
white man. In New York, the city-
owned WNYC signs off every night
with a perfect lie in amber: “Where
eight million people live in peace
and harmony.” And if you'll just
adulterate your joy with some busi-
ness, the government will subsidize
you in the name of Expense Ac-
count.

Well, one thing is certain: from
Key West to Puget Sound, from Bar
Harbor to Tijuana, up, down and
sideways, we do have a lot of fun.

HAVE FUN: possessiveness is part
of the very idiom: fun is a bird you
can have if you catch. (But only a
flicker of a bird — you mustn’t
squeeze him. )

Not that there’s anything wrong
with genuine fun. It’s as natural and
healthful as any other form of play.
Four Nebraska farmers pitching
horseshoes at a church social, their
wives setting out the thermos of
lemonade and charcoal-broiling the
chicken, their children playing hide-
and-go-seek among the cars. Ten or
twelve Columbus high school friends
in somebody’s living room on a
snowy Friday night drinking pop
and listening to records, from time
to time dancing, a few of them duck-
ing into dark corners to kiss. In
Indianapolis, kids playing in the
water which the firemen let gush
from hydrants on a hot day. Driv-
ing fast on a Maryland country
road. Bridge and coffee in the front
room; poker and beer in the kitchen.
Fishing. Ball games. Fireworks on
the Fourth in the Riverside city
park. A block party in East St.
Louis, a hundred kids dancing in the
street to canned music. The movies.

But this is only a hit-or-miss begin-
ning to a list so huge and various it
addles the brains to think of it. And
every item on the list is in fact a
fun worth enjoying ; “you take it
for what it is, fugt nd not very
important. Only pt " would ob-

And there’s a good share of the
trouble: the puritans did, and do,
object. They do all they can to pol-
lute the springs of fun.

Take liquor, which has come to
have a lot to do with having fun.
In Mississippi it cannot be bought
legally (Oklahoma went wet just ae
this summer). In three-fourths of i?
the rest of the states of the union,
there are restrictions (local option,
buyers’ licenses, papers to sign)
which make you resentful or un-
easy every time you buy a bottle, or aia
at least conscious that the law
watches you do it. And the public
gathering places for drinking! In I
don’t know how many states, noth-
ing, or nothing more than beer, may
be served on the premises. It’s scarce-
ly worth trying to get good wine Bes
with dinner in a restaurant outside
the metropolises, nor in most of the
restaurants in them. And what kind
of joy is the ordinary cocktail lounge
arranged to generate? — a long,
straight bar facing bottles and a
mirror; backless stools, murk; no
games to play but pinball; noise
from the TV. or the juke-box; no
dancing permitted; about the en- |
trance as you turn to go in, an aura
of discredit: a meager, thick joy. Ms

“We may not be able,” said the _
pale-eyed Calvinist, “to keep you y
from sinning, but we’ll do what we
can to keep you from enjoying it.”

So, an act which can be, ought to
be, often is pure fun — dancing, for fq
example — may be turned into an
occasion of uneasiness and_ strain
simply by being looked at with
puritan eyes. And when the dancers
themselves so look, then the trouble
goes far deeper. They may quit danc-
ing entirely, or, quite as bad, they
may dance in flagrant defiance of
conscience. In this latter case, much
liquor may be needed to keep the |
psyche quiet. (In Washington, D.C., —
where psyches need quieting for all —
sorts of reasons, the consumption of
alcohol is much higher than in ont
of the states: two and a half g
lons of wine and over five gal
of hard liquor per capita per y
Or, worst of all, fun may becom mi
desperate need and a cause, as
became in the 20s and still ‘is for
many; too many.
ba fun! For any select,

fan-house —‘a traveling carnival —
Coney Island — are callow symbols
of the meretricious; and surely any-
one who becomes addicted to fun is
his own contemptible dupe?
There’s more to it than that.

THE ECONOMICS of fun is quite
impossible to come by, if only be-
cause fun is an impossible economic
category. Even if you identify it as
“the entertainment business,” you’re
going to run into all sorts of trouble
defining entertainment. At the end
of last year, Life, that magazine of
Luce religiosity, gave as its Christ-
mas present to the world a double
issue devoted to the business of en-
tertainment in the United States.
But I at least run into aesthetic trou-
ble immediately when I find that
“entertainment” includes, at one end
of the spectrum, any opera staged
at the Metropolitan and, at the
other end, anything broadcast over
TV.

Pardon me, but no high art
should be reduced to “entertain-
ment” even when, like The Magic
Flute, it entertains, and Otello,
which I like better than any other
opera I know, is no fun at all. And
pardon me again, but if watching
This Is Your Life is entertainment,
then so is cutting up Siamese kit-
tens with a dull pair of scissors.

And then (to get away from in-
disputable taste) a great many
things which originally were luxuries
and fun now have developed in us
a craving as great as a need, like rum
to a drunkard.

Take automobiles. Nearly all the
people in the world seem to get along
without them. Even in the United
States, a few people manage with-
out them; some of the Amish south
of Iowa City still go by horse and
buggy, and they look good too.
Usually when I drive some place, I
could just as well have walked, or
gone by public transportation, or
stayed home. But it’s fun to drive!

Yet, car ownership has, for a very
great many people, come to have so
much to do with status and con-
fidencé and sécurity and convenience
that it couldn’t bé exciséd from their
lives without effecting a profound
dislocation. Maybe this dislocation
would bé good; I don’t khow; but

192

Wits, A ‘7 PAT ¢

Sate tie *.
my point. is that! it. puts-cars- quite
out of the order of what is meant
by fun. Furthermore, by now so
many jobs. depend on cars, either
in producing and maintaining them
or else in using them, that the in-
dustry has become an inextricable
part of our national life as well as
of our private lives. Or so we think,
as we do not think about basker-
ball, bingo, the funnies.

How is an economist to categorize
cars? They’re a luxury, they’re fun,
they’re a drug, they’re a necessity
— all at once.

Sull, so nearly as I can guess by
poring over various tables of family
and national expenditures and of na-
tional business statistics, we Amer-
icans apparently spend more per
year on liquor than on medical care,
the “entertainment business” is fi-
nancially more important than min-
ing, and most families lay out as
much for cigarettes in the course of
a year as for charity.

I submit: this is not only wrong
of us, but down underneath the of-
ficial gloss of Life-like lies, in which
we live, we ourselves know it to be
wrong. So why do we do it?

HERE, ON THE troubled waters
of why, an unspecialized citizen like
ne can float as free as any sociologist,
economist, psychologist, anthropol-
ogist. My speculations are going to
be unabashed.

It has something to do with pur-
itanism all right. (Nothing but Pro-

, Pee ee a, ne Soe
- . pe ae,
hibition’ could have made bathrii
gin taste good.) But.there’s a lot
more to it than that.

‘I can’t see that it has anything
directly to do with the class strug-
gle (in fact, I have trouble seeing
the classes struggling any more, at
least one against another as they
used to do). Nor with the loss of
religious faith or with the pains and
disappointments which come. with
groping for that lost faith. These
and others like them may be, and
I think are, involved in’ our fun-
desperation, but in remote, perva-
sive, indirect ways. It has a great
deal to do with our wealth, for our
wealth gives us leisure for which we
do not have good enough uses (we
speak of “killing” time) and more
money to spend than training in how
to spend it responsibly. And it has
a very great deal to do with the joy-
lessness and lack of engagement most
people feel about their work, whether
office or factory or field. But these
things have been talked about much
and well.

Here, I want to look at two enor-
mous, efficient causes influencing
each of us Americans and all collec-
tively. They are so monstrous that
every time I really regard them my
ears ring and I run for the fun-juice.

THE FIRST OF THEM is our war-
making. The traditional political and
nationalist reasons for making war
are still about as good as they ever
were, though there are a lot of ob-
scure and very important new rea-
sons mixed in with the usual ones.
But ordinary Americans no longer
go to war primarily for these rea-
sons. Young men allowed themselves
to be drafted, trained and shipped
to Korea to fight, but they did not
allow it for political reasons primar-
ily, not as a police action to contain
communism. I’m not sure why they
did it, and neither, I believe, are
they; nor do they or the State réally
want to know, just so long as they
keep doing what seéms to be (and
perhaps used to be) their duty. And
no more than 15 to 25 per cent of
the American riflemén. in World
War II (this is on the authority of
Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall
in Men Against Fire, Motrow, 1947)
would actually fire their guns éven

The Nation —

TESS TT La ie i ae

all_of these

fired at anything. They allowed the
State to draft them, but they had
trouble shooting its enemies.

But worse than our reasons for
going to war are our ways of waging
it. (Not ours alone, but ours, but
ours.) The ways themselves challenge
and overshadow and finally obliter-
ate the reasons. Nothing could jus-
tify such abominations: I believe that
we all feel this obscurely and refuse,
in any effectual way, to look at it.
Our United States used the Bomb,
nobody else; our government is the
one chiefly responsible for spreading
radioactive particles over the world.
We had not thought we were capable
of such evil.

And we don't know what to do
about it.

THE second of the overwhelming
causes of our fun-desperation, as |
conceive the matter, is the dreadful
social injustice which we are guilty
of and benefit from, especially we
white Americans and most especial-
ly we whose Christian ancestors
came from Northern Europe. We
stole the nation in the first place
without believing that might makes
right; we ravished millions of Af-
ricans from their homes, their pasts,
their languages, their ways, enslaved
them, and left them one great pas-
sion, hating us (yet those who can,
would become like us); the Amer-
icans from south of us and the Asians
who have come to our country we
have insulted and do insult; our na-
tion helps the poor primarily when
it thinks that that action will hurt
its enemies or help itself; the pro-
ductive modes of our gaining our
inconceivable wealth we ourselves
think to be unscrupulous and un-
just, and they are so lunatic that
one of our reasons to give to the
poor is that that action will make
our nation richer; and for this same
bad-dream reason, to make ourselves
the better off, we destroy, prohibit,
or hoard yast quantities of food,
which food we know we should give
to the hungry.

We don’t like it. But we are so
rich, so comfortable, so et

We don’t like to think about it.
Circuses, Bread and circuses,
Let’ $ ae us a ball, s

* Pretty wel i in

It we tickle pe we expertly
enough, maybe we can just quit
thinking about the whole business.

I WANT to leave with you a couple
of images of fancy fun, Times Square
and call girls.

The good-time girls! — fun is their
life, they’re the Social Register of
pleasure, they have beauty and
money and no responsibilities, they
really kick their heels up at the law.
So far as I know, the best literary
portrait of a call girl is Holly Go-
lightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast
at Tiffany’s (Random House, 1958).
He takes her pretty much at her
own estimation—fun and charm and
wild, gay living, with accesses of the
acute anxiety to be got through,
and a fairy-tale ending. The trouble
with Holly is that only the best
part of her is there. For Capote
never shows her to us in her chrom-
ium habitat, where in fact ordinary
citizens with the price can observe
her any time they want — in those
mortuaries of fun, night clubs.
Capote never asks us to take her
anxieties as anything more than
conversation pieces. He does not
mention her pimp. Maybe she doesn’t
have one, but most call girls do;
they need someone whom they can
despise more than they despise them-
selves.

One of the saddest books I ever
read is The Call Girl by a psycho-
analyst named H. Greenwald (Bal-
lantine Books, 1958). The author
has little regard for English prose
and less for the arts of narrative,
but he knows his people well and
makes it possible for you to know
them too, the daughters of joy. In
this book the girls come a lot closer
to breaking your heart than they
would in a_ night club or a hotel bed.
Here, you understand they have to
have their fun with such ferocity be-
cause they are so full of anxiety and
self-contempt and because they do
not really enjoy what they do: they
are frigid; . their customers, solid
citizens very likely. with families,
want their sex per most of the
time; they must pse 4
fast to allay their
that no one will
them, and of ec

‘it. But finally, rather than et

does. Most of them will end in drug
addiction, streetwalking, alcoholism,
or suicide, as they know....It takes
a gruesome lot of fun to get through
“the life.”

The highest concentration of fun,
everybody says, is Times Square on ss
New Year’s Eve. So I went a couple
of years ago to see what there was x
to see. And that’s what everyone
else was doing, seeing what there
was to see. There was a battalion of
police and a fair number of youths
with noise-makers. But mostly there
were thousands of us just milling
around. A third or so lined the
store-fronts four or five deep, an- 34
other third ranged along the curb
and out into the street, and the rest
straggled densely along in the course ff
between, largely in a counter-clock- :
wise direction. Mostly, we shifted
from one group to another without
any particular reason, just to be do-
ing something. Few made noise. We
looked at one another with eyes
blanked from too much liquor or
from looking at too many other
faces or from madness. We smiled a
lot; it was New Year’s Eve; we were
making merry. At midnight every-
body croaked, and because there
were so many of us croaking we
seemed to roar. We watched one
another for reactions to react to. '

SOMEONE —I think it was St.
Augustine — suggested an image of
hell for the intellect: two mirrors
facing each other in a gray void. We
have improved on all that.

Some New Year’s Eve, if you’re
in a deserted fun-town, say Atlantic
City, watch the Times Square cel-
ebration over gray-glassed TV, in a
motel room or any bar. Or, if you’re
at home, invite a couple of friends
over to watch with you and have
plenty of drinks; your own living |
room will do just fine for having
that sort of a hell of a time; as yo
watch people in the void- box watch-
ing one another, you and your friends
can watch each other too. Double.
distilled fun. I’ve tried it.

To be sure, having the kind o
fun you have to have doesn’t hurt
as much as finding out what’s real.
ly wrong and doing something al

hepa Td | prefer to to hi

BOOKS and the ARTS

Dragnet for Proust

PROUST: THE EARLY YEARS. By
George D. Painter. Little, Brown &
Co. 435 pp. $6.50.

Mina Curtiss

FOR MANY years a number of critics
and scholars, who have not themselves
suffered the splendors and miseries of
creating an imaginary world peopled by
living, three-dimensional characters,
have attempted to reduce Marcel
Proust’s great novel, A la Recherche du
Temps Perdu, to the level of a super
true-life mystery story. They have dug
into Proust’s personal life, into the lives
of all his friends, of his major and minor
acquaintances; they seem to have
searched everywhere but in his own
writings for clues to an understanding
of his masterpiece. The books resulting
from this procedure are regarded as
literary criticism or critical biography.
Actually they are little more than de-
fective detective stories, since the prob-
lem these writers set themselves is be-
yond solution. Poets and novelists, when
they act as critics, know that no micro-
scope, however unremittingly, however
conscientiously focused on the minute-

to-minute details of an artist’s daily life,

can ever isolate the moment or series of
moments when his imagination trans-
forms the visual, the palpable, the fact
— what Henry James called “the germ”
— into a work of art. Proust himself,
in recalling the conception of his great
novel, wrote, “No one understood it.
Even those who sympathized with my

perception of the truth I meant later to

engrave upon my temple, congratulated
me on having discovered it with a micro-
scope, when, on the contrary, I had used
a telescope to perceive things which were
indeed very small because they were
very far away, but every one of them
a world.”

‘The most recent in the line of Proust-
ian sleuths is George D. Painter, a
curator at the British Museum. Prowst:
The Early Years is the first of two
volumes, the second of which he
promises two years from now. The
wisdom of publishing the two volumes

MINA CURTISS translated The Letters
of Marcel Proust (Random House). Her
biography, Bizet and His World, was
published last year by Knopf. Mrs.
Curtiss is now working on a biography
i Edouard Manet.

separately rather than waiting until the
whole work is complete is questionable
on the grounds of both scholarship and
literary criticism. For not only has he
deliberately withheld a bibliography of
his sources in this volume, in order, as
he says, “to avoid laying all my cards
on the table before the game is fin-
ished”; he also asks the reader to play
his game by suspending judgment of
his critical acumen until the second
volume appears. Proust: The Early
Years might be regarded by the review-
er as just another search for the keys of
a roman a clé, even though he feels
that the doors have already been many
times opened, were it not for the tone
and point of view in Mr. Painter’s pref-
ace.

In it he states that his book is not
intended to be controversial, while
claiming at the same time that “some-
thing like nine-tenths of the narrative
here given is new to Proustian biogra-
phy; or conversely, that previous biog-
raphers have used only about one-tenth
of the discoverable sources.” Accepting
Mr. Painter’s challenge, I should be
willing to risk reversing his figures. It
seems to me that about nine-tenths of
the present volume is familiar to any
reader who has followed Proust scholar-
ship and criticism.

THE chief novelty among the sources
is the diary of Albert Flament, a little-
known journalist who is mentioned three
or four times in Proust’s letters. He was
perceptive, astute and obviously a born
diarist. Discovery of a hitherto unknown
document as interesting as Flament’s is
indeed a feather in the cap of a biog-

rapher.
Another innovation is a Baedeker-like
guide — maps included — of the small

village of Illiers which, except for the
accident that Proust’s father’s forebears
stemmed from there, differs very little
from a thousand other villages in France.
The emotions of at least one Proustian

after visiting Illiers were comparable to,

the sense of loss and shrinkage she ex-
perienced on returning to a childhood
home, remembered as a large, light man-
sion set back from the street and sur-
rounded by ample lawns, only to dis-
cover a small frame house with a front
and a back yard, situated on a street
corner where trolleys. Panked past. The
ordinary little village of Miers in the

author’s Guide Blew account bears as
little relation to the magical Combray
of Swann’s Way as do Mr. Painter’s
meticulous accounts of the habits and
foibles of Proust’s friends to The Guer-
mantes Way. Indeed, Proust: The Early
Years might be described as a ragout
concocted of largely familiar ingedients
based on a recipe out of the Almanach
de Gotha re-edited by Walter Winchell
or Cholly Knickerbocker. But Mr.
Painter’s preface precludes any such
frivolous dismissal.

In his opening sentence he states:
“Believing that the published sources are
now adequate in quantity and quality,
but that the subject has never yet been
treated with anything approaching schol-
arly method, I have endeavored to write
a definitive biography of Proust: a
complete, exact and detailed narrative
of his life, that is, based on every known
or discoverable primary source, and on
primary sources only.” J. Christopher
Herold, whose Mistress to an Age: A
Life of Madame de Staél is one of the
most brilliant and illuminating biogra-
phies to appear in many years, seems
to me to have spoken definitively when
he explained in his preface to that work
why it was not offered as a “definitive”
biography. “Despite the impressive liter-
ature and documentation already pub-
lished on Madame de Staél and_ her
friends,” he writes, “a still larger mass
of material remains unknown; in the
second place definitive biographies can
be written only about people who are
quite dead. Sometimes, to be sure, they
will show some feeble signs of life, but
the definitive biography gives them the
coup de grace.”

Mr. Painter could not give that cowp
de grace because Marcel Proust is
still very much alive in the minds and
hearts of those who knew him. And
since until after the death of his heirs,
many of the primary sources will remain
unavailable, Mr. Painter would have
been wise to postpone staking his claim
to definitiveness. In spite of his state-
ment that he has used “every known or
discoverable primary source,” he has
apparently not availed himself of con-
versation with Proust’s friends and con-
temporaries, many of whom possess
highly relevant documents and informa-
tion communicable only by word of
mouth, Some of this material, which
would surely have changed certain
statements and conclusions, in his book,
1 know at first hand.

On page 148 he says, “It is probable

™~ > hd. Ne

IN, TO)

oh pea

that if his teens, liké Gide, he [Proust]
had femained perhaps ignorant of the
existence of homosexual love.” ‘This
statement is contradicted by a letter,
dated May 13, 1887, written to a young-
er schoolmate when Proust was fifteen
years old. The letter includes an analysis
of homosexuality as well as an original
poem by Proust entitled Péderastie.
In discussing “La Confession d’une
Jeune Fille,” a story in Les Plaisirs et
les Jours, Mr. Painter states that “it is
abundantly clear that the heroine is
Proust himself,’ and that this “is the
i only certain case of ‘transposition’ in
Proust’s early short stories.” But there
is 4 manuscript of an early short story
or novel, written in letter form like Les
Liaisons Dangereuses, of which Proust
was part author. During the summer of
1893 while he was at St.-Moritz and
Evian with his friend Louis de La Salle,
they collaborated by mail on this proj-
ect with two other friends, Daniel Halé-
yy and Fernand Gregh. Proust assurned
the role of the heroine, Pauline; La Salle
was. an officer, Halévy an abbé, and
Gregh a poet. The collaboration did not
prosper beyond the few opening letters,
' but im-one by “Pauline” there are two
references which show that, even two
years before Proust started writing Jean
Santeuil, the seeds of that book were
sprouting.

THE existence of other unpublished
documents also precludes the accom-
plishment of Mr. Painter’s aim. A mass
of material, second only to that belong-
ing to Proust’s nieee xind heir, is owned
by a wealthy collector who has little
interest in either literature or scholar-

Pe ship. I was fortuitously permitted a

glimpse of some of these rarities which

include a number of letters from Mad-
ame Proust to Marcel, one of which
more than implies that she was aware
of the homosexual aspect of some of his
friendships. There are also a number of
little notebooks of the kind in which
Proust wrote Jean Santeuil. The few
pages I was able to glance at led me to
Suspect that these notebooks may well
contain the missing portions of that
book.

Theéré ig space here to mention only
one other source of unpublished mate-
rial: Proust’s lettérs to the Duc d’Albu-
féra,. connected with which thére i is an
anéedoteé in Mr. Painter’s vein. When a
year or two ago the Duke was dsked
whether he would consider the publica-
tion of his letters from Proust, he is
eae to oer replied, “I navek fead
gett whieit Maréet was alive. Bi don’t

ect mé to read them now, :
5 ees iy

“hosts, hostesses, acquaintances in high
society” and «aristocratic «friends — of
Proust who play an important part in
Mr. Painter’s game of detection.

But the ignoring of unpublished mate-
rial is not the only flaw in Mr. Painter’s
procedure. He asks his critics to “con-
sider whether the facts as given are
true.” A number of them are not. How-
ever, | shall cite only 4 few of those
statements which | know to be errone-
ous. On page I41, Eugéne Reiter is de-
scribed as a “son of Jacques Bizet’s for-
mer wetnurse.” Jean Reiter, as he was
usually called, was the illegitimate son
of Georges Bizet and the only child of
Marie Reiter, a highly prized servant in
the Bizet household. Her son was ten
years old when Jacques Bizet was born,
so she could hardly have served as his
wetnurse,

Mr. Painter states on page 285 that
during the Dreyfus affair in 1898 and
1899 Madame Straus “was already ap-
proaching the intermittent nervous ex-
haustion by which she was to be tortured
the remaining twenty-eight years of her
life.’ And in a footnétehe implies that
her facial tic was of recent origin, add-
ing that “her neurasthenia was heredi-
tary, for her mother, sister and aunt all
had died insane.”

At the time of Genevieve Halévy-
Bizet-Straus’s marriage to Georges Bizet
in 1869, when she was nineteen, the
father of one of Bizet’s friends wrote to
his son, “I am glad that it is Bizet, not
you who is marrying Mlle. Halévy....
Even when I knew her as a child, it was
not difficult to recognize the seeds of
mental instabihty that did not bode
well for the future. On the other hand,
I would have been very happy to see
you marry the older sister, who was a
charming person.”

There has always been a mystery
about the cause of the death in 1864 of
Madame Straus’s older sister, Esther,
but there is no evidence that she died
insane. Madame Straus’s neurasthenia,
however, is evident in a journal she kept
both before and after her martiage to
Bizet. The first evidence of a complete
nervous breakdown appears in a letter
of Bizet’s written in 1871. “The external
manifestations of her nervous shock are
frightening,” he wrote. “I can’t give you
any idea of the extent of the nervous
tics.” The facial tic remained permanent-
ly. The nervous breakdowns were in-
termittent. The one. that t prevented her
helping Proust aéquire s signatures for the
Picquart petition, 1
Painter, grew large! 1

_spiration is reborn, when we are able to —

segment of material do not reassure one
of Mr. Painter’s judgment in. choosing
what “seem” to him “reliable” sources.

There remains the question of taste
and literary value. The fact that I do
not’ share Mr. Painter’s penchant for

scatology is unimportant. But the ex-
ample on page 114 raises again the a
question of the relationship between ex- sll
ternal behavior «nd the creative process :
of an artist. “In his youth Forain had Pa

sheltered Rimbaud in his studio,” we
are told, “until that atrocious young man }
left after defecating in his host’s morn-
ing milk by way of farewell.’ What 4
relevance this bit of gratuitous informa- 7
tion about the poet who wrote Le Ba- f
teau lvre, Saison dE nfer and Iilumina-
tions bears to an understanding of
Proust’s great novel is all the more
puzzling since neither he nor Forain is
suggested as a key to any character in .
A la Recherche.

HAVING thus far considered Proust:
The Early Years from the point of, view
ofa critic, IT think it is necessary to “Y
mention the author’s rather special con- f
ception of thé general reader whose
“needs” he claims “to serve.” For such
a person to profit by the footnotes which
pinpoint the relationship between the
mass of information gathered by Mr.
Painter and the relevant passages in
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu he
would need to be sufficiently bilingual
to read Proust in the original, and suf-
ficiently affluent to purchase the three-
volume Pléiade edition which costs about
twenty-five dollars. For all of the foot-
notes refer to this edition only.

This defect would be less important
if the main purpose of Mr. Painter’s
book were not to prove Proust’s depend-
ence on facts in the creation of his
novel. “There is no aspect of Proust or
his work,” he writes, “which can be
studied without ati accurate or detailed
knowledge of his life.” Yet Proust him-
self has poirited out the flaw in this
external, factual form of criticism:
“Our passions shape our books, repose
writes them in the intervals. en in-

také up otr war again, the woman
who posed to us for our sentimer
réaction can no longer make us feel it.
We miust continue to paint her irom
another twee! ahd if that is a tre:
to the fir a literary sense, th
to the ‘diay. of our sér
which make - work at Sin
same time a

abit te

guess whom an author is writing about,
are fatuous.”

On another level Mr. Painter has
also ignored Proust’s point of view. He
disdains the biographers and critics who
believe that A la Recherche contains “in
itself all the necessary elements for its
understanding,” indeed accuses them of
having been “egotistically contented to
know ... only what it means to them-
selves.” But Proust himself believed
that this is the way in which his master-
piece, or any other great masterpiece,
must and should be read. “Every reader
as he reads is the reader of himself,” he
has written. “The work of the writer is
only a sort of optic instrument which
he offers to the reader so that he may
discern in the book what he would
probably not have seen in himself.”

Surely the touchstone of a master-
piece of fiction is the fact that on each
rereading certain passages seem wholly
new or different because the reader’s
own experience in life has over the
years changed his point of view. There-
fore a far deeper insight into the work
can be reached by studying the results
of the author’s labors, the text itself,
than by trying to discover “what the
novel meant to the author,” and ‘

understand the special
which . . . every character and episode
had for Proust,” as Mr. Painter does in
his first volume, By separating the facts
of Proust’s formative years from the
basic themes of memory and time which
are Proust’s most original contribution
to the art of the novel, he has inevitably
placed undue emphasis on what at least
appear to be extraneous details.

Not that a literary biography should
ignore or minimize external events.
Knowledge of an author’s life is an im-
portant and valuable clue to his work—
but it is only a clue. “There are very
solid merits by which acquaintance with
the lives of writers may illumine their
works,” the distinguished novelist, Angus
Wilson, has said, “by a general suffu-
sion in the atmosphere of an author’s
life, in the strains and stresses that have
twisted out of him the imaginative
shapes which ‘pure’ literary critics so
rightly assert are the proper centre of
our interest.” But in order to perform
this function the biographical critic,
quite apart from his abilities as a schol-
ar and writer, must have self-abnega-
tion, humility and love. Mr. Painter’s

‘book raises grave doubts as to his pos-

session of these virtues.

Stories, Songs and People

KINGS, LORDS, & COMMONS. An
Anthology from the Irish. Translated
by Frank O’Connor. Alfred A. Knopf.
167 pp. $3.75.

Vivian Mercier

THE Irish (Gaelic) language contains
some of the most vivid — as well as
some of the most tedious — poetry ever
written. Naturally, Frank O’Connor has
avoided the tedious “official” verse, full
of imaginative genealogy and hallucinat-
ed history, rigorous law and loose the-
ology. Instead he has rendered into Eng-
lish some eighty-five poems, long and
short, that the modern reader would
agree to call poetry rather than verse.
About half of these are acknowledged
masterpieces, already available in one
or more English translations, but O’Con-
nor’s version is often both more accurate

_ and a better poem in its own right than

its predecessors: I am thinking especial-
ly of the much-translated verses about
the scholar and his cat Pangur.

The vividness of good Gaelic poetry

VIVIAN MERCIER, who was born in
Ireland, spent a year there in 1955-56,
studying Early Irish. He now teaches
English at the University of California.

comes primarily from its sense of drama.
The Gaels had no drama in the usual
sense, except some rudimentary mime,
because they had no cities and no the-
atres. Their potential O’Caseys became
poets and storytellers, with a gift for
dialogue and dramatic monologue that
we can still appreciate. Many poets used
Browning’s device of putting words in
the mouth of a long-dead saint or a
folk hero who never lived at all. St.
Columba has more poems attributed to
him than ever King David had, yet
even the best of these must be psycholog-
ically acute reconstructions of what
the saint might have felt, not at all
like the poems he may actually have
written.

The very first lines of such a dramatic
lyric establish both a character and a
situation; here is the remorseful Liadain,
an early Héloise, speaking of her dead
Abélard, Curithir by name:

Gain without gladness
Is in the bargain I have struck;
One that I loved I beac ve to mad-
ness. i

Here is the Old Woman of Beare lament-
ing her age and ugliness:

i the old norma Beare

ath in ys eh eM, Ne
‘ ee i i
‘

ak sey te a f ‘ as
, ee Ta : iy

significance |

aa Lae
Ones as ie ‘shift ena tom, +
Now and since my beauty’s fall
I have scarce a shift at all.

Even the monk who writes “A Prayer
for Recollection,” deploring the flighti-
ness of his thoughts, does so with a
dramatic immediacy not far from
stream-of-consciousness technique:

How my thoughts betray me!
How they flit and stray!
Well they may appal me
On great judgment day.

Through the psalms they wander
Roads that are not right;
Mitching, shouting, squabbling
In God’s very sight.

(1 could wish that O’Connor had avoid-
ed trochees in translating this fine poem,
twelve stanzas in all, whose structure he
so justly admires.) In almost every poem
from this book, as in O’Connor’s short
stories, we are conscious of a man or
woman speaking, of a personality being
revealed. And each of the three I have
quoted was indisputably composed be-
fore 1000 A.D.

ALMOST the last-written — and cer-
tainly the longest — poem in this col-
lection, Brian Merryman’s “The Mid-
night Court,” dating from the late eight-
eenth century, possesses the same dra-
matic quality. The poet himself, as he re-
Jates his dream, and the old man and
the young woman whom he uses as
mouthpieces for his satire against late
marriages and clerical celibacy leap off
the page at us with their racy speech
and clear-cut personalities. No “Celtic
twilight” here or in the sharply defined
pictures of natural scenery which
abound in Early Irish poetry!

Another refreshing and unexpected
fact about most of these poems and
O’Connor’s translations of them is that
they are not loquacious; on the con-
trary, they tend toward the laconic and
the epigrammatic. Irish “eloquence” re-
sults from the decadence of the prose
tradition — a process which began, alas,
as early as the twelfth century. Before
then, and sometimes afterwards too,
Irish narrative prose out-Hemingways
Hemingway, especially in the realism of
its dialogue. O’Connor calls the early
prose “Latinized,’ making me wonder
just how much Latin prose he has read.
Caesar, let alone Cicero, never wrote so
starkly as those anonymous Gaels,

Even aside from this remark about
Gaelic prose, O’Connor’s preface and
headnotes are a bit eccentric — mainly
because he hates to admit that these
poems which he loves could be the un-
aided work of those natural enemies, his
fellow-Irishmen, He tends to overempha-

1. OW oi
spall ; rey ae 4

size the influence of Latin, of the Anglo-
Normans, of Burns. I feel, too, that he
ought to have acknowledged more fully
his debt to earlier translators, and par-
ticularly to the scholars — Kuno Meyer
above all — who edited the originals,
often making sense out of the most
garbled manuscript copies. Indeed, it
was inexcusable not to give even the
briefest textual notes indicating just
which text of a given poem he has trans-
lated. As with any MS. literature, a dif-
ferent text may result in what amounts
to a quite different poem.

Also, he is unfair to the Gaelic court
4 poets who, after all, created and per-
petuated the linguistic and _ prosodic
vehicle of this poetry. For all we know,
they may have written many of the
best personal or dramatic lyrics in their

INTERNATIONAL interest in Ameri-

can art is a new thing. It is compar-
able to the nineteenth-century interest

in Japanese popular art, or the twenti-

eth-century interest in Impressionism

and Cubism. American painting has a new
; quality that attracts interest even be-
hind the iron curtain: Polish artists
admire it, and Russian art circles take
time to express disapproval. From in-
ternational exhibitions it looks as though
this painting style, which is more ac-
curately called non-objective than ab-
stract, is not a spontaneous growth
contemporary in all countries, but that
it has its greatest authority in New
York. The new American painting
comes from a variety of sources, mostly
French and Japanese. It does not mat-
ter who influenced who, or who came
first; quality is what counts. Arthur
Dove and Kandinsky may have made
the first abstract paintings in 1908 or
whenever, but Picasso’s and Braque’s
Cubism has more authority. De Kooning
derived from Picasso, Picasso from Tou-
louse-Lautrec, Bonnard from Gauguin,
Cézanne from Pissaro, van Gogh from
Hiroshige and Fl Greco from Jacopo
Bassano. But the distinction that fin-
ally counts is not how unlike one artist
is from another, but how much this
quality stands by itself and honors
what it came from.

MAURICE GROSSER is at present in
North Africa. During his absence we
Shall publish occasional guest columns.
This is the third contributed by FAIR-
FIELD PORTER, painter and critic.

October 3, 1959

less professional moments. Before 1600,
a Gaelic professional poet doubtless
would not have bothered to sign a poem
that he wasn’t expecting to be paid for.

Nevertheless, I envy anyone who
meets Gaelic poetry for the first time
with Frank O’Connor as his guide: he
may feel as Keats did about Chapman’s
Homer. But remember: O’Connor didn’t
invent the poetry — it was there all the
time. I have beaten a path through
many of the early poems with Thur-
neysen’s Grammar of Old Irish in one
hand and the Royal Irish Academy
dictionary in the other; at the end of
that struggle, they were still poetry.
Poems of such caliber are indestructible,
but they can always profit by the re-
storer’s hand if it has the skill of Frank
O’Connor’s.

ART

Fairfield Porter

The new quality in Japanese art that
was attractive to the nineteenth cen-
tury was an expression of the tempo-
rary nature of experience. Impression-
ism expressed the empirical theory that
what you know you can know only in
your sensations. The new American
painting expresses the habit of thinking
that what one does is what one is; that
a past origin is no more real than its
present derivative, and that the signifi-
cance of future ends is contained in pres-
ent means. From this it follows that
art does not stand for something out-
side itself. This notion contains the
difference between typically American
non-objective painting and the European
abstraction that preceded it, and also
between American non-objective paint-
ing and the contemporary European
painting that resembles it. Non-objec-
tive European painting still either
stands for something outside itself or,
if not, then the painter, being used to
making symbolic art, does not pay
close enough attention to the painting
before him.

As painting reveals, like handwriting,
the state of the artist’s soul, so a na-
tional school shows the strength and
weakness of the class that produces it.
The finest French painting is in a great
national tradition. French non-objective
painting is as much outside this tradi-
tion as American Cubism. The French,
non-objective painters express the
chauvinism and avarice of the French
petite bourgeoisie. It is as if they thought
it were enough to be French, and also
cynically believed that they were getting

“Trust one another, or per-
ish. Trust one another, or
spend your wretched lives
delving vast catacombs in
which to immure yourselves
and your scientists while they

feverishly strive to invent a
bomb which will vaperize

catacombs."

So declared Peace News editor-
ially in August 1945. The paper
was then nine years old.

It saw then, as it sees now,
one of its tasks to stimulate the
thought and action of all concerned
with the problems of war and vio-
lence, bringing them news and
comments about developments like-
ly to have a bearing on their ac-
tivities.

It was Peace News in 1956 which
first gave the world the inside
story of conditions in Kenya’s
prison camps, just as, nearly 20
years before, it had played a lead-
ing part in attempts to rescue
Jews from the camps of Germany.

Vinoba Bhave’s Land Gift Move-
ment, Mahatma Gandhi’s Basic
Education programme, Family
Service Units in Britain, Interna-
tional voluntary work camps in
undeveloped countries, all have
been recorded and reported on in
Peace News in the early weeks
of their development.

In the 23 years of its existence
Peace News has built up a world-
wide chain of correspondents and
commentators and become indis-
pensable reading for all concerned
with questions of peace and the
things which make for peace in
social and international life.

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LO | ut Re. eM 5) | Bd aa

197

away with something. Soulages is a
French painter whose work somewhat re-
sembles Kline’s: but Soulages does not
“follow the paint” as Kline does: his
painting is less attentive to the paint
than to a pretended mystery. of rep-
resentation — say, the sky seen through
tarred fence boards. Manessier, more
cubistic than de Kooning, is very far
down what Clive Bell would call the
slope that starts with Picasso.
Non-objective Italian painting looks
very much like American painting, but
it is tidied up. Tidiness is inadequate
formality. Except for Burri, the Italians
have a common sense of humor that
prevents them from taking their art
seriously enough. They are like wise
clowns inhibited by a knowledge of the
yanity of all human effort. The ‘Ger-
mans are still under the influence of
the Bauhaus idea, and they believe in
the supreme importance of the com-
munication of \ideas, as ‘if’ art existed
for education’s sake, as a guide to the
good life. As ideas in German have a con-
creteness that. they Jack in ‘any other
language, so in abstract German. paint-
ing the details embody general ideas, and
the painting as a whole is ‘something
that can be taught rather than. experi-
enced. : Pena dal
The British are the most sympathetic
in their understanding of American
painting. Alan Davie (who derives
from early Pollock) and Peter Lanyon
have shown two qualities that exist 1n
no other national school: a sense of the
division of the canvas reminiscent of, the
division of the wall in eighteenth-century
architecture, and a love for the country-
side. Americans have no continuing
sense of what architecture 1s: we are

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198

es 2h Bee. e's

7 :
Siete

sentimental about the. past and about

functional engineering; and, since the
{ . 7 . . . .

American countryside is still in the

process of destruction, our colors are.

drug store colors.

HOWEVER, the new American painting
stands by itself, and one remembers it
on its own terms. That happens. when
the artist pays profound attention to
the painting itself while he is making
it. Art is measured by an interior in-
tensity. The intensity may have taken
place previous to the specific painting,
or even in some other artist’s work.
(This latter is the carried-over intensity
of a highly skilled performance.) But
somewhere along the line the greatest
possible attention has been paid to
something whose importance to the art-
ist 1s a measure of its reality to him.
The painting compels the imagination
of the spectator as it compelled the
painter’s. The Impressionists taught us
to look at nature very carefully; the
Americans teach us to look very care-
fully at the painting. Paint is as real
as nature and the means of a painting
can contain its ends. Shaw = said of
playwriting that once the characters
are started, the . writer must follow
them, not will. them: he must pay
attention to the life that has been given
an independent existence. This idea of
creation is non-intellectual. Also,. be-
cause what continues to interest in such
a work of art is the work itself and not
outside references, this idea necessarily
stresses formal values. In the criticism
of painting it has led to an emphasis on
decoration as a standard, which has in
its turn the weakness of a standard ex-
ternal to the painting (what is decora-
tive ornaments the enyironment), and
so what is only decorative has no life
of its own.

The non-intellectuality of — self-suffi-
cient art is quite different from the anti-
intellectuality of the Nazis or the Com-
munists, who want to be the only chent
of art, which they can then use to
advance their power, as Madison Avenue
wants to use art to advance the power
of its various chents.

Any number of accustomed things
may be real to the painter of non-
objective paintings, but one thing is
new to the paintings under discussion,
namely that the labor of the process is
a subject of contemplation, To be at-
tentive to a process is a way people
have of making tedious tasks palatable.
If one loses oneself in washing the dishes
or jin cutting the grass, one makes a
game of it. The task is transformed by
attentiveness to the process: work he-
comes play, and it is said that one is

being artistic about it. The non-objective
artist separates the process from the
work result.

Symptomatic of this. attitude is the
use of accident. Accident would seem
to be an element unworthy of the ends
of a completed painting that has been
willed in advance (as the Batihaus paint-
ers planned their art). But when an
artist pays the closest possible attention
to the work as it goes along, it does
not escape his attention that the acci-
dent may have a place. (When Japanese
painters copy this characteristic look in
American painting, the effect is that
of putting artificial worm holes in new
furniture.) The organic use of accident,
that is, the attentive use of it from
following the painting as Shaw said a
playwright must follow the characters,
makes painting as art relate in a new
way to painting as labor, and to its
function as a protection against — the
weather. American non-objective paint-
ing 1s playful about work. The practical
end. of work is disregarded. In this par-
ticular way work has not been turned
into play .before, It makes art- out. of
the contemplation of work, as Stendhal
made art out of the contemplation of
love and politics, or as Dostoevsky made
art out of a contemplation of the con-
flict of Christian belief with atheism. I
think of a carpenter who built a barn
for my father. He was very skillful, and
to entertain the children who watched
him, he would either hammer in a nail
very rapidly, never missing the head,
or else, in parody of a clumsy novice,
make what he called “hammer . blos-
soms’—sears around the nail where he
had just as accurately missed. He turned
labor into comedy.

THE quality of American painting
comes partly from a playful exploitation
of the medium and partly from the fresh
eye of an outsider. It is as though
American painters had, as John Stra-
chey said of T. S. Eliot, “ransacked” the
history of art in search of how. the
classics were made, and taken: these
means out of the context of their origi-
nal purposes. The fresh attitude toward
the process is like the fresh attitude of
a small child toward the words that
he has known for only a year and a
half, but it does not mean that the
painter is interested only in the process
any more than the child is interested
only in the words for themselves, and
not in what they can do, American
non-objective painting has an articulate-
ness coming from a sudden mastery of a
tool, making the tool seem full of bright
and unrealized possibilities. European
non-objective painters are inhibited by

The NATIO

past.

Here it may be appropriate to say
something about Russian painting, which
is so different from what has so far
been discussed. Judging from the selec-
tion at the Coliseum last summer, Rus-
sian paintings lean on extraneous ends
even when there is no obvious propa-
ganda purpose. One immense painting
of flowers tells you that what moved
the artist in nature can be reduced by
conscientiousness and hard work to an
unpleasant task, stoically carried out.
And of the propaganda paintings one
thinks, what a laborious way to point
a moral! It is like American advertising
art with the difference that what an
American commercial artist paints in
less than a week, is shown by the dates
on the Russian painting to have taken
years to complete. Taking the Russian
paintings as space covered with paint,
they protest their spots of meaning with
a literalness that has less to do with
life than with a will that is everywhere
in Opposition to natural processes. These
moments of meaning—that Stalin was
there, that the sun sets behind new
constructions as well as old ones, etc.—

are like a musical composition stopped
on a single note, that blows and blows.
They are connected with conscientious
passages of gray and brown paint.
Structure is arithmetical, nature is trans-
formed into jargon. Art is turned into
work. Russian painting is closest of all
to the painting of the early development
of capitalism. The conscientiousness re-
sembles the bad conscience that Eakins
struggled with in presuming, by his de-
cision to be an artist, to live off the
money his father had earned through
hard work. But the conscientiousness
induced by the Russian state has none
of the intensity of Eakins’ burden.

You look at a Russian painting and
appreciate the hard work that must have
gone into it, but also you wonder why
anyone bothered to make the effort. It
is a way of making a living, like an-
other. You think of a good American
painting, how easily done, what a
pleasure; I, too, would like to do that!
Russian painting is a skill for those
willing to pay the price exacted by a
government-induced conscience: Ameri-
can painting presents the pleasure of
art in a way that makes it possible
for the spectator to participate.

THEATRE

Harold Clurman

THE STRENGTH and weakness of the
prevailing tradition in the contemporary
English-speaking manner of presenting
Shakespeare’s plays may be observed in
John Gielgud’s production of Much Ado
About Nothing (Lunt-Fontanne The-
atre).

The company — particularly John
Gielgud and Margaret Leighton — pro-
nounce and phrase all their speeches
with admirable clarity, precision, light-
ness, intelligence, aplomb. In a word,
their reading is exemplary. And this, it
goes without saying, affords great
pleasure.

The pleasure is especially keen in this
instance because Much Ado About
_ Nothing—though not among the great-
_est of Shakespeare’s comedies — is
blessed with some of his most delight-
ful writing, while Benedick and Beatrice
are thoroughly charming personages.

The total effect of the production,
however, is that of a reading in costume.
What is lacking is what the theatre
alone can give: a sense of the world
from which the figures emerge and in

which they dwell. This, technically

speaking, i is the production idea.
That it e hardly exists in Gielgud’s -

Much Ado is made evident by two
facts: except for Dogberry, Verges and
the watchmen (whose very make ups
create identities), there are no true char-
acterizations. And, aside from a politely
spoofing tone, there is no specific at-
mosphere.

Benedick and Beatrice are young peo-
ple of the Renaissance (presumably
Italian) “born in a merry humor.” They
are soldier and lady of a muscular era,
cock and hen of high spirits at a time
when quarreling, fighting, teasing, tor-
ture, dancing, wit, gallantry and love-
making all were intimately related. The
keynote — “man is a giddy thing,” Ben-
edick says — is a youthful and external-
ly courtly animality, a joyous vigor
which can manifest itself as much in
sudden sword play as in enchanting

_ friskiness.

But Gielgud and Leighton struck me
chiefly as superbly practiced actors
more at home in the smart drawing
rooms of Mayfair (or in a Maugham
comedy) than in the lusty palaces of
Shakespeare’s Italy. This tames and re-
duces Shakespeare to ns pos-

nh English,
J

ture; but Shakespeare, t
was no “gentleman.”

Another failure of style is evident in
the treatment of the subplot that centers
on Hero and Claudio (though it is dif-
ficult to be sure from the structure of
the play whether Shakespeare meant
the story of Benedick and Beatrice or
of Hero and Claudio to constitute the
subplot). On the face of it, Claudio’s
brutal treatment of Hero is melodrama,
the amatory turn-about of Benedick
and Beatrice is high comedy. In between
is the sweet horseplay of the simple folk
represented by Dogberry and his com-

panions.
The secondary plot — the abuse of
Hero — has, because of its inherent ab-

surdity, been considerably cut down in
text so that it is not embarrassing now
— only dull. What remains is done
“straight.” Gielgud’s Benedick challeng-
es Claudio to a duel very nearly in dead
earnest. To unify the play, stylistically

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speaking, all this should be treated with
a certain boyish extravagance — mock
seriously or, if you will, with comic and
“foolish” romanticism.

Little attempt has been made to deal
with this problem because the play is
done literally on the level of the words
alone — as if to make Shakespeare “the-
atre”’ it is sufficient to speak his beauti-
ful language with appreciative gusto in
a strictly contemporary comprehension
of its meaning. That is the common sin
of most Shakespearean productions in
England and America.

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mie ee =

taer

Robert Hatch

VISIBLY and audibly — that is, ob-
viously — Tony Richardson has turned
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger
(which he also directed on the stage)
into a wonderfully effective movie. It
looks, it seems almost to smell, exactly
like the blight that lies along the Brit-
ish railway lines. It is acted hard and
explicitly by Richard Burton and Gary
Raymond, Claire Bloom and Mary Ure.
They use fine big gestures and swing
their lines like mallets. It is boldly done
and it carries you along with its energy.
But except that the picture fills the
screen and your tinie, does it matter?
Is there anything about this terrible
Jimmy Porter, this prototype of the
Angry Young Man, that commaiids at-
tention? The answer, for me at least, is
found in the fact that I was constantly
watching the doors of the sets for the
entrance of a competént physician. —
Art is not sociology and a character
is not a complex statistic. A character
is an imagined man who acts thus and
so because of forces that work on him;
Porter is an accumulation of symptoms
— latent homosexuality combined with
castration fears, infantile eroticism,
suicidal tendencies and hysteria induced
by paranoia. A man might labor under
that formidable complex of miseries, but
the point about Porter. is that when
you have compiled the list you have
defined him. The aberrations are ex-

plained, or at least suggested by refer-
erice to earlier experiences; but this re-
mrdins at the level of clinical case work
and does not relate, so far as I could
see, to the Welfare State in particular
or man’s fate in general. Porter is a
horror, but a dehumanized one. He does
not approach the horrors that William
Faulkner can conjure up. But Faulkner’s
people are ourselves carried to such and
such points; we ate appalled by their
humanity, not by their disease.

I found myself watching Gary Ray-
mond, who plays Porter’s Welsh friend,
Cliff Lewis. (I did not much watch Miss
Bloom or Miss Ure, decorative though
they are and deft at conveying amorous
transports, because their mission was too
evidently to be battered by Porter.)
Lewis appears to be a troubled sort of
fellow, a psychological vagrant, a con-
genital second man. But he is nof in the
throes of anything; he moves himself,
he 18 capable of giving and receiving
surprise. You can say — or guess —
what is wrong with him, but you do not
thereby define what he is. The role of
Lewis is entirely secondary in_ the
movie’s structure, but I left the theatre
troubled by what was to become of him,
[ cannot care about Porter— not, I
think, from lack of compassion but be-
cause he has no reality beyond his agon-
ies. Try to imagine Porter not abusing
his wife —a blank page confronts you.

Yes, as a Look Springs to Its Face

as edrth, light and grass

illustrate the meadow,

there's a natural grace I hope for
that unkhowing a poem may show
having its life in a field of rapture,

4 book made full of days (pages),
a ready effort full of all places then
that tay be because I have loved them

part-song of companions

and of those unknown, alike in soul.

For them may there be a special green
and flowering of life in these words-—
eager to be read, taken, yielded to.

Yes, though I contrive the mind’s measure

and wrest doctrine from

old lore,

it’s to win particular hearts
to stir an abiding affection for this musie,
as if a host of readers will join the Beloved

ready to dance with me, it’s for the

unthinking
rea y thing I’m writing

these poems,
Rosert DuNcAN

1 » “A, *
4 iy

CON

Crossword Puzzle No. 836

By FRANK W. LEWIS

~~ 1 L

\ ‘ee

| . |
| pee

Ba
ba:
a
Zl
PAs
ei
qt
ash a
re
iC
rls

ACROSS:
The thing, Debussy wrote about is
able to furnish a covering of trade.
(10)
Hurry off! He could make it hurt!
(4)

0 Certainly not slicker in the number

a plof,might. (7)
1 Justine at least one swallow. (7)
2 What happens when Mr. Franklin is

poorly modeled in stone? Give up?
8

eS)

Only a Coward would imply one

slept firmly from twelve to one. (5)

5 If auks sound common birds, these
could also be common in London
cries, (5)

7 Acted like Lestrade? (9)

9 A saving grace might make one. (9)

1 An opera singer must be’ given di-

Tae for such a comfortable spot.

3 See 9 down

and 27 Four-ten might suggest the
reverse. (6, 2,7)

Made by encroachment. (7)

Made of wrong addition, one might
be just dandy! (4)

ae various submarine men?

DOWN:
See 24 down
See 9 down
When turned nowadays, one is not

Re to preface it by “Well!”

vieber- 3; 4959

oo 0 ~1

16
18

ACROSS: 1 Alabaster;

, 23° across and 2

So much French Bea fase Topsy’s
friend, and causes worry. (9)
Part of the race angles off at 135
degrees, implying absent-minded-
ness. (5) ;
Secretary or secretaries. (7)

2 down Where 11 is

See 14 down

powerless, but auric. (2, 3,3, 2, 3,7)
and 8 down In the eating ‘of a7
type? (3,5, 2,3, 7)

Lets up, if malicious: (8)

An embarrassing job? (9)

Cut more than anyone coming out
of a stratum. (7)

Break, as a code..(7)

and 1 down A _ suspicious person
might hire Pinkerton to do it as a
moving objective. (9)

Maxim of literature. (5)

I and ny mother’s Ss daughter (by a
different father) might be cow-
headed. (4)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 2935
10 Banking; 11,

9, 6 across, 17 and 22 The morning after

the night before;

27
18
25

12 Anthem; 13 and
Pillaged; 15 Dust-free; 16 Nugget;
Suborn; 20 Shadowed; 24 Leaner;
Tub; 28 Allegro; 29 Gondola; 30

Eased; 31 Entreated. DOWN: 1 Admit;
2 Airless; 3 Animal Farm; 4 and 23

Togetherness;

5 Rabies; 6 Aunt;

Twining; 8 Regulated; 14 pedi
15 Disengage; 19 Bustles; 21 Without;
26 Brand. |

| Semi-weekly.

atte (hy

eee ee)

PLEASE HURRY!
TO PLACE OR RENEW YOUR

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a Pa, >

The Philosophy of Courh

is the Key to Success

YOU must decide whether you want to be one of the untold
millions who live and die within the compass of a day or to
stand shoulder to shoulder with the leaders of your time.

It is no easy thing to live as an independ-
ent human being in this age of fear and the
suppression of ideas. It is becoming increas-
ingly difficult to even think for ourselves
—und thinking must come before action.
To be free men must act.

Fear and anxiety characterize our gen-
eration. We are being driven far from the
Truth. How does Religion promote this con-
dition? How does Atheism work to make all
men free? In simple, yet bold and vigorous
language, the author of “An Atheist Mani-
festo” enunciates the basic principle of the
Philisophy of Atheism—the Philosophy of
Courage.

Courage Is the Crown of Success

Many of the greatest and foremost men
and women of our time were influenced by
the Philosophy of Courage.

It was courage that gave Edison the urge
to wrest from Nature the secrets of light
and sound. It was courage that caused Ben-
jamin Franklin to defy the angry heavens
and discover the nature of electricity .. .
courage that inspired Columbus to sail the
uncharted seas and discover a new world
... courage that forced the Wright brothers
to fly.

The successful man is the courageous man.
This is his only secret, his only key.

A Declaration of Intellectual Independence

Courage is the result of inspiration and
the deepening of the intellect. It can become
a part of action only by driving fear from
your mind. To those who want courage,
Joseph Lewis’ new book will be a revelation,
a treasure-house of ideas, a continuing
source of inspiration. This volume is a bril-
liant call for courage in an age of caution;
it is a profound argument for intellectual
integrity in a time of moral cowardice. It
points the way others took to true Free-
thought—that company of giants which in-
cludes Socrates, Spinoza, Voltaire, Thomas

JOSEPH LEWIS, the author of ‘‘An Atheist Manifesto,’’
rose from the lowest rung of the ladder. Self-educated, he
overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles, attained both
a financial and literary success, and now enjoys a world
reputation as a leading exponent of curageous thinking.

Paine, Robert G. Ingersoll and Bertrand
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You cannot know in advance which sen-
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J re a ee ma eae ae mre ea

SOME OF THE SUBJECTS
DISCUSSED

Was man specially created, or 1s-he a
product of evolution?
Is disease a punishment for sin, or is
it the natural consequence of life?
Has man a destiny, or is he doomed
to oblivion?
Has prayer ever been answered?
Are all prayers acts of moral cow-
ardice?
Has a belief in God been a shackle
upon the brain of man?
Could a religionist haye discovered
Anaesthesia?
What has been the influence of a be-
lief in God upon war, intellectual prog-
ress and social justice?
Does a belief in God help or hinder
the ethical and moral conduct of man?
Why has more intellectual and ma-
terial progress been made since 1776
than in the previous 5,000 years?

Highly Praised

PROF. ALBERT EINSTEIN: Here is
my comment on your book, ‘Anu Atheist
Manifesto.’’ Superstition and tyranny by
hierarchy are grave evils, and it is pleas-
ing that you are carrying on such a
decisive and determined fight against
them. Because without the struggle of
men who can see and are relatively free
conditions in the world would be much
worse.

WILLIAM J. FIELDING: I have read
with enthusiasm and pleasure’ your
thought-provoking book, ‘‘An Atheist Man-
ifesto.’’ It is a devastating onslaught on
religious superstition, which unfortunate-
ly remains the Sacred Cow—the Untouch-
able—in all the conventional media of
modern life. Your book is a telling re-
pudiation and refutation of the stulti-
fying God-idea. Having smashed the
icons, you point out the roa Reason,
the path to intellectual } ty, true
social progress and human (SYaerhood.

PSYCHIATRIC QUARTERLY: “An
Atheist Manifesto’ sets forth a very
high standard of ethics, based on altru-
ism, humanitarianism, refraining from
knowingly inflicting avoidable pain on
any living thing and dedication to free-
dom, scientific progress and happiness.

| FREETHOUGHT PRESS ASSOCIATION N 10-3 | [ meersoll the Magnificent (flexible leather binding) $5.00 |
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BUR, Pre,
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SS f

NEW HOPE
FOR DISARMAMENT

Rethinking the Security Problem

by J. David Singer

HIDDEN CENSORS

The Post Office Polices the Mail:

.
4a

by Stanley Meisler

Wile? Mey

LETTERS

‘Fear of the People’

Dear Sirs: The article by Peter Bach-
rach, “Fear of the People,” in your
September 19 issue was the best thing
I have read for a long time. You redeem
yourself from “modern Republicanism”
by printing it.

VircintA Durr
Montgomery, Ala.

Dear Sirs: Peter Bachrach’s article,
“Fear of the People,” hit the bull’s eye.
I served as a shop steward in a United
Steel Workers local for two years .after
graduating from theological school (my
field was social ethics), and his obser-
vations about our middle-class workers
are so true it hurts.

Too few “intellectuals” have really
exposed themselves to the conditions in
which our middle-class workers live and
work. It is amazing that they would
expect that people without the benefit
of college would be seized by universal
abstract ideals. Of course they express
themselves in terms of middle-class
values. What else could be expected
when they were educated with middle-
class textbooks and middle-class teach-
ers and live in a culture whose ethos is
middle class?

Despite this, I have found that these
middle-class workers usually have a
profounder understanding of the Amer-
ican power structure than most “profes-
sors.”

Wattace B. Porear
Flint, Mich.

Dear Sirs: Mr. Bachrach’s quest for
the goodness of all that is “liberal”
leads him to conclude that the custom-
arily unrevered “common man” may
well be the most dependable factor if
“the battle for freedom” is to be waged
to a successful conclusion. Concomitant-
ly, he warns against the tendency of
his colleagues “to rely on the educated
classes or . professional class to pre-
serve freedom... .”

Unfortunately, these basic contentions
are marred by inconsistencies. . . . He
depicts the Vinson Court as one of the
“elite” institutions which failed to pro-
tect individual rights in time of crisis... .
What is overlooked in this particular
assertion is the fact that the illustrative
Dennis case was a well-received and
popular decision with the “masses.” Mr.
Justice Black’s dissenting opinion rec-
ognized this: “Public opinion being
what it now is, few will protest the

pe ee ee ee rT eo

ia.
. > y
b :

conviction of these Communist peti-
tioners.”

Ricuarp H. Siecer
Cleveland Heights, O.

Lively Small Press

Dear Sirs: It was good to see the at-
tention paid the small presses in Lloyd
Zimpel’s article, “They Also Serve Who
Only Lie In Wait,” in the Sept. 26 issue.
I should, I think, indicate however
that the Jargon Press, after many months
in a cataleptic, uncapitalized trance, now
is about to stir with a barrage of titles,
which include: New Maximus Poems,
by Charles Olson; 1450-1950, by the late
Bob Brown; A Form of Women, by
Robert Creeley; collected poems, A Red
Carpet For the Sun, by Irving Layton;
100 Poems From the Greek & Latin,
translated by Kenneth Rexroth; The
Roman Sonnets of G. G. Belli, translated
by Harold Norse; Some Deaths, by
Walter Lowenfels; and The Empire
Finals at Verona and three earlier
books of poems by Jargon’s editor.

JonatHAN WILLIAMS
Publisher, Jargon Press

Highlands, N.C.

Marxist vs. Marxists

Dear Sirs: In your issue of March 28,
devoted to “The Economic Hazards of
Arms Reduction,” the leading articles
were written by Paul A. Baran and Paul
M. Sweezy, both outstanding orthodox
Marxist economists. Their pessimistic
conclusions as to the prospects of arms
reduction in the near future were best
summed up by Mr. Sweezy in these
words:

On the basis of experience to date,
the probable alternatives to a sharp
reduction in the need for arms spend-
ing would appear to be prosperity
with continuing war orders or depres-
sion without them. Those of us who
believe that arms spending is already
inflated out of all proportion to need
will feel that this theory has already
been tested and found valid: for
others the test will begin to come if
and when they in turn are convinced
that the need for arms spending has
fallen significantly below the defense
budget.

On Friday, September 18, another
Marxist, Mr. Khrushchev, addressed
the U.N. on the issue of disarmament.
He said:

The utilization of the money, the
resources released as the result of
disarmament would create the broad-

~ est possible opportunities for the em-

ee _ va Cres

4 rte Tra
Bcsent on the iebulation! —Conse-
quently, assertion to the effect that
disarmament would lead to a crisis
or economic depression in the in-
dustrially highly developed countries
of the capitalistic world [is] errone-
ous.

Unorthodox Marxists like. myself
will welcome Mr. Khrushchev’s conver-
sion to this long-held view.

Evias M. ScHWARZBART
New York City

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
201 ®

ARTICLES

203 '@ Rethinking the Security Prob-
lem: New Hope for Disarnia-
ment ,
by J. DAVID SINGER
206 '@ East Germany Is No ghitwee
by PREDERICK KUH

207 @ Hidden Censors
by STANLEY MLEISLUR
210 'e Jim Crow Wears a Sombrero
by JOHN. RBCHY
BOOKS AND THE ARTS
214 @ What It Is We Lack
by EMILE CAPOUYA
Through Art to Sanity
by HAROLD CLURMAN

The Hero of Nothing
by PAUL LAUTER

Here (poem)
by HAROLD WITT

The Law We Feel

by CURTIS BOK
Theatre

by HAROLD CLURMAN

Architecture
by WALTER McQUADE

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 220)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

215 @
216 @
216 'e
217 @
218 '@

219 @

George G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, Editor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Mditor
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art _
M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, Buropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager

The Nation, Oct. 10, 1959. Vol. 189, No. 11
The Nation published weekly (except for omlis-
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A. by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
New York 14, N, ¥, Second class postage paid
at New York, N. Y.

Subscription Price Domestite—One year $8, Two
years $14, Three Years $20, Additional postage
per year, Foreign and Canadian $1.

Ch of Address: Three weeks’ notice ts re-
ulred for change of address, which cannot be
ade without the old 8 oo well as the new,

Information to Librarl We » indexed
Ehorevere Book

fete Bact i

The New Imperatives

Autre temps, autre moeurs. It is true even in diplo-
macy, undoubtedly the most stagnant and backward of
the social technologies. Not only other manners — vide
the bizarre mixture of conviviality and contention dur-
ing Khrushchev’s visit to the United States — but also
other methods are an inevitable consequence of the rev-
olutionary changes in weapons which sprang from World
War II and which so far have prevented, but not re-
moved the threat, of World War III. As J. David Singer
points out. in this issue (page 203), before the fission
and fusion bombs it could be plausibly argued that
political settlement must precede disarmament. But
that was in ‘the heyday of TNT — only fifteen years
ago as the planets revolve but eons ago in practical
human terms. By their potentiality for total destruction,
the weapons must take priority in any attempted solu-
tion; the disease cannot be controlled until the symp-
toms are relieved. Adlai Stevenson’s mind seems to be
tending in the same direction. Immediately after Khru-
shchev’s visit he wrote: “. .. We have always thought
that arms were an effect, not a cause, of tension, and
that arms reduction could only follow political settle-
ments. Is it possible that this may no longer be true in
the nuclear age when men are afraid of the weapons
themselves, even if they have them?”

Such thoughts, sinking into the minds of the common
people and the leaders alike, are beginning to exert
political pressures which are already formidable and
promise to become irresistible. President Eisenhower rec-
ognized these pressures in inviting Khrushchev to the
United States and in his remark about governments
getting out of the way of the people’s desire for peace.
The Soviets have played on this longing with heavy-
handed but effective emphasis. “I can see now,” Walter
Lippmann wrote on September 29, “that I had failed
to reahze how mighty are the compulsions which are
working on both the President and on Mr. K.”

It would be underestimating the pressures if one as-
sumed that they come only from the common people.
They come equally from level-headed and public-spirit-
ed industrial capitalists like Cyrus Eaton and agri-
ete esas like Roswell Garst. Khrushchev, even

Rie enh Stalin in rT Sn would

j f z *
A . : <a :

be under equivalent pressures from colleagues, who are
the Communist equivalents of our Garsts and Eatons.
That is one reason for taking his proposals for “general
and complete disarmament” more seriously than Maxim
Litvinov’s pleas before the League of Nations were taken
in 1927 and 1932. For years general disarmament was a
concept so visionary that it could safely be left to the
wranglings of diplomats. Now it is in stronger hands,
and the time for it seems ripe.

It Does Move

Up to a few weeks ago, there was only an inchoate
popular longing for peace which drew sustenance from
unofficial efforts like those of the Pugwash conferences
sponsored and financed by Cyrus Eaton, and _ political
miscarriages like the one which preceded Harold Stas-
sen’s departure from the Administration. In the United
Nations there was general frustration, for which the
Soviet Union and the United States can share the honors
about equally. Yet, in the meantime, here in the United
States there have been changes which, cumulatively,
can now be seen as preparations in the sense of removal
of obstacles to a consideration of disarmament.

It may be said — and not in derision — that the Pres-
ident gave John Foster Duiles a bang-up funeral and
then proceeded to do all the things the Secretary had
forbidden. His first great departure was the invitation
to Khrushchev. Then, singly and collectively, he forgot
the famed Dulles slogans except “liberate the satellites,”
which remains as a purely verbal memento with do-

mestic political connotations. Next, the President made

statements, off the cuff, at variance with the earlier
Dulles line. An example is his recent reference to the —
Berlin situation as “abnormal,” which had implications _
that were not lost on Bonn. Of course it is abnormal to
have a city committed to the West 120 miles inside’ the :
Soviet satellite border, but this had been the situation
for over a decade. “Abnormal” must therefore have |
used in the sense of something to be changed ¢
justed, At the same press cota he sai

e are anal items ii

been interpreted as indications of a new flexibility in
American diplomacy. And if it is not an entirely new
State Department under Mr. Herter, it certainly is not
the old one either. Mrs. Eleanor Lansing Dulles, the late

tae Secretary’s sister and one of his principal advisers on
free, Germany, has been transferred from the Office of Ger-
a man Affairs to the department’s Bureau of Intelligence

y and Research. Eyen more striking is the recall of Am-

bassador Charles E. Bohlen from his exile in the Philip-
pines. The way is now open, as far as the Administra-
tion is concerned, for a fresh look at disarmament.

The Vacuums

War is one of the primary preoccupations of the
human race; and its discontinuance, as Senator Hum-
phrey has pointed out, cannot be treated in a vacuum.
Actually, what we are confronted with is a whole con-
geries of vacuums, some already in existence. In the im-
mediate foreground there is the diplomatic vacuum of
Red China, a blank spot on the map as far as the West
is concerned. This nation of the vacuum happens to have
one of the largest armies in the world. There cannot be
world disarmament without Chinese disarmament, and
Chinese disarmament is inconceivable unless and until
China is admitted to the United Nations.

Then there is the power vacuum. World disarmament
leads directly to world government, at least to the ex-
tent of a police force under United Nations control. In
theory the answer is simple: a part of the men and
munitions released by national disarmament would be
allocated to the international police force. The proposal
of Frank Aiken, Minister for External Affairs of Ireland,
for an area-by-area progression of United Nations polic-
ing, is worth noting in this connection.

In the United States, however, the gravest vacuum
is probably the economic one to which Senator Hum-
phrey had particular reference. Federal spending
amounts to only about 15 per cent of gross national
product, but that 15 per cent is the balance wheel of
the economy. Armament-spending constitutes two-thirds
of the balance wheel. On his trip to the United States,
Premier Khrushchev announced himself as a convert
to the theory that our prosperity is in no wise dependent
on armament production. His principal mentors were
Frank Pace, head of General Dynamics Corporation,
which doesn’t manufacture a single machine screw for
anyone but the government, and William C. Foster of
Olin Mathieson. This is the same William C. Foster who
has represented the United States in top-level negotia-
tions with the Soviet Union, and who only a few months

_ago proposed an increase of U.S. armament expenditures
to double the present level.

- Mr. Khrushchev is probably less credulous than he
pretends to be. Nevertheless, as the San Francisco
Chronicle says, “if he intends to put Western capitalism
fr to the test of going along without arms expenditures,

Pr tee
i em

oe - me),
m~ n

Western capteatn m must be ready to face it.” ‘Truer iy
words were never spoken, but the Chronicle expresses
doubts which, in Averell Harriman’s parlor, , Messrs.
Pace and Foster so airily dismissed. “We can’t help
wondering if any official of the United States Govern-
ment has sat down to plan for this extraordinary event,”
it writes. “Disarmament @ la Khrushchev would direct-
ly disemploy three million men in the armed forces and
no one can say how many indirectly; it would cause cut-
backs in orders to every big industry, and would leave
countless institutions and establishments now bustling
with self-importance, without an excuse for existing.”
This vacuum can be filled — but it will take a bit of
planning, and it is not too early to begin.

Censorship Without Warrant

The adjournment of Congress has put a temporary
damper on the artfully stimulated demand for new
legislation to underpin Postmaster General Summer-
field’s “war against muck.” But the legislation in ques-
tion — H.R. 7379 (see article on page 207) — passed
the House by voice vote, with only Rep. John V. Lind-
say of New York voting against it, and will unquestion-
ably be pushed with great vigor once Congress reassem-
bles. In the Senate it should be subjected to critical
scrutiny of a type it did not receive in the House. A
causal connection may exist between the availability
of “obscene” or “pornographic” printed material and de-
viant juvenile behavior, but it has not yet been estab-
lished by competent evidence. Until such a connection
has been established by evidence more conclusive than
any currently available, Congress should table H.R. 7379.

On its face, the measure is objectionable. For example,
it would allow the Postmaster General to issue an im-
pounding order if he determines such action is “in the
public interest” and it would extend the effective im-
pounding period from twenty to forty-five days. No
standard whatever is established; and the power to
harass by impounding is destructive, as the American
Civil Liberties Union pointed out in a brief submitted
to the House committee. If protection is needed, exist-
ing federal laws which provide tough penalties for the
distribution of obscene material through the mails,
would seem to be entirely adequate.

An odd aspect of this latest “war against muck” is
that the Post Office Department has apparently stim-
ulated much of the pressure for new restrictive legisla-
tion. True, various church and civic organizations have
urged the department to take action. But in turn the
department has suggested the formation of local “decent
literature” committees, has invited various organizations
to inspect its “Chamber of Horrors” exhibit in Washing-
ton, and has conducted a well-organized campaign for
new legislation. There is, of course, nothing improper
about a department making known its views on legis-
lation related to its functions. But is censorship a func-—

ie
‘ )
_ ve bo . 1
A'T ‘ON.

t * ottiy ee
URS eh a ie © Bi wh i he ,

2 © ™ @ 1 4
ra ir A;

of the Post Office Department? Should it be con-
cerned with censorship at all? At best the function has
been appropriated; it has never been clearly assigned. Of

recent years, the postal service has deteriorated rather
alarmingly and Postmaster General Summerfield should
be urged to concentrate his energies on improving this
service rather than attempting to safeguard the morals
of American youth.

Rock Candy

So much of the paper that accumulates on an editor’s

' desk contains news of deceptions practiced, miseries en-

| - dured or disasters pending that we are grateful for the
| _ arrival every other month of the Contest News Bulletin.
; This four-page “confidential” file is published by the
h

Bruce Richards Corporation, “The Nation’s Largest

Contest Management and Judging Organization.” The
p firm’s offices are in New York, but the copy sounds
’ as though it had been written in the shadow of the

; Big Rock Candy Mountain.

The manufacturers of Sta-Puf and Sta-Flo (nos-
trums used in washing machines) have recently com-
pleted a contest in which they gave away ten first prizes
consisting of two automobiles each — a Lark sedan and
a Lark station wagon. The advertising featured the
“his” and “her” angle.

ieee

The Listerine people are now distributing ten swim-
‘ming pools —a brand called “Living Pools,” endorsed
by Esther Williams. Purex (soaps and kitchen cleansers )
prefers sweepstakes to the usual jingle or why-I-like-in-
25-words contests. But sweepstakes are very tricky, be-
cause the Post Office is always getting them mixed up
with lotteries. The entrant has to be allowed to choose
a number without actually bwying the sponsor’s product,
but at the same time must be made to feel a terrible
heel for taking advantage of good old Purex. This is all
worked out by a system of coupons.

The most popular prize, according to Bruce Richards
researchers, is a trip (for two) to Hawaii. Twenty-five
backyard chefs, survivors of a barbecue recipe contest,
are about to be flown to the 50th state by Kaiser Foil
and will there engage in a “cook-off” to determine the
world’s “cook-out” champion. Zenith Hearing Aids is
also running a trip-to-Hawaii contest, with the proviso
that “all prize winners must be hard of hearing.” Keen-
eared contestants may designate deaf friends to take
the trip for them.

The thing that makes this sort of enterprise so funny
is that the reward is completely disproportionate to the
effort expended or the end desired. And the reason why
the joke seems so tart and lively is that these contests
are slapstick versions of the whole sanctioned-by-God
free-enterprise system.

RETHINKING THE SECURITY PROBLEM

j NEW HOPE FOR DISARMAMENT eo « by J. David Singer

AFTER A PERIOD of more than a

decade in the doldrums, broken only
by occasional and sporadic flurries
of interest and activity, Soviet-
Western disarmament negotiations
appear as if they might once more

be headed for a round of renewed ~

activity. The diligence (if not suc-
cess) of the one-year-old talks on a
E nuclear-test ban in Geneva, the
Khrushchev speech in the U.N. As-
! sembly on September 18, the re-
sponse the speech generated, and the
recent Big Four decision to create
a new disarmament body, all point

J. DAVID SINGER is teaching po-
litical science at the Umwersity of
Michigan and has been engaged for
some time on a survey and analysis
of post-World War II disarmament
‘ negotiations. ht?

to the likelihood of some intensive
diplomatic action in the coming
months. Within three days of Mr.
Khrushchev’s address, the Assembly
decided to place his proposal on the
agenda of the First (Political) Com-
mittee. Whether it be a_ belated
awareness of the significance of
weapons-control to their national se-
curity; or simply a response to the
public and governmental hue and
cry in most nations of the world, the
Western governments have been un-
willing to write off as mere propa-
ganda the patently inadequate pro-
posal which the Soviet Premier of-
fered to the U.N.

If this resurgence of interest and
activity is not to go the way of
previous efforts, it is essential that

some basic ae eee entire

aanty problem b

cornered relationship has bi en cr

os sah ais |
¥ i

the near future. And crucial to this
re-evaluation is a willingness to ab-
jure the easy but unproductive pas-
time of automatically attributing
prior failures to one side or the other:
a careful study of the negotiations
since 1945 clearly indicates that both
the Soviet and the West are highly —
vulnerable on these grounds. Neither
has assumed what could honestly be
termed a far-sighted or responsible
position on armaments reduction.

Perhaps one of the most troubl C=
some of the general questions in
volved is that of the relations
among disarmament, tension
tion and political settlement. |
safely be argued that faders
preciate the nature of this t

major »stacle to the as
duction ¢ ies of b

clear and conventional weapons. My
purpose here is to attempt to clarify
the nature of this critical set of in-
teractions, and thus perhaps clear
the way for a more successful attack
on the specific complexities of dis-
armament itself.

Probably the most important con-
sideration is the kind of psychologi-
eal, military and_ political setting
within which the negotiators and
policy-makers must operate. First of
all, their dominant and most power-
ful concern is and must be for the
physical security of their own na-
tions—not some vague “national in-
terest” or some imprecise ideological
dogma, but the survival of the state,
the regime and the people. Secondly,
there is nationalism, as pervasive
in Russia and America as in Asia
and Africa, affecting not only the
masses in all parts of the world, but
their leaders and policy-makers as
well. Those who lead the nations and
make the foreign policies are both
producers and consumers of national-
ism, and thus as suspicious and hos-
tile toward one another as the masses
to whom they direct their emotional
and over-simplified appeals.

Superimposed on this distrust
among opposing policy-makers is the
third and most crucial ingredient —
the military arsenals. Not only does
each regime attribute to the other
a desire to increase its power and
security at their expense, but each
sees that the other has the weapons
with which that desire might be pur-
sued. And within this awesome set-
ting, built of hostility and weaponry,
each elite will inevitably equate the
other’s military capability with his
military intentions. The policy-maker
who evaluates his adversary’s stock-
pile in other than the most cynical

‘terms would be taking an unheard
of and inordinate risk. Not to be
afraid may be to court disaster.

To summarize then, this fear
which dominates the policy-makers
of the Soviet and Western camps is
the natural resultant of their mutual
suspicion and their mutual military
stockpiles. The obvious approach to
this problem would be to seek either

~ (1) reduction of the tension between
the two sides, thus diminishing the
expectation that the other might in-
tend to use his weapons, or (2) a
reduction of the weapons themselves.

mee ae
, eR ee

7 u
But since tensions produce arms, and
arms produce tensions, it is clear that
the only effective way to break out
of the vicious circle is to reduce both
arms and estimated intentions more
or less simultaneously.

LET US turn now from this de-
scription of the arms-tensions prob-
lem to some possible avenue of
escape from the dilemma which it
poses. There seem to be two major
ways of breaking out of the vicious
circle—one which might be called
the tensions-first approach, and the
other, the arms-first approach. Most
American opinion-makers (partic-
ularly news analysts and spokesmen
for foreign-policy organizations) lean
to the tensions-first approach, and
argue that since the weapons are
merely a result and reflection of a
deeper problem, the latter must be
solved first. That deeper problem
lies in the tension and suspicion ex-
isting between the two major powers.
The way to eliminate that tension, it
is then further contended, is to ex-
pand trade and increase cultural con-
tacts between the peoples of the
opposing camps; as they get to know
one another better, they will de-
velop an increasingly greater trust
and confidence in each other. The
more trust and confidence between
the peoples (and the leaders) on both
sides, the less tension there will be,
and consequently less of a need to
maintain high levels of armament.
If, as is argued, the armaments are
merely a reflection of the deeper
problem of tensions, the decrease in
tensions must lead to an inevitable
decrease in weapons levels—both
conventional and nuclear.

The trouble with this analysis is
that it ignores (or at least de-empha-
sizes) the role that the arms them-
selves play in the preservation of the
tension and fear. As I suggested
above, the fear experienced by po-
litical leaders is a result not only of
the hostile intentions ascribed to
their opposite numbers, but of the
very weapons available to them.
How can we expect those responsible
for a nation’s security to begin dis-
arming as long as the potential en-
emy—no matter how many exchange
students and trade missions have
gone back and forth—retains his ca-
pacity to strike a devastating mili-

\ WOR ie

tary blow? As long as he keeps his
weapons, one must assume that he
might use them. In addition, there
is considerable doubt that these pro-
posed tension-reducing activities can
actually achieve that purpose. If
national preparedness requires not
only military readiness but a unified
citizenry willing to pay the taxes,
produce the men in uniform, ac-
quiesce in the reduction of civil lib-
erties, and _ tolerate increasingly
dangerous levels of radioactive con-
tamination, the leadership cannot
permit the public to question the
hostile intent of the other camp.
Thus, even if enough Americans
could meet enough Russians (and
vice versa), revise their earlier
images and retain them after re-
turning home, the elite would still
have to continue the propaganda
barrage. In this century of total war,
governments require near-total pre-
paredness. It would seem, then, that
the tensions-first approach is unlike-
ly to lead to any real disarmament.

A SIGNIFICANT variation on the
tensions-first theme, and one held by
many political scientists and _his-
torians, is the political-settlement ap-
proach. The general thesis here is
that national armaments reflect the
tensions which, in turn, have been
generated by the existence of unre-
solved political issues. Thus, it
would follow that the first thing to
do is seek a negotiated settlement
of such political problems as have
resulted in the division of Germany
and Korea, or the Soviet occupation
of Eastern Europe. The weakness in
this approach, however, is that it
presupposes a major distinction be-
tween political settlement and arms
reduction, and that the two sets of
problems can be dealt with sep-
arately. Yet George Kennan (clearly
of the political-settlement school),
in attempting to formulate a plan
for the reunification of Germany,
for example, felt compelled to tie this
solution in with “disengagement,”
which clearly smacks of disarma-
ment. How, for example, can one dis-
tinguish between withdrawal of mili-
tary forces from a key strategic area
and the elimination of the weapons
available to those forces? The dis-
tinction seems far from clear, and
perhaps the opposition of the pox .

The I VATION |

f Ps aw 8 Ot 2 “Ye
cal-settlement people to disarma-
ment is merely a semantic one. If
so, they are not far apart from the
proponents of multilateral disarma-

ment negotiations.

THE ADHERENTS of the arms-
first, or direct, approach to disarma-
ment assume that if the existence
of weapons in the hands of the ac-
knowledged competitor suggests not
only ability to attack, but possible
intention as well, “the way to disarm
is to disarm. ” The trouble here,
though, is that this pervasive fear
and threat to one’s security still
dominates and paralyzes any possible
negotiations. Since neither trusts the
other to adhere to its agreements,
emphasis is placed on inspection and
verification. Only a constant assur-
ance that the other is adhering to
the agreed disarmament schedule
will lead the nation to continue its
own disarmament. But here is an-
other. difficulty. We may have in-
spection techniques adequate for
verifying the cessation of large
H-bomb tests, for example, but so
far we have nothing reliable for as-
suming compliance with an agree-
ment to stop further production of
nuclear bombs or, more important,
to reduce existing stockpiles. And
while a ban on the tests might be a
welcome beginning, it can hardly be
‘viewed as a major step toward dis-
armament; a ban on production and
(ultimately) on possession itself is
the only meaningful disarmament in
nuclear weaponry.

How then, can we cope with this
element of fear in the arms-tension
dilemma? It seems to me that only
two possible solutions exist, and
neither will be palatable to those
seeking disarmament and security at
a bargain-basement price. One is to
establish a series of U.N. depots in
key areas of the world, and arrange
for the transfer of weapons to these
depots according to a carefully
staged schedule. Thus, in place of the
classic concept of scrapping weapons,
the signatories to any disarmament
treaty will gradually turn over both
the legal and physical possession of
their weapons—in accordance with
a mutually acceptable time schedule
—to prearranged U.N. depots stra-
tegically placed around the globe. If
this were done, the nation contem-

eles hs

Mw
—

plating a disarmament agreement
need have less fear of the conse-
quences of a breakdown or success-
ful violation of the accompanying
inspection system. Its leaders would
know that, in event of violation by
the other, it could automatically and
quickly re-acquire whatever weapons
it needed to redress the imbalance
which evasion had created.

Another possible solution, even
less palatable to our enthusiastic de-
fenders of national “sovereignty,”
might be the creation of a U.N. po-
lice force with the political powers
and numerical strength not only to
take gradual possession of these Rus-
sian, Chinese, American and British
weapons (for example), but to main-
tain and operate them. Thus, if
major violation were to occur, the
U.N. force would have both the
power and the responsibility to pro-
tect whichever nation might be the
possible victim of any evasion or

* duplicity.

TO CONCLUDE, until there is
widespread agreement not only that

there is little national security in the

weapons race, but that the race it-
self will have to be checked (at least
at the beginning) lout any prior
settlement of major political issues
or significant reduction in tension,
the prospects for ay are meager

indeed. The tensions-first approach
founders on the rocks of fear gen-
erated by the weapons themselves; ©
the political-settlement approach re-
quires the separation of the insep-
arable, and the disarm-by-disarming
approach usually fails to meet the
legitimate security requirements of
the nation which gives up part or
all of its sole and traditional means
of self-defense.

Thus, for the coming disarmament
negotiations to make any real dent
in the menacing spiral of weapons
technology, production and distribu-
tion, both sides will have to make
two key decisions. One is that any
partial reduction in armaments must
have a more or less equal impact on
the military capabilities of each side,
so that the present rough (now men-
acing) parity may be maintained.
The other is that, as the nations’
capacity for self-defense is dimin-
ished, the United Nations must be
given the political and military pow- —
er to step into that void and offer —
a reasonably reliable means of pro-_
tection for those who carry out their
disarmament commitments in
faith. Otherwise, we are doomed to
return once again to the dubious se-
curity of an increasingly unstable
balance of terror, with arms de-
velopment and production resuming

at the present feverish pace. 5
J Wy

205
“Sie
by os al Re

Pood

oft Alla rye

East Germany Is No

“There is only one way out [of the
German question),” Premier Khrush-
chev told the National Press Club dur-
ing his visit to this country. “We must
acknowledge that there exist two Ger-
man states... and conclude peace
[with both|.”. The West, of
does not recognize East Ger-
many; and out of this policy of non-
recognition arises the question as to
whether the German Democratic Re-
public does or does not exist as a viable
State.

Frederick Kuh, veteran Chicago Sun-
Times foreign correspondent, and one
of the very few American newsmen who
have ever been permitted to roam
through East Germany at will, herewith
gives his views on the question.

treaties
course,

—EpiTors

East Berlin
THIS REPORTER lately traveled
1,500 miles by car from Berlin to
the Baltic coast, then back to Berlin
by another route and on to the
Polish border and through industrial
Saxony into the forests of Thuringia.
He stopped at will. He spoke freely
to whomever he chose. He roamed
through many factories and talked
with working men and women. He
lingered in the countryside to chat
with peasants on private farms and
collectives. He met university pro-
fessors and writers—and achieved
the almost unprecedented distinction
of never interviewing a taxi driver.

The extensive journey left an im-
pression of rapid industrial advance
on all fronts, and a distinct rise in
living standards. East Germans are
eating better than a few years ago
(some, of course, eat better than
others); they are better dressed.
Children look happy. Cafes and res-
taurants are crowded. A_ Leipzig
night club, with seats for 350, was
overflowing the night this reporter
visited it.

Factory workers evince little dis-
content. With more goods appearing
on shelves, they want more pay—
hardly an idiosyncracy. Many amen-
ities available in West Germany are

lacking here, but the discrepancy is
diminishing. Educational opportuni-
ties for workers have increased
enormously: in 1928, 2 per cent of
the student body at Leipzig (since

renamed
were the

Karl Marx) University
children of workers and
peasants; today the percentage is
about 60. (On the other side of the
coin is the fact that children of mid-
dle-class parents have often been
barred from the universities, which
may be one reason why 1,350 doc-
tors—among thousands of other citi-
zens—fled East Germany in the last
eighteen months. )

There is ferment among the farm-
ers, however. Generally, this re-
porter found them more fearful than
any other East Germans of speaking
frankly to an American visitor. The
latest available statistics—end of
1957—show the failure of the Com-
munist Party to rally the people on
the land. Total party membership
then was 1,472,000, of which 42.3
per cent were professional people and
white-collar workers; 33.8 per cent
industrial workers; 2.9 per cent col-
lective farmers and 2.1 per cent
private farmers.

But the peasants are neither or-
ganized nor articulate in their dis-
content. The Communist regime’s
strongest opponent here is the
church. Some years ago the govern-
ment introduced an oath known as
“the consecration of youth” for boys
and girls who at fourteen enter the
Youth Movement. For many East
German youngsters, this oath sup-
planted confirmation in the church.
The clergy were angry, and until
1957 refused to confirm anyone who
had taken the oath. Now it has
yielded—albeit resentfully—on the
point. It is worried now about an-
other problem. In the East German
Pioneers, composed of — 1,300,000
children between six and fourteen,
the church correctly sees a state at-
tempt to wrest education from all re-
ligious influence.

THE RELATIVE stability of the
atmosphere, and the rising living
standards, ere a reflection of the in-
dustrial boom. The country is today
second only to the Soviet Union in
industrial importance among states
in the European Communist camp.
Its industrial output has risen from
42 in 1946 (taking the prewar year
of 1936 at 100) to 250 this year.

Mirage ee by Frederick Kuh

According to Bruno Leuschner of
the East German Planning Commis-
sion, steel production has increased
threefold since 1950, and iron five-
fold. Electric-power output jumped
from 14 billion kwh. in 1936 to a
scheduled 38.3 for this year; the
country is stated to top all other
European countries in per capita
power output.

A familiar Communist slogan pre-
dicts that East German per capita
consumption will match that of West
Germany by 1961. First Deputy
Prime Minister Heinrich Rau is
more cautious in his forecast, but
points to a trend: East German in-
dustrial production rose 10.9 per
cent in 1957-58, while the corre-
sponding figure for West Germany
is given as 3.4 per cent.

THE East German advance is being
pushed hardest in machine manufac-
ture; according to Herr Rau, the
country has already surpassed the
Soviet Union in the export of ma-
chinery. A seven-year plan, now in
process of execution, displays char-
acteristic Communist boldness. By
1968, a gigantic plant—it will en-
compass a hundred buildings spread
over seven-and-a-half miles—will be
completed forty-five miles outside
Dresden. Its production will pivot
on a ten-year-old discovery for mak-
ing coke from soft coal (one of East
Germany’s few plentiful resources),
and will enable East Germany to re-
duce its costly imports of oil and
anthracite.

Stalinstadt, two miles from the
Polish frontier, was once at the heart
of one of Germany’s most backward
areas; recently built, it now has a
population of 21,000—the number
is slated to double by 1965 — whose
average age is only twenty-six. Now
producing iron, it will soon produce
steel,

On the Baltic coast, the East Ger-
mans are constructing a huge port
at Rostock which will make them
less dependent on West German
ports such as Hamburg. The new
harbor will begin functioning next
spring, but will not be completed
until 1965; it will include two pipe-

lines which will funnel petroleum
A : alia . \ »

Pa: -

q ; - ical journals.

oe Hel re, too, a shipyard begun in 1957

is growing swiftly; two years ago it
launched 35,000 tons of shipping,
and this year production will reach

90,000 tons.
EAST GERMAN leaders, discussing

these impressive economic gains, in-
variably point out the handicaps
which their country faced from the
beginning. First of all, when the Al-
lies carved up Germany, the lion’s
share of industry went to the West-
ern half. To East Germany went
only 6.6 per cent of the nation’s
steel production and 2.7 per cent of
its anthracite. West Germany was
given the bulk of the chemical in-
dustries, including 90 per cent of
coal-tar dyes output, 80 per cent
of sulphuric acid, and 75 per cent of
the production potential for fibers
and artificial textiles.

Herren Rau and Leuschner, the
two top economic members of the
East German Government, stressed
to this reporter the additional ad-
vantages West Germany enjoyed in
the millions of dollars of American
aid which were poured into the coun-
try under the Marshall Plan and its
successors. But in so doing, they
found it convenient to omit certain
extremely relevant factors:

I. Herr Rau, replying to this re-
porter’s question, stated that since
1950, the German Democratic Re-
public had received Soviet credits
totaling about 2 billion marks (or

HIDDEN CENSORS ee by Stanley Meisler .

IT IS fashionable in literary circles
to snicker at Arthur E. Summerfield,
the former Chevrolet dealer who
may have produced one of the most
publicized cases of poor judgment in
the history of criticism. But the
Postmaster General merely carried
the logic of traditional Post Office
procedures to their proper conclusion.

STANLEY MEISLER is a Wash-
ington newspaper man and occasion~ Ai

al contributor to critical

illion at the official exchang
rate). This substantial sum accrued
to an area and a population one-
third that of West Germany.

2. While the Western powers put
an early halt to the dismantling of
factories in their zones of Germany,
the Soviet authorities removed huge
industrial installations from the
East Zone. This is a factor which
seems to elude Communist memories
when they try to explain their state’s
lag behind West Germany.

3. Herren Rau and Leuschner, as
well as other East German political

(om foe)

leaders, stress their country’s short-
age of manpower. But,.unless press-
ed, they never mention one cause of
this shortage: the 3,000,000 citizens
who have fled East Germany since
war’s end. (It should be added here,
however, that the refugee flow has
dropped from 4,000 weekly last year
to about 3,000 weekly this year;
meanwhile, responsible Western au-
thorities estimate that for every four

Through the years, these procedures
have led to the seizure of Tolstoy’s
Kreutzer Sonata, Boceaccio’s De-
cameron, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata,
Hemingway’s lor Whom the Bell
Tolls and Caldwell’s Tobacco Road
as obscene literature, and Sholom
Aleichem’s Bewitched Tailor, aboli-

tionist pamphlets, discussions of the
French Revolution,
een and a Rus

conomist

the Ecor

who flee East Germany, at least one

is now returning.)

FROM ‘THE impressions gained
during seven days of travel and ob-
servation, two contradictions struck
this reporter. One is on the Com-
munist side, the other on the West’s.

Why have the East German rulers
failed to ease political repression to
correspond with the economic con-
solidation? They have shunned the
moderate liberalization which Khru-
shchev substituted for the Stalinist
terror. The contrast is even sharper ‘ha
between the rigid conformism in a
East Germany and the relative free-

dom under the Polish Communist an
regime. A member of the East Ger- a
man government seemed to despair “ta
of this correspondent’s sanity when va

he suggested that the gain in pres- a
tige might offset the risk of liberali-
zation in the press, speech, travel
and other fields. The East German
and Soviet masters of the German _
Democratic Republic appear resign-
ed to an indefinite continuance of
Stalinism here. 4
The contradiction in the Western E
camp’s behavior is its pretense that
the East German regime is non- |
existent. The no-recognition policy —
seems to reflect a childlike notion
that if we don’t look, maybe this dis-
tasteful government will quietly go
away. Against this naive assumption
is the impression of permanence
conveyed by economic stabilization
and growth in East Germany.

who admits to reading little fiction,
decided that D. H. Lawrence’s Lady —
Chatterley’s Lover “taken as a whole, -
is an obscene and filthy work”; a
erary critics and at least one federal
judge decided otherwise. Snickering,
at this difference in judgment seem:
like misplaced energy. Rather th
cae the critical faculties of S

Ad ie Jv .

for obscenity in 1873, when Congress
passed the Comstock Law, which still
is the chief weapon in the postal war
on pornography. The history of cen-
soring propaganda in the mails dates
back to the Federalist days, but the
present program derives its strength
from a regulation set down on the
eve of World War II. The scrutiny
of mail for obscenity and for propa-
ganda presents similar questions in-
volving civil liberties; but, since they
stem from different statutes and dif-
ferent histories, they are best con-
sidered separately.

THE COMSTOCK LAW states that
anyone who knowingly sends or re-
ceives obscene matter through the
mails may be punished by five years
in jail or a $5,000 fine or both. Con-
gress passed the law after an inten-
sive, one-man lobbying campaign by
Anthony Comstock, agent for the
New York Society for the Suppres-
sion of Vice. A religious zealot who
had become incensed over the in-
creased traffic in erotic literature
after the Civil War, Comstock wrote
that obscene literature “like a canker
worm, secretly eats out the moral
life and purity of our youth.” The
Post Office appointed him a special
investigator to enforce the Comstock
Law, and he spent many years try-
ing to clean up the mails.

Although the law specifically pro-
vides for enforcement only by crim-
inal penalties, the Post Office has
inferred that the statute also meant
to give it civil powers of enforce-
ment. Postal logic runs this way: if
Congress does not want obscene mat-
ter in the mail, then the postmaster
surely has the power to remove that
matter as well as to arrest the men
who sent it or asked for it. If, for
example, someone sent a time bomb
through the mails, you would not
expect the postmaster to seek a con-
viction before getting rid of the
bomb. With this reasoning, the Post
Office has assumed the power to de-
cide for itself whether mail is ob-
scene and if so to remove it.

The Post Office employs three
civil devices in eliminating what it
considers obscene matter. The case

of Lady Chatterley’s Lover illustrates

the first: the impounding of suspici-

‘ous material, followed by formal
hearings to decide whether it is ob-

scene and therefore unmailable. The
delay between seizure and the
final judicial decision can be finan-
cially crippling (although this was
not the case with Lady Chatterley’s
Lover). Big Table, a little-known
literary magazine, was not so for-
tunate. The Post Office impounded
441 copies of the magazine last
March, not bothering to tell editor
Paul Carroll about it for a month.
By midsummer, the Post Office still
had not made an official ruling, and
the American Civil Liberties Union,
which is defending the magazine,
cannot appeal to the courts until a
ruling is forthcoming.’ Even if ulti-
mately the courts uphold Big Table,
it 1s doubtful whether the magazine
can wipe out its losses by selling a
back-number issue. In this case, the
magazine will have escaped convic-
tion, but not the sentence. Under
present rules, the Post Office pe-
nalizes first and only then seeks to
justify the penalty.

In the second civil device used
against obscenity, the Post Office
impounds first class mail sent to a
person who runs a mail-order busi-
ness in obscene materials. The idea
is to cut off his remittances. This
device, unlike the others, is detailed
in a postal statute which provides
that first class mail may be impound-
ed for twenty days while the depart-
ment tries to prove that the letters
should be returned to their senders
because the company deals in ob-
scenity and its business, therefore, is
unlawful. But the Post Office has
found it difficult to prove a business
unlawful within twenty days, and it
has asked Congress to extend the
limit to forty-five days. This request
the House approved last month by
overwhelming voice vote, the lone
dissenter being Representative John
¥.. Landsay, (RN). Critzes gay
that the Post Office figures that ces-
sation of receipts for forty-five days
will drive a fly-by-night operator out
of business even if the department
never proves its case. But the Post
Office replies that it needs the time
for a full and fair hearing.

With its final civil device, the Post
Office denies second class mailing
rights to any periodical that, in its
opinion, continually prints obscenity.
In the Esquire case of 1946, the Su-
preme Court implied doubt that the

' ct

‘nography

5 r 4 e p
ba « f “|

, 1
department had the power to punish
future issues of a magazine without
examining them, but the practice has
continued,

Besides these civil sanctions, the
Post Office also invokes the criminal
provisions of the Comstock Law. But
the Justice Department has not been
able to get many convictions in these
cases. “In some cities, courts inter-
pret obscenity so liberally that get-
ting indictments is very difficult,”
the Postal Service News complained
in its June issue. The official depart-
ment magazine is particularly crit-
ical of juries in New York, whose
standards “may be vastly different
from those in the smaller, less blasé,
cities and towns in which so many
of us live.” These complaints, how-
ever, tend to reflect more on the de-
partment’s judgment than on New
York juries.

THE Post Office Department re-
ports having received more than 50,-
000 complaints about obscene mat-
ter last year from parents, clergy-
men, school officials, parent-teacher
groups and newspaper executives.
Since World War II, the market in
pin-ups, strip-sets, lust-ridden books
and pure pornography has increased.
While no scientific evidence pin-
points this as a cause of the accom-
panying increase in juvenile delin-
quency, many parents are convinced
that common sense pinpoints it. In
any event, they do not want their
children receiving the stuff, and have
joined church and community
groups that demand help from the
Post Office. There is no doubt that
Summerfield’s “war on muck” would
have continued free of public criti-
cism if he had not slipped on Lady
Chatterley’s Lover. Congress, of
course, also feels this public pressure,
and its committees studying por-
apparently sympathize
with the position of the Post Office.

Thus the federal courts remain the
only obstacle to the Post Office’s ex-
ercise of its assumed censorship pow-
ers. In the Roth case of 1957, the
Supreme Court said that the First
Amendment does not protect ob-
scenity at all, for obscenity, as Jus-
tice William J. Brennan, Jr. put it, is
“utterly without redeeming social
importance.” But the court also de-
fined the standard of obscenity:

py iy The Nat

ON |

af / v

“whether to the average person, ap-
plying contemporary ~ community
standards, the dominant theme of
the material taken as a whole ap-
peals to prurient interest.” It is this
standard that Summerfield seems to
misunderstand when he asks news-
men if they would read Lady Chat-
terley’s Lover aloud to their children.
Judge Frederick vanPelt Bryan sim-
ply read the book and, applying the
Supreme Court standard, decided it
was not obscene. He did not rule at
all on the Constitutionality of postal
censorship procedure, although he
did imply that he felt it conflicted
with the First Amendment.

The Constitutionality of postal
procedure probably will not be set-
tled until the Supreme Court, con-
fronted with an obviously obscene
book, has to consider the method of
seizure, rather than the book’s con-
tent. Professors of Law James C. N.
Paul of the University of Pennsyl-
vania and Murray L. Schwartz of
UCLA, culling the opinions of Jus-
tices from past obscenity cases, find
that Justices Hugo Black and William
O. Douglas oppose any suppression
of sex material unless there is clear
and present danger of harm, Justice
John M. Harlan opposes all federal
control of obscenity, Justice Bren-
nan demands jury trials in censor-
ship cases, and Chief Justice Earl
Warren feels that the conduct of the
person selling the material, not the
material alone, should be judged. In
short, at least five members of the
Supreme Court probably would rule
that the present Post Office system
of censoring obscenity is unconsti-
tutional.

But it is not certain that the Post
Office plans to maintain its present
questionable system. Under the
guidance of a dynamic, new general
counsel, Herbert B. Warburton, the
department is studying ways of re-
vising its procedures to meet the ob-
jections of book publishers and civil-
liberties groups. Warburton hopes to
ask Congress for legislation that
would put the power of judging ob-
scenity increasingly in the hands of
the courts.

The Constitutionality of the cur-
rent campaign against propaganda
also seems doubtful. Working with
the Post Office, the Federal Customs
Bureau checks foreign non-first class

October 10, 1959

Soo) Prey

mail as it enters the United States.
If translators and inspectors decide
that the mail contains foreign po-
litical propaganda, the Post Office
usually holds it up and notifies the
addressee that “such matter ordi-
narily would be treated as non-mail-
able,” but that he may receive it by
signing a form stating that he order-
ed, subscribed to, or desires the pub-
lication. Less than half the addressees
sign, and the Post Office destroys
the unclaimed material.

An Alice in Wonderland quality
surrounds this procedure, which is
not outlined in any statute, but is
derived from an Attorney General’s
interpretation. In 1940, Attorney
General Robert H. Jackson ruled
that the Post Office could seize sev-
eral large shipments of Nazi propa-
ganda, and he justified his ruling in
these steps: (1) the Espionage Act
of 1917 says that no one may mail
material that is treasonable or is
used to violate any law of the United

a ae OE

States; (2) the Foreign Agents Reg-
istration Act of 1938 says that all
persons in the United States acting
as agents for a foreign government
must register with the Federal Gov-
ernment; (3) if someone in the
United States mailed foreign propa-
ganda but did not register, he would
be breaking the registration law; (4)
this propaganda then would be ma-
terial used to violate a law of the
United States—the Registration Act
and, under the Espionage Act,
would be non-mailable; (5) if a per-
son living outside the United States
uses its mails to spread foreign propa-
ganda, he should be considered the
same as a foreign agent living in the
United States; (6) since the mailer
in Moscow or Berlin or Prague has
not registered as an agent with the
U.S. Government, he has violated
the Foreign Agents Registration Act;
(7) under the Espionage Act, his
material is non-mailable.

Under this labyrinthine theory,

J - Loe
Oi9T> He WArtaecen Pes eas

“T've got to be careful — it might be a book!”

-
}

‘Pravda,

was last in EI] Paso,

‘
the Post Office may destroy all for-
eign propaganda without giving the
addressee a chance to sign a form
requesting it, or even without telling
him about it. This is exactly what
the department did during the
Korean War when, pressured by the
House Un-American Activities Com-
mittee and the Senate Internal Se-
curity Subcommittee to stop the in-
flux of Communist mail, it revived
the Jackson opinion. The current
system of notifying the addressee,
initiated as an experiment this year,
actually represents an attempt by
Warburton, the new general counsel,
to bring some intelligence and fair-
ness into a program that had been
mostly chaos for several years.

Chaos erupted because the Post
Office and Customs Bureau set after
propaganda without much advance
preparation and without a set of
rules of procedure that the public
could read. On one occasion, a non-
Russian-speaking Customs worker
in St. Paul was handed a Russian-
English dictionary and told to check
through a warehouse of material and
pull out all items that contained
Communist propaganda. Procedures
such as these resulted in the confis-
cation of a Soviet book titled Chess
for Beginners, German-language edi-
tions of the works of Karl Marx,
and Catholic Imperialism
and World Freedom, an anti-Church
book published in England. Univer-
sities, libraries, political scientists and
journalists soon discovered that im-
portant Russian journals and news-
papers were not reaching them.

M. atone Retaen, Hoar example,
received no Russian mathematical

publications for a year. In 1955, the
American Friends Service Commit-
tee discovered that the Post Office
had destroyed 500 copies of an Eng-
lish pamphlet, written by a member
of Parliament, which condemned the
United States for its part in the
Guatemalan revolution.

Complaints descended upon the
Post Office, and it gradually revised
procedures until the present program
evolved. In the main, the depart-
ment now apparently holds up only
Communist propaganda coming from
behind the Iron Curtain and releases
most of it to anyone who signs a
form. Propaganda sent in bulk, how-
ever, is destroyed. But, ironically, a
registered foreign agent in the United
States can receive all the Commu-
nist propaganda he wants without
any trouble at all. The Jackson opin-
ion, in its acrobatic weaving of the
Espionage and Foreign Agents Reg-
istration. acts, fails to cover regis-
tered Communist agents.

Security is the main rationale for
the postal anti-propaganda program.
Proponents argue that it is danger-
ous to allow subversive propaganda
to-.reach the foreign-born in the
United States, especially when it is
written in their native tongue. At
the very least, they say, the Post
Office should identify it as propa-
ganda. But this puts the Federal
Government in the business of decid-
ing what opinions are fit for an
American to read. When you require
a man to state that he desires Com-

ever -
he can easily interpret. that
ment as a form of intimidation, at
is quite likely to do so.
The American Civil Opadins
Union has started a suit in behalf
of the managing editor of the Amer-
ican Journal of Sociology, who re-
fused to sign the forms for delivery
of two Czech magazines. It is pos-
sible that General Counsel Warbur-
ton welcomes the suit as one way
of clearing up the question of the
program’s Constitutionality and le-
gality.

AT PRESENT the Post Office’s ad-
ministrative procedures have no solid
authorization from Congress. This
is true of its campaigns against both
obscenity and foreign political propa-
ganda.

Congress, of course, might not be
averse to granting the Post Office
direct authorization if called upon,
especially in the field of obscenity.
But, at the very least, Congressional
review would expose postal proce-
dures in these fields to public scru-
tiny for a while. The Post Office, on
shaky Constitutional ground, often
censors mail out of the public gaze.
This activity receives attention only
when some official loses his discern-
ment in zeal and mistakes a chess
book for a political tract or a classic
for a French post card. In fact, until
the courts or Congress act, poor
judgment, like that of Postmaster
General Summerfield, is all that
keeps the problems and procedures
of postal censorship in public view.

JIM CROW WEARS A SOMBRERO e e by John Rechy

A COUPLE of months ago, when I
‘Texas—my
home town — I looked out the back
window of my mother’s government-
project apartment, toward an enclo-
sure for garbage cans, where a sign
warned that anyone littering the area

JOHN RECHY has done creative

writing, as well as translations from
the Spanish, for several literary

_ magazines.

was subject to a $200 fine. I saw
an old man going through the cans.
At first I thought he was looking
for boxes or rags, which he would
later sell, but then I noticed he was
discarding those items and had come
across what he was really looking
for: some kind of food matted at
the bottom of a can. He scraped it
with a stick and ate it.

before I left El Paso, at least
four different groups or single per-

sons had come to my mother’s door,
standing there like Indians with their
colorful homemade sacks to carry
their bounty in—usually something
like an apple, an old pair of pants,
a rolled-up tortilla with beans or pi-
cadillo in it.

Sunday mornings especially these
pitiful bands leave their hovels at
the extreme southern edge of the city,
beginning their rounds of — the
Southside government aoue proj-

or
,

: Preltatay a
incongruous that they should con-
centrate their begging on the poor
Southside and the fringe neighbor-
hoods along the tracks. The reason
is that they are hesitant to invade
the richer sections of E] Paso—Kern
Place, Rim Road, Sunset Heights.

A substantial group of middle-
class Mexican-Americans lives nicely
integrated with its Anglo-Ameri-
can neighbors in the newer commu-
nities of E] Paso. But I don’t intend
here to speak of that group. The
group which is the subject of this
article is the one that makes its home
in this city’s Southside and forms a
closed world of its own.

ects 0

EL PASO (generally warm and sun-
ny and very picturesque) is located
on the border of Texas, New Mexico
and Mexico, separated from the lat-
ter by a winding stretch of sand call-
ed the Rio Grande (dominated by
a huge statue of Christ on the peak
of Mount Cristo Rey overlooking
Juarez, in Mexico, and EI Paso, in
Texas), and linked to it by two
bridges where American immigration
police stand guard against invading
; Mexicans without passports.

Daily, a stream of American tour-
ists flows back and forth across the
bridges, laughing, lugging liquor and
—on the return trip—sporting giant
“Mexican” straw hats (“suhm-bray-
rows,” as the tourists call them). The
happy Americans straggle past bra-
cero applicants—all wooden chicken
boxes and holy amulets and untrim-
med whiskers—who wait patiently in
line to be allowed to cross over into
the rich, the fertile, the promising

_ American farm country.

At least half the population of El
Paso is Mexican-American, and from
the railroad tracks southward it is
almost exclusively so. Although the
geographical boundary that separates

Mexico from the United States is.

the Rio Grande, the real boundary
is formed by the tracks that daily
block the flow of city traffic with
fat freight trains spilling business

into this prosperous, growing South-

west border area.

On the wrong side of these tracks
lies the world of poorer-class Mexi-
can-Americans, a world of common
characteristics of which grinding pov-

erty is is the Most outstanding. ual

fer 1 Mass. It seems

Social as well as economic circum-
stances, of course, have created this
world. Prejudice against the Mexi-
can is sometimes subtly, sometimes
blatantly, manifest; whatever its
form, it permeates the Southwest air
as smog permeates downtown Los
Angeles. How vividly I can remember
from my own childhood those hu-
miliations to which members of all
minority groups are subjected early
and which at the time—and this is
the greatest humiliation of all—tempt
one to forego one’s kin and attempt
to “pass.”

As early as kindergarten, I heard
Mexican-Americans like myself re-
ferred to as “greasers,” and I learn-
ed that, for some strange reason

MeESGés

which I still haven’t discovered, we
were supposed to put lard on our
hair. There was a child next door
(he always smelled of the salted
crackers his mother was constantly
feeding him) who wasn’t allowed to
play with us. His mother would haul
him inside the house as he protested
through cracker-crammed mouth
that he wasn’t doing anything de-
serving of punishment.

In high school I asked an “Ameri-
can” girl—from_ exclusive Kern
Place, as a matter of fact—to a big
school dance, and she accepted. Her
mother waited until one hour before
I was to pick up the girl (I had, of
course, ordered a ridiculously giant
corsage) to telephone me that I must
keep away from “Jeannie”—and
didn’t I know my own, place?

ROR Ge heme Neri, ay
“ pe es Re i. eee

& om

lar student who was apparently un-
aware of my descent, informed me
that he had telephoned my house
and the “dumb Mexican maid”
hadn’t been able to understand him.
“They should send them back across
the border where they belong,” he
said, voicing an opinion often ex-
pressed in Texas. Of course, we had
no maid, and the person who had
answered the telephone was my
mother.

STILL LATER, I was invited by two
“unsuspecting” Anglo friends to go
with them to the ranch of one of
their Texan grandfathers in East
Texas, and as we drove through what
is indeed miraculously —blue-skied,
green countryside, we decided to stop
and eat. At a two-bit run-down
restaurant (I remember lots of buzz-
ing bugs sailing lazily in and out
the unscreened windows) I saw an
elaborately lettered sign which read:

WE DO NOT SERVE MEXICANS,
NIGGERS, OR DOGS

Later, at the ranch, the hostess
said at dinner that she never touched
her food until the Mexican servant
was out of her sight.

In Dallas, an eating saab
boasts that “No one need eat out of
paper plates here” — in other words,
no patron need worry that a Mexi-
can-American might have eaten off
the restaurant’s crockery.

Some towns in the interior of
Texas segregate movie theatres,
which play Friday and Saturday
nights. The Mexicans are seated on
one side, the Anglos on the other,
the Negroes not at all. In this state
that boasts of its easy relations be-
tween the two “races” and spews out
editorial copy about its “friendly
neighbors in the land of Mazana,”
these instances are not rare, and [
remember one occasion in which, in
an East Texas town, a visiting diplo-—
mat from the Mexican Government —
was refused service at a restauranesy 3

Despite all this, however, El Pas
recently elected a Latin mayor. C ons
sidering the large number of Mexic f
can-Americans in the Southwest,
this is remarkable only because it
doesn’t happen more often.

In Southside El Paso there X=
ists among the people a clannishne
that is very often denounced. x

5 4 - =) a at ae a at
a nae, SE et =

a ee eee eC See ee iG ,

Southside families subscribe to Mexi-
can newspapers. They attend church-
es where Mass is said in Spanish.

Because they speak a heavily accent-
ed English, which is easily and often
caricatured, they speak only Spanish
among themselves — the younger
ones, a rhythmic Mexican jive which

: somehow matches the cadenced regu-
larity of their “cool, bad” walk. In
this world there is no greater object
of contempt than the Mexican-
American who “passes” or claims to
be “Spanish.”

THE clannishness of the Southside
Mexican-Americans results from pres-
sures imposed from without. In El
Paso, for example—as elsewhere—
school attendance is determined by
zoning, Since the Southside is vir-
tually a Mexican town, the schools
there are populated predominantly
by Mexican-Americans — and now
also by Negroes. Integration was
thus accomplished by one minority
group accepting another. The schools,
therefore, are politely segregated,
just as the two “worlds” of North
and South El Paso are separated by
social circumstances and the incomes
of the respective groups.
But the school situation is only
one of a number of factors creating
the clannishness of the Southside.

ie, There is a constant awareness
" among this group of being looked
3 down upon by the Anglo-Ameri-
cans and, sadly enough, even by
their more prosperous brothers of the
Northside. The middle-class, “de-
segregated” Mexican-Americans of
. El Paso are very often apathetic to
pad the conditions in the Southside; they
are the people who, in some in-
stances, pompously claim “Spanish”
descent. Also, there is the ever-
present tinge of social inferiority im-
plicit in being poorer than most and
in belonging to a group largely com-
prising maids and laborers who must
mouth “sir” and “ma’am” to others,
while they themselves invariably are
called by nicknames.

This “Mexicanness,” then, is a
defensive measure in each of its
_ manifestations.

There is, further, as I have already
said, the imposition of a definite
boundary separating South El Paso

from the cleaner, newer sections of

b's Pe q oA i
s - > Ai =

the city. The only homes which the
poorer-class group can afford are in
the Southside. They live either in
tenements decorated by old, fading
election signs and advertisements of
Mexican movies at El Paso’s Span-

ish-speaking theatre — EI Colon,
named after Columbus — or in the
newer, cleaner tenements, which

here as elsewhere are the govern-
ment projects.

Once in a great while a stray
Anglo family moves into one of
these government-project apart-
ments, and then, as if afraid of con-
tamination, quickly moves away.
Other than that, the projects are
all inhabited by Mexican-Americans
and Negroes — which means dozens
and dozens of children.

To qualify for one of these units,
the occupant must not have over a
certain income. The houses are ar-
ranged in row after row of two-story
apartments, or units, of identical
construction, joined to each other
by a common wall, through which
it is next to impossible not to hear
a neighbor’s conversation and the
constant flushing of toilets.

THESE rows of apartments line the
Southside like giant cracker boxes.
It is very easy to become lost among
these identical buildings, and hardly
a day passes at my mother’s house
that someone is not knocking, asking
where apartment number so-and-so
is located in that orderly maze of
twin structures. When I am at my
mother’s, I have to count four rows
from the corner in order to find hers.

Other not quite so lucky Mexi-
can-Americans in the Southside
live in the older sections, in dilapi-
dated old tenements near the border,
in close, crowded “apartment houses”
whose front porch might be a rickety
balcony somewhat pitifully adorned
with potted plants in a kind of
parody garden. These apartment
houses stretch beyond the newly
built Paisano Drive and run into
the government projects. In ‘the
stifling summer, the children play
in the streets, against the impatient,
protesting honking of automobiles.
They stay out late in order to avoid
the rancid heat inside and the giant
cockroaches which thrive on the
weather and the surroundings.

as
=

ry ee 7 7
3 vr, rt ia yr

There is often an incredible pov-_
erty among these people. Many are
constantly unemployed, through no
fault of their own. The kinds of jobs
the men in this group can usually
get are those of laborers; the women
can work in restaurants or become
maids. The competition is so. stiff
that maids are sometimes available
for as little as a dollar a day, plus
meals.

And over this world of character-
istic. poverty looms the long-legged
figure of the rich Texan — the ranch-
er, strutting across San Jacinto Plaza
in the center of town. In Juarez,
across the border, where prostitu-
tion is sometimes the only means of
livelihood available—where a young
Mexican girl can be had for as little
as a dollar plus the price of a pro-
phylactic during the “desperate
hours” of the morning — this “rich”
American forms his impression of the
amoral Mexican. And this is the
impression he brings back with him
— not with horror at the frightful
results of poverty and social neglect,
but with the smirking of someone
who has found a bargain. This im-
pression, along with his Mexican
“suhm-bray-row” and his allowed
amount of liquor, is what the aver-
age Texan brings back with him
after a night spent over the border.

A MEXICAN-AMERICAN child
growing up in this atmosphere of
implied inferiority and “differences”
— knowing that if he gets through
high school at all, he will have to go
out and work immediately — quickly
becomes aware of his bleak future.
Naturally, this results in resentment
and in the formation of the inevitable
street gang.

Here, as in other cities, the police
often add to the delinquency prob-
lem, becoming a kind of rival “gang”
themselves. In El Paso, the poorer-
class Mexican-American boys whose
families can’t afford the “protec-
tion” that money is always able to
pave suffer the burden of the

r.” The light-haired gangs of,
fies ee Place, in the expensive
residential area of the city, are
“just kids growing up”; but the dark-
haired boys of the Southside are
“delinquents.” The jura — police
on the prowl — are constantly

Ti Nz
‘ ‘he NATION
*

|
|
FE
|
|

rounding up the Southside
even when the boys are merely
standing under streetlights outside
of dingy grocery stores, or next to
the Palace Theatre, because they
have nothing else to do and no-
where else to go.

The circle which produces, typical-
ly, a member of an EI Paso street
gang is illustrated by the following
incident, only one of many similar
cases.

A young woman whose “junky”
husband left her with four kids and
nothing else went to work as a
maid. The three boys, left to shift
for themselves, naturally gravitated
to the gangs. As a maid, the woman
wasn’t paid enough to support the
family, and she couldn’t receive wel-
fare aid as long as she was working.
Her solution was to stop working,
apply for aid and — because this
aid would still not be enough —
take a lover. She couldn’t marry
him because, again, the aid would
stop and the man’s income would
not be sufficient to keep them going.
As her lover, he could help her fi-
nancially and she retain the welfare
aid. Even more important, she could
now stay home to watch the chil-
dren.

~When the lover inevitably walked
out on the woman, another took his
place. The children experienced a
string of such “fathers.” On the day
he was presented with a new “fa-
ther,’ the youngest of the three
boys wrote on the wall of his house,
with black shoeshine polish: “J hate
my mother.”

In her anguish and despair, the
mother grabbed the boy and held
his hand over an open flame on the
stove, burning away a crudely tat-
tooed “burning cross” which pro-
claimed him to be an initiated mem-
ber of one of El Paso’s toughest
gangs.

groups,

WELFARE groups in El Paso have
a stiff problem. They provide needed
relief, but there are too many poor.
Like other such groups, they are
tied up in rules and regulations and
strict budget limitations which some-
times become very difficult to justify
in certain instances. The following
is an example.

When he Ochoa, an old eramnan

€ ef

‘

who lived in the projects near my
mother, was evicted for non-pay-
ment of rent, she moved into one
of those tiny hovels near the South-
ern Pacific shops where women still
do their washing outside, scrubbing
on an old tin board. With the old
lady lived a son, a hopeless alcoholic,
and a grandson whom the daughter
had left behind in order to go live
with her husband in Los Angeles.
A welfare group bought groceries
for Mrs. Ochoa until they found out
about the alcoholic son, who was
always in jail. The aid stopped.
Technically, the son is strong enough
and young enough to support the
mother and himself. Psychologically,
of course, he isn’t. But rules notorious-
ly ignore psychology. The old woman
became one of that sparse, pitiful
band of beggars prowling from house
to house along the Southside of El
Paso. For weeks she had breakfast
at my mother’s, and she and the
grandson and the son, when he was
out of jail, lived on what she could
beg.

Finally, all three moved to golden
Los Angeles, where the week of their
arrival the son was again in jail. In
Los Angeles, the woman applied for
help from a social agency. They of-
fered her aid to this extent: the fare
back to El Paso.

Queerly enough, these poorer-class
Mexican-Americans have become

Pt EF. eee

quick heirs of the American Dream.
My mother’s best friend comes over
every afternoon to watch Queen for
a Day on our television. She’s been
badgering the sponsors to get her on
the show, and she writes a letter to
them almost every week. What she
would ask, if chosen Queen, would
be a combination spectacles and
hearing-aid set. Not too long ago
she entered a contest for the hard-
of-hearing, hard-of-seeing. She re-
ceived a letter saying that although
she hadn’t won, she had become a
“finalist,” which entitled her to the
hearing-seeing combination at a $50
discount.

She finally received the gadget,
loved it, couldn’t meet the payments,
and so the set, with its comical,
tiny batteries which had a way of
going dead on her inopportunely, was
(ttaken away from her. Now she
watches my mother’s television from
a position almost on top of the
screen, her better ear cocked toward
it, the volume turned up thundering
— and she writes letters to Queen
for a Day.

AND SPEAKING about queens —
each year, around Christmas, the
leading citizens of EF] Paso elect a
queen of the Sun Carnival who en-
tertains in high, Southwest style.
From the time of the announcement
of her election — around the time
when San Jacinto Plaza in the
center of the city becomes a veri-
table fairyland, with lights, trees,
Santa Clauses, and Jesus in the
Manger (and scratchy Bing Crosby
carols playing all day) — she rules
over the carnival activities: the
parade with its tinseled floats, the
football game, dances, luncheons.

. The El Paso newspapers are
crammed with pictures of the carni-
val festivities. Here’s a picture of
the queen at a reception and at the
country club; and here she is with
her inevitable brother from a South-
ern university, sir, who is now visit-
ing our fair city; and here she is at_

Paso Pastas decked out as cowba °.
Yippeeee!! -

My mother’s friend, her faded
eyes a foot away from the TV
screen, watches it all, enthralled.

fi)
iS

CONVICTION. Edited by Norman
MacKenzie. Monthly Review Press.
237 pp. #4.

Emile Capouya

NO QUESTION but that the Welfare
State in Britain owes more to Keynes
than to William Morris. After the Sec-
ond World War the Labour Party won
a landslide victory, and might have
chosen to invoke the headier ideals of
the Socialist tradition — those that
proceed ultimately from the French
Revolution and are best expressed in
the crude and classic formula, Liberty,
‘s Equality, Fraternity. Instead, the Party
7) demonstrated that it was very much a
> child of our time. Rather than try to
aN deal directly with the necessity for
- bringing about a renewal of social moral-
a ity, ethics, style and tone, it adopted
a technician’s blueprint for achieving
| a
.
t
|

guaranteed ration: feed the hungry
their short commons, clothe the naked
in decent black.
rf In 1945, that contracted program
F may have seemed to be the best, or
the only, political tactic. In 1959, we
see that it was bad political strategy.
Britain’s revolution has been to a large
extent absorbed and neutralized; its
architects have become place-holders in
a system run by class and money on the
old lines.

This is the point in history at which
the contributors to Conviction have
chosen to issue their manifesto. Under
the editorship of Norman MacKenzie,
who also wrote the first essay in the
book, a dozen young left-wing Social-
ists (the two oldest are forty and the two
youngest twenty-seven) have set down
observations that, arising though they do
from their authors’ separate characters
and interests, yet comprise a sketch of a
social program concerned with the human
person—its nurture, cultivation, protec-

tion and transcendence. Perhaps it is
natural that so generous a view of goy-
ernmental responsibility should be the
property of a group of moral back-
~ benchers — certainly, official Labour
thunderers like Aneurin Bevan are in-
_tocent of any such philosophy — and
young ones at that. It will be another

New York publishing house. His “Apro-
pos of Don Juan” appeared in ae
ation of August 29.

pes CAPOUYA is an editor with a

BOOKS and the

What It Is We Lack

of the banal tragedies of history if in
time these radicals and the spirit they
incarnate are absorbed and neutralized,
whether by Government or Opposition.
At the moment, however, it is brac-
ing to see people who are engaged in
an activity that is recognizable as poli-
tics. (Anyone familiar with the recent
attempt of a group of “insurgent Demo-
crats” in New York City to replace
the party Gauleiter with their own
man will appreciate the implied distinc-
tion.) To an American it must seem
that the rump represented i in Conviction
is in the enviable position of being
attached to a genuine trunk, a privilege
that the intellectual Left in our own
country has not enjoyed in twenty years.
The fact helps to explain the breadth
and pointedness of the views developed
in this book, as it does the dearth of
political ideas in the United States.

Will the future be different, or can
we make it different? Can we avoid
the Age of the Oligarchs, and defeat
the faceless men of power? I believe
we can. But we must know why we
want to do this before we can say
how we propose to do it. That means,
first, we must regain confidence in
man’s ability to control the social
and technical machinery he has him-
self created. This I put as the central
Socialist objective. And the second
is closely related to it. It is the be-
lief that it is co-operation rather
than conflict that gives dignity and
purpose to our lives. The acquisi-
tive society is based upon an ethic
which runs directly counter to these
two principles, and it is its denial
of them that fundamentally makes
me a Socialist, that makes me ask
what life could be like if we treated
our own capacities and the resources
of nature reasonably, with the in-
tention and the expectation of being
happy.
With this piece of arrant Jacobinism,
Mr. MacKenzie sets the style for the
essays that follow: Peter Shore (who
recently wrote, in collaboration with the
young American scholar Arnold Rogow,

a book called The Labour Government

and British Industry) suggests that
turning Private enterprises into “public
corporations will not in- itself advance
the society of equals, but is 1 likely

to aaron a “power elite” a fa Ci

i | a

Wright Mills or a “new class” @ la
Milovan Djilas, so long as the acquisi-
tive ethic is countenanced by society,
and its devotees are rewarded with
power and perquisites; Brian Abel-Smith
presents evidence for the view that the
great beneficiaries of the Welfare State
are the members of the middle class,
and hints that it might be pleasant to
spread welfare to the lower orders as
well; Nigel Calder reminds us that science
is producing, unasked, profounder revo-
lutions than deliberate policy has thus
far achieved, and that its blind dynamic
must be made subject to our intelli-
gence if policy is to have any meaning
— and so on. All the essays are worth
reading for the candor of tone and clar-
ity of commitment that uniformly dis-
tinguish them. But four must be singled
out as having special relevance to the
American predicament.

PAUL JOHNSON calls his essay “A
Sense of Outrage.” It is in part a person-.
al history, from which we learn the
events that led up to Mr. Johnson’s ac-
quiring the indispensable animus for re-
form. In our outrageous world, nothing
is rarer than a proper appreciation of
enormity. The kind of man who cannot
establish a synapse of rage between sur-
plus wheat in America and famine in
India will never help us establish the
New Jerusalem; his place is where Dante
put him, in the lowest circle, getting
inspiration from Satan’s breech. The
first step toward a decent society is made
possible by a lively hatred of what-
ever defaces the human image.

The gifted novelist, Iris Murdoch, is
also a teacher of philosophy, and it is
with a peculiar grace that she reminds
us of the necessity for reasserting the
traditional moral and ethical bias of
libertarian socialism, and reincorpora-
ting it into the theory of reform. It is
vital to know what one wants in these

matters — if only to avoid the substi-
tution of non-human for human goals
that threatens whenever we begin to
deal in a practical way with this tough
world, and are tempted to make our
intruments our ends,

“Culture is Ordinary” is the title,
leitmotiv and conclusion of Raymond
Williams’ contribution to Conviction.
By implication, Mr. Williams is opposed
to the theory, advanced by an eminent
American teacher, that culture, sweet
and sustaining, has from Paleolithic
times to the present been the product

of the @ middle-cam bees in the Hive of

—

Sse

. ritellect. “The contra

{ wee

ry notion, culture
broad and general as the casing air,
is a more suitable diet for American
radicals. Contempt for the masses sorts
well with a society run by warlords,
plutocrats, or mandarins, but not with
a society avowedly egalitarian, such as
has been sketched in our own country,
and whose perfect likeness we trust some
day to see. Eliteism is mostly sham; in
the context of American manners, its
interpreters are part of that army of
couturiers and caterers whose mission
in life is to provide symbolic denials of
the quaint American faith that one man
is as good as another. Do we really
suppose that the ingenuous advertising
appeals to “those who can afford the
best”. are without social consequence?
That it can be a matter of indifference
if a cigarette manufacturer encloses
with his smokes an emetic little squib
suggesting that the lucky purchaser
is a member of a natural aristocracy
of birth and talent? These are outward

and visible signs to set apart those _

whose bank accounts are in a state of
grace, and what they import ultimately
is the rule of the financially bien pen-
sants. The assertion that the middle
class is the sole culture-bearing stratum
is intended to lend sanction and prescrip-
tive force to social caste. Mr. Williams
is right. Culture is ordinary.

FINALLY, Mervyn Jones argues that
the renunciation of war, so urgently com-
mended to us by nuclear physics, is
the sine qua non for the regeneration
of society. However, he is a_ pacifist
only in a Pickwickian sense, for he adds
that we “must seek to render powerless
all those persons and institutions which
hold for us no other promise than
death.” Just so. And if, by good luck
or good management, we escape atomic
destruction in the next few days,
months, or years, we should not forget
the system that orchestrated our lusts
and fears into a prepotent war machine,
and left our decent selves to languish.
In thinking about Conviction, and
the quality of social responsibility it
embodies, one cannot suppress the un-
happy. reflection that a comparable ef-
fort seems at this moment to be beyond
the power of Americans to achieve. But
surely we are that people of whom
Goethe wrote: “America, you are hap-
pier/ Than our old Continent;/ You
have no ruined towers/ And no un-
grateful rock.” That is, no crippling his-
tory of caste and class, no sree
substratum of necessary poverty.

beyond that, a program,
vital center for reform.

hat —
do we lack? The will, apparently. And
a patty a
2, ae ae a

THE TRADITION OF THE NEW. By
Harold Rosenberg. Horizon Press.
285 pp. $4.95.

Harold Clurman

THESE essays, which appeared separ-
ately during the past nineteen years in
several advanced literary periodicals,
deal with painting, poetry, politics and
sociology. Their collection under the
title The Tradition of the New is justi-
fied. They help toward an understand-
ing of our present cultural situation.

It is easy to say we are living in
chaos, but it does little good to say it.
Nor is there much point in bemoaning
the fact. One must experience it, strug-
gle with it, nearly succumb to it and in
some “crazy” way order it within one-
self. To do this one has to be a lucid
anarchist, a conscientious demon, a mys-
tic with a hard head.

This, after a fashion, describes Harold
Rosenberg. Numerous passages — will
strike some readers as obscure, but it is
not the book’s difficulty but its unity
and creative value which should be em-
phasized.

To perceive this unity I suggest that
the reader begin with the first two
papers on American painting and then
skip to the final piece called “The Org-
american Phantasy” which surveys the
findings set forth in such books as Ries-
man’s The Lonely Crowd, Spectorsky’s
The Exurbanites, Whyte’s The Organi-
ization Man.

“To be legitimate,” Rosenberg says,
“a style in art must connect itself with
a style outside art.” Our world is in-
creasingly depersonalized, a world in
which the individual is coaxed, flattered,
seduced, bamboozled and _ blackmailed
into transforming himself into a faceless,
tasteless, conscienceless instrument to
serve the requirements of a super-effi-
ciency that lacks true human purpose.
The scope of this regimentation is so ex-
tensive that everything — including the
details of our private lives — ends by
becoming a function of the process.

No wonder then that America leads
in what Rosenberg calls “action paint-
ing” and others call “abstract expres-
sionism” — one of the less publicized
forms of our flight from the machine in-
cubus outside. Of this new art Rosen-
berg says, “A painting that is an act is
inseparable from the biography of the
artist. . . . Anything is relevant to it.
Anything but art critic west) With
this painting “The Gres
Past and the Good Lif
become equally nil.”
gesticulated upon |

Through Art to Sanity

watched for what each novelty would
declare him and his art to be.” This
movement, “essentially religious” (in
a secular, extremely personal sense), is
one in which the artist must possess “the
force to refrain from settling anything.”

Rosenberg is in sympathy with this
art: he understands its sources and re-
lates to its impulse, but he is neither its
apologist nor its booster. With the
tricksters such art becomes little more
than “apocalyptic wallpaper.” Having
a genuine critical sense (though un-
fortunately he discusses no particular
artist) Rosenberg states that “The
American vanguard painter took to the
white expanse of the canvas as Mel-
ville’s Ishmael took to the sea.” This is
the rootless man’s adventure into chaos
to find what might be found there: es-
pecially what he seems wholly to have
lost — his identity.

This, if you will, is romanticism —
an extreme romanticism. For although
the romantics of yore were in rebellion
against societies which had ceased mak-
ing sense to them, they harbored the
enthusiastic belief that they knew what
would make sense. Our present-day
romantic is no longer sure of anything
except a mad awareness and need to
plunge into some realm — almost any
realm — away from the “air-conditioned
nightmare” he lives in.

In the light of all this one under-
stands Rosenberg’s politics, though they
are not explicitly stated, possibly not
even formed. (“The choice between bad
politics and no politics,” he pithily says,
“is a tragic choice — a kind of Hamlet
impasse that exists everywhere today.”)
The chapter on The Heroes of Marxist
Science is a brilliant caricature of the
Communist as a psychological type, a
variation of Rosenberg’s revulsion
against the regimented person in any
shape. The article on the ex-Communists
of the “guilty past” is a further sign of
Rosenberg’s independence of mind.

He boldly states the plight of art in
our time. “People don’t need works of
art any more for entertainment — there
are too many commodities more directly
designed for that purpose.” Art today
is a “disturbance and a risk” — which |

of its existence.

Rosenberg writes with the sensibili
of a poet coupled with the labyrinthin
logic of a cabalist versed in latter-day
science. This makes his prose uneven —
and occasionally opaque. But there is
spiritual sinew in it. If he seems “nega-_
tive,” his negations have a tonic and
liberating force. *

Vhe Hero

WARRIOR'S
Rochefort.

$3.75

REST... By
David McKay,

Christiane
214 pp.

Paul Lauter

ON. AUGUST 6, 1945, Jean-Renaud
Sarti, whose contemporaries thought him
sure to dazzle the world, found that
Colonel Tibbets had once for all beaten
him to it at Hiroshima. Seeing too well
in a world dazed by a bomb, Renaud
undertakes an alcoholic strike against
humanity for the right of oblivion. But
the only meaningful action mankind
leaves him is total inaction, and his boy-
cott can culminate only in an overdose
of barbiturates.

But since this is not Werther, the
story does not end there; rather, that
is where Christiane Rochefort’s War-
rior's Rest commences. For Renaud’s
luck is to be discovered in time by the
book’s narrator, Genevieve Le Theil,
to be desired by her, to be installed in
her bed. Ensconced like one of Beckett’s
bums in his primordial sanctuary, he
campaigns to revenge himself, in de-
grading her, upon all the demons of
bourgeois hypocrisy that torment him.
He has no stronger allies than her
ennui or curiosity or lust, which rouse
formerly prim Genevieve to claim this
“dead” man for an object of love—of
ideal love, to be sure, of True Romance
love-at-first-sight. His gaff is finally too
much for her tubercular constitution;
desperate and beaten, she is carried off
to Assy by her guardian angel doctor
to listen in the tenderness of the nurses’
voices for her approaching death.

.But since this is not Clarissa Harlowe,
the story does not end there either; for
now is Renaud’s opportunity to return
the favor of salvation. Discovering his
treasured isolation pierced by a perverse
need for Genevieve, he comes to her
bedside to restore her will to live. The
second cycle of contention begins in
Genevieve’s well-meaning attempt, which
springs from earlier plans to serve needy
children, to reclaim Renaud to society,
to “success.” Renaud dominates their
new habitat by again refusing to do
anything at all.

But with Genevieve’s goal seemingly
in sight, Renaud discovers in the fairy-
land Cote d’Azur his personal Garden,
and within it an alter-ego, Rafaele. His
chrysalis and alcohélism fall away as
he flits with her into a_prelapsarian

_ childhood of joy and creativity, all the

PAUL LAUTER teaches English at the

University | of M assachusetts.

of Nothing Hi

‘ x Serer, Mae

further beyond Genevieve’s comprehen-
sion for her own seriously adult presence
in it. Discovering that this transformed
Renaud is not her Renaud, but Ra-
faele’s, Genevieve sets out to reclaim
him. To redeem him from death to life,
as she likes to think of it, she must
mobilize the very demons she has been
trying to exorcise—alcohol, promiscuity,
disease.

HER success measures the urban and
intellectual worlds’ conspiracy against
children and Gardens; and besides, as
Renaud says, it is “too late for the
Golden Age”—for he himself has lost,
if it ever was really available to him
or to anyone, the total confidence of
freedom necessary for remaining an
“idealist in a vacuum.” By now des-
perately in need of chains, Renaud fi-
nally seizes the opportunity of bowing
into matrimony before the classic gam-
bit—pregnancy—which Genevieve stead-
fastly refuses to use.

But since this is not Ten Nights in a
Barroom, Miss Rochefort’s novel does
not end in visions of felicity; rather in
ironic qualification of Geneviéve’s “suc-
cess,” the success of the middle-class
world, in domesticating the spirit of life
and poetry. For to secure Renaud’s sur-
render to “salvation,” to the “cure,”

Here

Here, where we pick up wind in shells,
are lapping laces, waterswells,

moss, foam, hermits’ houses

in which they masquerade as snails.

Tentacled anemones

pretending to be flowers in pools,
touched, clutch inward into balls
digesting enemies.

Gulls are gone to gleaming meals—
underneath these indigos

jellyfish with stinging veils

glitter among grotesqueries

of weeds and things that look like weeds;
something quick eats something else,
something fortressed under coral,
hungering, has eyes.

Here are cormorants’ sticklike tracks
and shapes of rancor on the rocks,
a reek, as much of death as salt,
ghost wood and wood that rots;

here, through bone and claw, we stroll
where horror crawls in pearl
and flaming rainbows beautily —

a cold and wordless world. —
Hanoi, Wirt |

i 4 i
“Ae f

Jat PS §.
Ral ed an y in B ¢

5 ae ; * oe ee vie Sega
in short, to her, Genevieve must with

hardly a whimper compromise the long-
treasured claims to philanthropy and
inner innocence which endear her to
us. Worse, in dissolving Renaud’s frag-
mentary visions of glory, all the while
consciously attempting to preserve them,
she also destroys the very latest—if
the shabbiest—Don Quixote.

These ironies are brought home force-
fully to us by Miss Rochefort’s narra-
tive technique. Most twentieth-century
novelists writing about the classic mod-
ern subject—the dilemma of the artist
or idealist in a bourgeois culture—
naturally choose as protagonist, fre-
quently as narrator, the artist himself,
or his representative. Thus in the first
generation—Joyce, Mann, Proust—the
hero was the artist; and in the second—
Faulkner, Silone, Greene—the hero be-
comes what R. W. B. Lewis calls a
“Picaresque Saint.” But such an ap-
proach requires that the hero believe
in engagement, and that he create or
act on that belief; the novel, by its
very existence, symbolically sustains the
validity of its subject. For the genera-
tion of “seedy solipsists” like Jean-Re-
naud Sarti—whose name itself is a
parody of the Existentialist Commis-
sar’s—the existential leap into action
is absurd and art shrinks to a page-
long “novel” announcing one’s resigna-
tion from mankind. Thus, since the re-
sponse of the most sensitive individual
—the artist—to his world remains the
subject, the role of protagonist and of
narrator must be shifted to an observer
of those responses. Miss Rochefort
brilliantly capitalizes on this necessity
by making her narrator a representative
bourgeoise whose very lack of under-
standing dramatizes what the artist is
up against, and whose insight at the_
very last, the insight which produced
the book, represents the artist’s odd
success in impregnating a sterile culture.

A FURTHER advantage of Miss Roche-
fort’s narrative technique is its ability
to trap our sympathies. One of the
major problems with the artist-as-hero
is that as society’s spreading uniformity
forces him into radical alienation, he
has become increasingly repulsive to
the audience—compare Tonio Kroger
and Humbert Humbert, for example.
Though Renaud may have our sym-
pathy, he defies empathy. But we give
ourselves to Genevieve, even in her
ignorance and especially in her whole-
some aspirations. For, in our work and
hopes, in our participation in society, we
are all Genevieves; and it is her story,
not Renaud’s, that is really our own,

Lowell Bair’s translation, unfortu- |

ns ¥ ls add me -

ei eee el . , ¥ . 3

ately, makes Geneviéve’s story all too
bourgeois by rendering Miss Rochefort’s
vivid ribaldry in technical common-
places. But if the vitality of its lan-
guage does not survive Americanization,
Warrior's Rest still remains in symbolic
action and in technique the richest of
the fine French novels recently trans-
lated. For Miss Rochefort provides us
with more than adolescent “experience,”

more than catalogues of trivia, more
than astral whispers hinting the un-
knowableness of whisper and whisperer.
Retaining the advantages of traditional
form and technique, yet developing a
terribly modern dilemma, Miss Roche-
fort’s book. looks forward, not to the
dead end of the novel, but to its con-
tinued extension as our most vital form
of social criticism,

The Law We Feel

LAW AS LARGE AS LIFE. By Charles
P. Curtis, Simon & Schuster. 224 pp.
$3.50.

Curtis Bok
THIS FINE little book, dedicated to

Learned Hand, comprises the three lec-
tures delivered by Mr. Curtis at Boston
University in the Caspar G, Bacon
Lecture series in 1958.

Its subtitle is: “a natural law for to-
day, and the Supreme Court as its
prophet.” The author says that the
current natural law is both modern and
mundane and is what judges must look
to when positive law, being the book
that binds them, falls short and must be
seen beyond for completion of decision.
To lighten the difficulty of definition
Mr. Curtis suggests Cardozo’s basic
principles implicit in the concept of
ordered liberty; Fuller’s fundamental
rules that make law possible; Wyzan-
ski’s core of values characteristic of our
particular civilization; Lippmann’s “pub-
lic philosophy”; Wright’s “consensus.”
He sets out four field-marks by which
to recognize the natural-law component
in a case: one, generality of expression
in the use of such words as fair, just,
reasonable, due and equal; another, the
layman’s feeling that perhaps he. can
tell his lawyer as much about the law
of the case as the lawyer can tell him;
third, a lawyer’s suspicion that a jury
could decide the case better than a
judge; last and perhaps best, the in-
effectiveness or needlessness of punish-
ment, penalty, or force to control the
matter. Natural law resides in the
troublesome feeling that you know more
law than you know you know, for as
Holmes said: “Judges know how to de-
cide a good deal sooner than they know
why.”

There are some questions that can-

CURTIS BOK is a Justice of the Su-
preme Court of Pennsylvania, and the
author of Star Wormwood, I, Too, Nico-
demus and Backbone of ‘the Hebi
(Alfred A. Knopf).

not legally be answered except by in-
voking or denying a divine law, such
as: is euthanasia to be regarded simply
as murder? What exactly is wrong
about contraception? Why may not a
woman conceive by artificial insemi-
nation?

Such considerations pose the crucial
question: how much of the eae in
natural law should be added to the “is”
of positive law?

The most important thing about
modern natural law is that it is common
knowledge, and it is not absolute. Natur-
al law must be provisional and tentative.
Its prime example, with all the field-
marks, is Brown v. The School Board,
the segregation case. This is closely
followed by Louisiana v. Resweber, the
case of Willie Francis, the boy upon
whom electricity failed to work the
first time and who provided the di-
lemma typical of natural law, whether
the state could try to execute him a
second time. Even earlier, the Supreme
Court had flung wide the gates of
welcome to natural law in International
Shoe Co. v. Washington, when it held
that the question of civil jurisdiction
over a non-resident person or corpora-
tion depended on “traditional notions
of fair play and substantial justice.”

Mr. Curtis states that the Court is
articulating a modern code of natural
law for the state courts based on the
Fourteenth Amendment standing alone
and undiluted by the First or anyother.
He asks his readers to choose between
this version and that of the Bill of
Rights, which Justice Black espouses
because he prefers the natural law of
the Declaration of Independence. To
make a dangerous generalization, the
difference is between the absolute free-
doms of the Bill of Rights as written and
the relative freedom, under the “due
process” clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment, to interpret the Constitu-
tion in the changing light of the times.

In standing pre-eminent! for free
thought and speech under e unrestrict-
ed guarantee of the First” mendment

;
A
a

cpeynensper ome aamece nasa aanoteecccenneeese te

Truman-
ac Arthur

CONTROVERSY
AND THE
KOREAN WAR

by John W. Spanier

The Truman-MacArthur dispute
was one of history’s dramatic
highspots. Now, in the perspec-
tive of eight years, it stands re-
vealed also as the most serious
constitutional crisis of our time.
Here, step by step, is the com-
plete story of this epic struggle.
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and for a certain dignified irreverence
for the past, Black equates very closely
with Jefferson.

The Court operates under the Con-
stitutional provision that its jurisdiction
is subject to Congressional regulation, a
device that Congress does not choose to
use but could do at any time. This
leaves the Court free to act as it is now
acting, with intellectual judicial in-
dependence but as a third legislative
chamber subject to correction. The re-
sult is a new concept of law: no longer
Coke’s “knowne certaintie” but the real-
ization that the law doesn’t have all
the answers.

This sums up the book’s argument for
the existence of a modern natural law.

I FIND it a provocative way of talking
to law students without specially press-
ing conclusions upon them. The author
seems to be on the libertarian side when
he says that it is hard to regard the
domain of natural law as a government
of laws and not of men. The sonorous
nonsense that law is somehow super-
human bears setting right whenever it
rears its head, and the author’s satisfy-
ing correction comes as close to a posi-
tive conclusion as anything in the book.
The other statement that approaches
conclusive clarity occurs when he says
that very reluctantly he leaves our natur-
al law to take its chances without a
national prophet. Presumably Congress
should be the prophet and presumably
the Court should not act as a_ third
legislative chamber. Mr. Curtis pushes
forward Judge Hand to provide the
reason, the Judge being willing to “take
our chances that such Constitutional
restraints as already exist may not suf-
ficiently arrest the recklessness of pop-
ular assemblies.”

Since one of the restraints is the qual-
ity of the judicial mind, the book’s most
important contribution to me as a judge
is its treatment of the “Society of Job-
bists,” a phrase invented by Holmes to
describe the judicial process at its best.
No one can improve on either of its
Presidents, Holmes and Hand, in the
acute articulation of a thought, and I
shall not try. Hand speaks disparagingly
of “chronic moral exaltation,” and
Holmes says flatly that the Society “is
a club for the abolition of altruism as a
requirement of salvation.” He adds, in a
letter to Wu, that the members “were
free to be egotists or altruists on the
usual Saturday half-holiday provided
they were neither while on the job. Their
job is their contribution to the general
welfare, and when a man is on that, he
will do better the less he thinks either
of himself or his neighbors, and the more

he puts all his energy into the problem
he has to solve.” Robin Hood, Mr.
Curtis avers, would fail to qualify for
membership on both counts.

I doubt my right as a reviewer to in-
trude my personal opinion unduly, but
as I am a judge in constant need of the
Bar’s reaction to the practice of judg-
ment and in awe of the Bar’s shyness in
expressing it, I rather wish that Mr.
Curtis had plumped a bit more steeply
either for the natural law of ‘due pro-
cess as mankind currently feels it or for
the Bill of Rights as the Founders felt
them. One moves in a current world,
causing eddies merely by the move-
ments of existence, and it is impossible
to say that these should go entirely un-
guarded. The smaller and more mechan-
ized the movements the greater the need
for regulation. But one is haunted on the
Bench by the need for the great rights
of man to be kept lighted and undiluted,
and in the cold light of morning, I sus-
pect, history will plump for the Bill of
Rights.

I cannot feel it trite to pose quality
and to insist upon it, and either process
serves the country well if a Court of
Jobbists, working under Congress’ im-
minent corrective, applies the Constitu-
tion. Lawyers may ask for more meat
than students, and it is the danger of
an expositional but inconclusive book
that its final message will add up to a
plea for a virtue instead of for a legal
position. But Mr. Curtis wrote for
students, and it can be said with some
justice that salvation lies not in forming
better answers but in asking ever bet-
ter questions.

THEATRE

Harold Clurman

I SEEM to have developed a condi-
tioned reflex in the theatre: every time
I see a Chekhov play — almost from
the moment the curtain rises — I sense
tears welling up within me.

The fact that a play makes me cry
(or laugh) is no sign that it is ‘good.
IT am not particularly lachrymose, but
I have wept at some fairly bad plays,
as I have occasionally laughed at pretty
cheesy comedies.

So when I say that the latest produc-
tion of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters
(4th St. Theatre), a play I have seen
more often than any other in the modern
repertory, made me cry, | do not offer
it as proof that it is a great play. It
simply means that, apart from its other

distinctions, it is a play which embodies |

Yee Vinge Ve |
. INATHI

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et ane ee

a quality that I always find very mov-
ing: goodness.

Several of the people in The Three
Sisters are fools, one is a silly wretch,
another irresponsible, still another a
selfish hussy. But it is part of Chekhov’s
genius to make us feel — without in-
dulging in the deplorable theatrical de-
vice called “gaining sympathy for a
character” — that all his people, how-
soever flawed, are entirely human.
Which means, because Chekhov is Chek-
hov, that they are essentially good.

To be human in the Chekhovian sense
is to desire happiness, to crave love, to
will kindness, to aspire toward an ex-
tension of one’s faculties — and to be
inadequate in all these respects. In one
of his short stories a peasant says “A
bird is given not four wings but two
because it is able to fly with two; and
so man is not permitted to know every-
thing but only a half or a quarter. As
much as he needs to know in order to
live.”

A positive character in Chekhov is one
in whom the will to strengthen his
“wings” is still vibrant. The Prozoroff
sisters are the three purest examples—the
archetypes—of this Chekhovian ideal-
ism. They want to go to Moscow —
another character remarks in passing
that if they lived in Moscow they would
not “notice” it — but the Moscow they
long for is not a city; it is an atmos-
phere in which they could spread their
wings and fly nearer to the high goal
which it is the nature of humankind to
yearn for. The drama of their failure to
make even the first step on the road to
this goal is as terrible as, and far more
convincing than, anything in the work
of our contemporary dramatic pessimists
whose theatre imagination is not rooted
in common reality but in intellectualized
concepts.

What makes Chekhov inspiring in con-
trast to these other playwrights is that
the frustration in his plays — too fre-
quently harped on in popular criticism
— is secondary to the fundamental
human impulses which make _ their
frustration poignant instead of depress-
ing.

The production of The Three Sisters
at the 4th St. is decent. The company
which plays in it is on the whole intel-
ligent, sensitive and loyal to the Chek-
hovian vein. If you have never seen
the play, you are a retarded theatre-
goer. To those who have seen it before,
I might point out that it is always
advisable to revisit a masterpiece.

A PARISIAN critic, quoted in the pro-

gram of An Evening with Yves Mon-
tand (Henry Miller Theatre), praises
this French night club singer and actor

October 10, 1959

for his “soul.” I should have said
health.
Montand looks strong, sings true,

works meticulously. He is virile with-
out ostentation and gives every evi-
dence of being that rare bird, a normal
person. He is “proletarian” without
crudity, a city fellow without shabbi-
ness, a popular entertainer without
cheapness. He is capable of the imagina-
tion required for social sympathy, as is
witnessed by his song, in flamenco style,
addressed to the Spaniard in exile. All
this is based on a fundamental attribute:
his personal character and professional
method express an attitude voiced in one
of his songs, Les Petits Riens Quotidiens
(The Little Daily Nothings) in which he
celebrates his love for the inconspicuous

pleasures of everyday living: moments of
work, a passing smile, a flower, a new
necktie, a bright day, a flirtation and any-
thing else you may like. This senti-
ment represents an essential wisdom
— without which nothing can ever be
right.

Montand is not “sensational”: he is
simply sound. He has real gifts as an
actor; he is theatrically most effective
when he impersonates rather than when
he addresses us as himself. His contri-
bution—appreciated all over the world—
is that he emerges from the noisome
clamor of everything that surrounds us
everywhere, not as a freak of glamour
or special accomplishment, but as a
whole man. In this he satisfies one of
our real needs.

ARCHITECTURE

Walter McQuade

THE LAST TIME you. picked up a
prescription for pills at your friendly
corner drugstore, did you notice the
container—the capsule that held the
capsule that held relief? Probably it
was of plastic, of a pleasant, waxy color.
The top fitted the neck easily, neatly,
with a real craftsman-like intimacy. It
snikked closed, without threading. Few
common items in our civilization are
so well made, such a good match to
their contents. Architects wish their
buildings could be so competent, fitting
serenely without fuss or fancy connec-
tions.

The design show currently occupying
the main floor of the Museum of Mod-
ern Art is an attempt to display this
new industrial exquisiteness in packag-
ing, and to make an aesthetic claim for
it. To connect with the past, the show

begins with some beautiful, elderly con-
tainers: a Swiss wheat bag of 1813 which
is hung like a heraldic banner, the inci-
dental wood boxes for some Japanese
pottery, a reed basket from Brazil which
once held melons, and a pre-Columbian
reed manioc container, whatever that is.
In each case the package presumably
was more beautiful than its contents.
Anyway, the wrapping wound up at 11
West 53 Street and the merchandise
did not. Also shown is a large picture
of an egg in its package, the shell, and
some peas in their pod.

After this fond backward look at
craft and nature, the show moves on
to some contemporary containers,
which, discarded, will be left to mark us
when we are gone, like the pipes and
walking sticks in a dead man’s study,
or—more accurately in this case—like

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net. The show treats both disposable
and re-usable packages, including a very
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something incomplete,” even untrue,
about this show, although I felt a little
unfair toward the museum when [I real-
ized what it was.

Conventionally, a museum does not
satirize, although it may hang paint-
ings or show films that do. Yet there
are some things that it seems incorrect
to display cold, however stylishly they
are arranged. The subject of packaging
can hardly avoid some satire if it wants
to be complete. Like other popular arts
in our country, some of its biggest
work-a-day successes are in reality grave
burlesques; some of these might have
been displayed to put the subject in
perspective.

For example, a friend of mine re-
cently was walking along a Manhattan
street when something lodged in one
of his eyes. He couldn’t get it out and
at length. groped his way tearfully into
an eye specialist’s on Madison Avenue.
The doctor rotated his bright lights,
tried to find the irritating particle,
failed, but then prescribed a soothant
(if this isn’t a word, it will be one soon,
like lubritorium).

The drug clerk wrapped the package
—containing a solution known as arti-
ficial tears—in brown paper as my friend
wept genuinely over him. The sufferer
then paid his dollar, took the package
and stumbled out toward his office,
stripping the paper off on the way.
When he got the paper off there was a
cardboard carton, sealed; inside that
was a plastic cylinder with a top to
fumble off, just the thing to display
a single mountain bud in; inside that
was a complicated squeeze container,
also plastic, which was accompanied by
instructions for opening which, this man
said, were a little hard to read without
perfect sight.

What I am driving at is this: if early
in the museum display there should be
a picture of some peas in a pod, should
there not be, toward the end, some to-
matoes or apples in form-fitting plastic
containers?

This show has a terribly solemn air,
also, because it is a somewhat inhuman
show, concerned little with the graphic
arts, much with mechanical design. It
is the squeeze tube that interests the
accumulators of these items, not the
label on it. Dominating the floor, for
example, is a great black whale of a
container, a leather-like bladder fully

should, have: been left. out.

a ‘ee ae rs ae ee ‘wr
twenty-four feet long which holds

twenty tons of fluid, the biggest wine
skin in the world, surely. When out of

use it can be rolled up and stored (al-

% ry Lys es

though there is no container shown to
store it in). And then there are many
ingenious. extrusions, castings, foils,
sheet and foamed plastics, expanded
papers, canvas, glass and even leathers.
But there are only one or two of those
ordinary paper cartons, which, decorated
and designed to the hilt, still bring us
most of the goods we consume. (There is
no flip-top cigarette box, a fascinating
piece of paper to unfold, incidentally, if

-you want: to take your mind off lung

cancer.)

Perhaps it is true that most com-
mercial art is dull these days, and
The peaks
reached a few years ago by advertising
designers and typographers like Paul
Rand have become too easily accessible
and have been flattened out. Perhaps,
also, the leading modern artists—the
De Koonings and Motherwells—are too
elusive or subjective to be useful as
inspiration for advertising adaptation,
unlike Chagall, Miro, etc. Maybe we
should search more deeply for the sub-
jective in these packages, too—or may-
be the mass subjective is something that
no longer belongs to museums or even
agency art directors, but only to the
motivational researchers.

ONE point along this line which the
show did not make very. clear is that
sensuality is not a victim of the plastic
revolution in handwares. The crowd at
the museum was particularly eager to
handle the displays, especially those in
the pharmaceutical field: gleaming,
perfect little containers, bottles in
bright chemical colors, pill boxes and
endless ribbons of plastic with pillows
of shampoo embedded in them, like
amber caught in plastic. A pair of
museum guards were kept busy mur-
muring, “Please do not touch.” Not
even the lordly leather briefcase from
Mark Cross in the same room, quite a
sensuous package, it would seem, at-
tracted the forbidden caresses that were
lavished on the plastics and foils. ‘These
glitter; they are numerous, real, ours
— brand new relics hallowed by the
museum. Touch them and find relief.

The Nation

Crossword Puzzle No. 837

By FRANK W. LEWIS

_
~~

22
23
25
26

Where to put an association with
Greenwich as an interim measure?
(2,3, 8)

Turn aside in the inside, via tenuous
methods. (7)

Farewell Leicester Square style. (7)
Cooked and peeled with the swell-
ing inside. (9)

The passage of one American is the
French equivalent. (5)

It’s natural to find it dressed like a
cardinal around the capital of Bo-
livia. (6)

Castro might be in a state of sin,
but not with faithful followers! (8)
a or Bing should be rather close!
8)

Makes a point solid and liquid, for
example. (6)

Give me a drink for the general! (5)
Frank? Certainly not! (9)

Study with borders in red. (7)
They might also expect their board
aa a reputedly vicious sound.
Rent’s partly an excuse for how a
poor liar acts. (13)

DOWN:
Sir ae Porter was asked “What
)

3 and 9 down Hard hit bounders’ boss?

(4, 4, 5,2, 4)

isis.

Tee |
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5 Giving in 4? (9)

6 One might see him where nursery

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7 Where the wild goose hides? (5, 4) Esglish translation. Each issue con-
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OCTOBER 17, 1959 . . 25¢

The
SEVENTH EXECUTIO
of
CARYL CHESSMAN

. One Man’s Eleven-Year Fight For Justice

by Gene Marine

LETTERS

Is He Angry?

Dear Sirs: It was disappointing to find
Mr. Hatch’s review of the film of Look
Back in Anger |The Nation, Oct. 3]
to be a restatement of the confused and
irritable reactions that so many respect-
able critics expressed toward Mr. Os-
borne’s play. ...

Opinions may vary as to the changes
wrought in filming, but if, as I believe
to be the case, Look Back in Anger in
both forms deserves consideration as
an important artistic achievement, a
comparison seems called for. Of particu-
lar interest are the film’s excision of
much of the marvelously offensive politi-
cal and theological dialogue of the origi-
nal, the addition of an incident involving
racial discrimination (which effectively
places Jimmy Porter’s anger in a social
context and to some extent clarifies
its motivation and meaning) and the
director’s semi-successful attempt to
utilize film techniques to convey visual-
ly, rather than by Osborne’s dialogue,
the dominant theme of disgust with
well-faring purposelessness and stupidity.

The review does, however, illustrate
a common American attitude toward
the play. In its excited denunciation of
the reality of the “Angry” character
and in its excessive concern with the
sexual motivation of the hero, it testi-
fies to the power of Jimmy Porter to
undermine easy liberal complacency,
and manifests the national determination
to medicate out of existence the human
symptoms of social sensitivity; it is
quick to recognize in the character of
Gary the silence and _ pliability that
mark the current version of the com-
passion-deserving man, but cries out
defensively against genuine protest.

Pau BresLow
New York City

Or Merely Noisy?

I’m sorry if I sounded irritable, but
T cannot agree that I am _ confused.
Protest is now in such short supply
that there is a temptation to cheer any-
one who breaks the dinnerware without
asking what evils he is protesting. (See
Harold Clurman’s review of The Gang’s
All Here, page 239, this issue.) Jim-
my Porter is not at odds with society;
he is at odds with his mother-in-law.
He is not angry, he is hysterical; and
what he cannot stand is to have his
tantrums scorned. I doubt that his de-
fense of the Indian peddler does much

“place his anger in a social context”;

he drops it as soon as it has given
him a chance to let off steam. If it is
held that Osborne’s play shows how so-
ciety drives sensitive men out of their
minds, then where does it describe how
society did that to Porter? I mentioned
his sexuality because the picture men-
tions it in almost every scene; he is
obsessed and terrified by sex, and there
are hints from his childhood to explain
the phobia. But no one alleges that
the play is concerned with mental ill-
ness. I do not think that I am defensive
in the presence of protest, but neither
will I welcome its counterfeit. Will some-
one who thinks that Look Back in Anger
is an important social document say
what evils are exposed when Jimmy
Porter blows his trumpet or beats his
women? There is no past or future,
rhyme or reason, to Porter’s protest and
that, I think, is why he weighs no more
than the sum of his symptoms.
Rogserr Harcu

Auto As Publie Utility
Dear Sirs: Professor Robert P. Weeks

makes the following statement in his
article, “Detroit Discovers the Con-
sumer” in the September 19 issue:

GM’s Peter Kyropoulos regards the
auto industry as a public utility whose
products will come under some sort
of federal supervision as surely as
the railroads did.

Most certainly, I made no such state-
ment to Professor Weeks. I do recall
his asking me a question about railroads
in the over-all transportation picture,
and I believe I pointed out their un-
enviable position as a public utility.

I am at a loss to know how Professor
Weeks could have attributed such an
expression to me on the basis of anything
I said to him in the course of our tele-
phone conversation of some weeks ago.
Not only do I not hold such views, but
am personally convinced that “federal
supervision” over the auto industry—or
any other competitive industry, for that
matter—would be a calamity from the
standpoint of the American consumer.

Prrer Kyropoutos
Technical Director, G.M. Styling
Warren, Mich.

Dear Sirs: I based the statement I at-
tributed to Mr. Kyropoulos on notes I
carefully took while he spoke to me.
The relevant section of my notes re-
cording his remarks reads:

Auto ind (industry) pub_ utility
today. Like RR’s 50 yrs. ago. Trend
is to interference via agency like ICC.
In transforming his remarks from a

direct quote to an indirect one, I follow-

ed the journalisti¢ convention . of ‘sub-
stituting a neutral term (supervision)
for a loaded one (interference).
In translating his “trend” to “surely”
I may have been guilty of making federal
supervision seem to be more of a sure
thing than the word “trend” suggests.
However,. Mr. Kyropoulos’ describing
the auto industry as a public utility
and, moreover, likening it to the rail-
roads fifty years ago (which was en-
tirely his idea, by the way) justified,
I felt, my use of “surely” in preference
to the weaker, vaguer “trend.”
Rosert P. WEEKs
Ann Arbor, Mich.

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
221 @

ARTICLES
223 '@ New Yardstick for 1960’s
Hopefuls
by ROBERT G. SPIVACK
226 '@ The Seventh Execution of Caryl
Chessman: One Man’s Eleven-
Year Fight for Justice
by GENE MARINE
BOOKS AND THE ARTS
234'@ Joyce: Portrait Without Irony
by DAVID H. GRUUNE
235 @ Gentle Knife
by ROBERT HATCH
236 'e The Monster and the Mirror
by GHORGE A. SILVER
236 @ Have We Been Americanized ?
by ORDSTH IF. PUCCIANI
238 '@ Inside Athens (poem)
by H. J. GOTTLIEB
239 @ Theatre
by HAROLD CLURMAN
240 @ Art
by FAIRFIELD PORTER
Crossword Puzzle (opp. 240)
by PRANK W. LEWIS
AU
=
= Goorge G, Wirstein, Publisher
= Curey McWilliams, Wditor
= Victor H, Bernstein, Managing Wditor
Robert Flatch, Books and the Arts
Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art

M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, MWuropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager

The Nation, Oct. 17, 1959. Vol. 189, No. 12
The Nation published weekly (except for omis-
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A, by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
New York 14, N. Y. Second class postage paid
at New York, N. Y.

Subscription Price Domestic-—One yeat $8, Two
years $14, Three Yearg $20. Additional postage
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Change of Address: Three weeks’ notice is re-
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Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed
in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book
Review Digest, Index to Labor Articles, Publie
Affairs, Information Service,

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NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1959

VOLUME 189, No. 12

EDITORIALS a

Woes of Space

If Congress were in session, the Soviet feat of looping
an instrumented rocket around the moon would be
greeted by the usual attacks on “budgeteers” and calls
for a “crash” program of spending in space. Actually,
much of our space spending has been of the crash
variety in the literal sense: it has been precipitate, and
it has failed to achieve its objectives.

But it is worth mvestigating, at least, whether perhaps
the Soviets know more about setting up an effective
technological bureaucracy than we do. This has little
or nothing to do with their lack of democracy or our
devotion to it. In the last analysis, all industrial organ-
ization is authoritarian: orders must be given, however
politely, and obeyed in accordance with a chain of
command. Like sensible businessmen beset by competi-
tion, we should study the techniques of our competitor,
the more assiduously since he is ahead for the time
being. We should also look for the faults im ourselves,
and some of these are so obvious that a dispassionate
eye can scarcely overlook them. The basic trouble in
our space adventure has been the destructive rivalry
among the military services and the unfitness of any
of them to assume a role for which they were never
intended. The Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) was established to coordinate the develop-
ment efforts of the services in the space field. It might
have succeeded (it was not given time enough even to
fail decisively) if the Air Force had not been bent on
pre-empting the field for itself. The ARPA has been
more or less emasculated by the Department of Defense
decision to turn over to the Air Force primary responsi-
bility for the development, production and launching
of space boosters (rockets for getting a vehicle off the
ground) and associated equipment. This looks like the
beginning of the end for the ARPA. But, on the basis
of past performance, the assignment of greater space
powers to the Air Force is not a cause for rejoicing.
The Air Force is the most glamorous, aggressive and
greedy of the services, but the Army Ballistic Missile

Agency (ABMA), for one, has on the whole done a _

better job with its facilities than the Air Force. The
Air Force’s next move may k : Me try to take over the

n these. activities

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the Russian manner? We already have the nucleus of
such a body, the National Aeronautics and Space Ad-
ministration, but it has no authority. The Department
of Defense would be better advised to look into the
pros and cons of this proposal (which is neither new
nor’ original) instead of giving the Air Force the key
to the solar system.

Unfair, Inept and Mischievous ;

If the President invokes Taft-Hartley in the steel
strike, as seems likely, the unfairness of the law and
the inappropriateness of its, key procedures will. be
demonstrated once again. Only now, with excess inven-
tories dwindling, are the pressures of the strike being:
felt on. the industry side. Intervention at this time and
under these circumstances, therefore, can hardly fail to
weaken. the position of. the striking union. But unfair-
ness aside, the remedy is inappropriate. There is no need
for fact-finding. The facts are known; the public has
been thoroughly briefed on the issues. And should
production be resumed in the wake of. an injunction,
the pressures on the industry to settle will be tem-
porarily removed. The end result of an injunction
might, therefore, be the “last offer” ballot provided
by the Act. But what happens then? “With the dispute
completely deadlocked by the vote,” observes Prince-
ton’s Dr. Richard A. Lester in a letter to The New York
Times (October 4), “the injunction is lifted, permitting
a strike that allegedly imperils the nation’s health and
safety to be resumed. Then, if necessary, the whole
matter is submitted to Congress for a (presumably polit-
ical) settlement.” Here, then, is the basic weakness of
Taft-Hartley: it is ill-conceived from the point of view.
of bringing about early settlements of strikes that, a
prolonged, might endanger the nation’s economy. In-
vocation of Taft-Hartley in the steel strike will confi i:
organized labor’s contention that the procedures of the
act are unfair, inept and mischievous. nt

er counsel prevailed and only a fact-finding commis-
sion was sent. It now appears that there are no facts
to find and Habib Bourguiba, Jr., one of the delegates,
has quit the commission. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
headlines the story “Laotian Charges of Aggression
Folding Up; Real Story Political.” A struggle is going
on for control of the country, but it is predominantly,
if not entirely, an internal affair. With little other than
American support, the Royal Laotian Government de-
cided to suppress its dissident minorities by embarking
on a tough anti-Communist line and blaming the en-
suing shooting on North Vietnam and Communist
China. Failing to get the upper hand in the skirmishes

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i which took place, the royal highbinders appealed to
4 the U.N., where Uncle Sam was sure to give a sympa-
Avie thetic ear and an automatic majority.

oe This might all be regarded as comedy calculated to
Rie enliven the international scene, but the sinister part of
ie" the affair is the automatic response of the American
ie press and radio whenever the bloody shirt of anti-
4 communism is waved. The latest report of The New
‘iad York Times, buried inside and describing the collapse
ey of the Laotian charges, was only a few paragraphs.
he A few weeks ago even the sober Times was devoting

Me” banner headlines and tons of newsprint to this synthetic
i war scare. These wild-eyed, frenzied build-ups, founded
on nothing, may never lead us into an actual world war,
but, if so, it will be no thanks to the State Department
Pe or—it would seem—to the C.I.A.

Come On In, the Water’s Fine

We commend to the public, and more particularly to
i the members of the American Newspaper Publishers
Association, two articles by Mrs. Dorothy Schiff, pub-
i lisher of the New York Post, entitled “My Secret Life
F with J. Edgar Hoover.” The articles serve as an intro-
duction to a series on the FBI and its Director which
is currently appearing in the Post — almost a year
to the day since the series was originally announced.
Mrs. Schiff offers evidence to prove that J. Edgar
Hoover sought, through an intermediary who was an
advertiser in the Post, to suppress the series. It is also
charged that FBI investigators called at the office of
the New York Newspaper Guild, when the series was
first announced, seeking information about one of the
reporters assigned to the story. The implications of
_ these statements should be of vital concern to every
member of the ANPA — and while editorial anvils
fe yet ring with denunciations of this crass attempt

o silence a publisher through advertising pressure,
Be date the silence has been deafening.

Dic dlessaniesiétes aside, the Post, its publisher, editor

_ and reporters, will escape unscathed in printing its
iy series. In fairness to Mr. Hoover we would like to make

pt ue ate
we eh 2S es

_ However, we confidently predict that, some minor.

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it a matter of record that The Nation suffered no known
penalties, retaliations or reprisals as a consequence of
having demonstrated, a year ago, that the FBI and its
chief were legitimate subjects for a journal of opinion.
True, some friends of Mr. Hoover denounced us (there
was a tell-tale similarity to the denunciations), but
these same professional screamers have denounced us
before. And so we say to the lords of the American
press, come on in, the water’s fine. The public is genuine-
ly interested in Mr. Hoover and the work of the FBI
and the press should gratify this quite legitimate
curiosity. It can be done with impunity.

The Chessman Case
With the publication of Fred J. Cook’s article “Does

the Death Sentence Prevent Crime?” in our issue of
March 10, 1956, The Nation resumed a campaign
against the death penalty which we do not intend to
abandon until substantial progress has been made
toward the abolition of this monstrous penalty. As
part of this campaign, most of this issue has been de-
voted to an analysis of the Chessman case — not
because we are convinced of the defendant’s innocence,
but because the facts vividly illustrate a prime aspect
of the case against capital punishment. The best of
legal systems can occasionally break down; now and
then the processes of such a system can become hope-
lessly snarled. This is what happened in the Chessman
case. For eleven years, law-enforcement agencies played
a cat-and-mouse game with Chessman which resulted
in his being sentenced to death not once but seven
times, a state of affairs that, under any reckoning, con-
stitutes cruel and inhuman punishment. California’s
Governor Edmund G. Brown should not permit this
latest sentence to be executed on October 23.

Live Now, Pay Later

The credit-card economy has been carried to its
apogee by a young inventor who, until he conceived
his brilliant idea, was a $55-a-week clerk in the opu-
lent city of New York. Only nineteen, the unknown
drudge ran $50 in original capital into a glorious $10,000
whirl of travel, plush hotel accommodations, elegant
clothes, champagne and, it may be surmised, the hap-
piness which only woman can bestow. M. Cinderella,
as we shall call him, obtained his first credit card in
August from a neighborhood branch of the Chase Man-
hattan Bank, where he had a modest checking account.
Apparently he used this card only for legitimate pur-
poses, but here the brain of the born inventor went
into action. Cinderella saw in a store window a sign
urging him to apply for a higher type of credit card
known as Carte Blanche, giving the fortunate possessor
the facilities of the Hilton hotel chain and its associated
phone, car rental services, night clubs. and other aids
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‘to the good life. Cinderella applied. The actual inven- —

tion, however, consisted in his discovery that one need
not pay at all. Cinderella visited Las Vegas, Montreal,
Miami and Havana. He liked it better than clerking.
In Montreal, he bought a $600 fur stole for a girl he
met on his pleasant journey, using the invaluable Carte
Blanche, of course. Whether Carte Blanche would ever
have caught up with him seems doubtful, but Cin-
derella needed small sums for shoe shines and the few
other necessities not provided by the credit card. Con-
sequently, he cashed rubber checks in the amount of
a few hundred dollars, and this old-fashioned device
proved his undoing. He forgot that he had already
cashed one check at the Hotel Plaza in New York and
returned there with a second ($120); the hotel man-
agement incontinently called the cops. “Easy Credit
Bounces Him into the Jug,” the headline reads. If the
Carte Blanche people have a grain of charity in them,
they will provide a small allowance on their future
cards to enable young men in their Wanderjahre to
avoid bouncing into the jug.

Say It ‘Ain’t So

The tearful plea of the newsboy to Shoeless Joe
Jackson in the White Sox baseball scandal of forty
years ago may now be echoed, mutatis mutandi, by any
of the millions of suckers, including ourselves,
trustingly believed in the honesty of TV quiz programs,

who -

in particular the now defunct “Twenty-One.” “Into the
vacated myth of quick success,” wrote Dan Wakefield
in The Nation of March 30, 1957, “the jackpot quiz
shows came with an answer. They came to an audience
hungry for glory, excitement, surprises and reassurance
that the man in the anonymous street might still sud-
denly rise to a place in the golden sun.” It is perhaps
symbolic that even this simulation of fulfillment. for
the common man turned out to be a swindle, and yet,
what else was to be expected? Why should showmen
of the most opportunistic kind, advertising questionable
nostrums ‘for profit, be burdened with silly scruples?
As for the network executives, they have a choice of
two pleas, in neither of which can they take much
pride. Either they were as crooked as the promoters or
they were as gullible as the outsiders whom they helped
to deceive. And where was the press, democracy’s tradi-
tional organ in ferreting out frauds and deceivers? Be-
latedly, Frank Holeman of the New York Daily News
Washington staff points a moral. “Any dumbbell knows,”
he writes, “that the longer you keep a lid on a garbage
can, the more it stinks when it’s finally opened.” The
highly paid TV executives had a chance last summer,
after the grand jury presentment, to let. the facts be
known. They passed it up, and Chairman Oren Harris
of the House Legislative Oversight subcommittee, saw

the opening and took it. The damage to the television —

industry will be all the greater. No one else will be
very sorry.

New Yardstick for 1960’s Hopefuls. . by robert 6. Spivuck

NIKITA S. KHRUSHCHEV came
to the United States during an “in-
between” season. The summer was

search for

gimmicks that could be
passed off as vital campaign issues.
The political managers were looking

sonalities of the candidates seemed
destined to be considered much more
important.

over, but the World Series had not

yet begun. Congress had closed up
’ shop, hastily. But the 1960 Presi-

t dential hopefuls were not yet pre-
P pared to admit that they were open

and ready for business, or even that
they were hopeful.

Up to the time of the Soviet Pre-
mier’s arrival, our politicians were
engaged in the usual rituals of “prac-
tical” men. They were “thinking
ahead” to 1960, but the scope of
their thinking was often limited to a

ROBERT G. SPIVACK is the
Washington, D.C., correspondent 4
the New York Post and a.
a_ syndicated i a

en on the .

for those things that, while project-
ing a favorable image of their candi-
dates, would at the same time avoid
arousing animosity in any quarter.

The whole ficld of “issues” was ex-
plored: the recession, labor “reform,”
monopoly, tight-money scandals, ex-
pansion of the economy, “balancing”
the budget, the race to outer space,
overhauling the education system,
civil rights. Realists at national party
headquarters—and_ privately, even
the aspirants themselves—were ready
to concede that none of these issues
was electrifying the f tblic. Each ap-
pealed only to a limi it of
the voters; it wa
‘national election

Then came Mr. K. By the time
of his departure, he had created “the
issue” for 1960. He called it “peace.”
Others said, more accurately, that it
was future relations with the USSR.
Some cynics saw it as the beginning
of another foreign “give-away’ Bic
gram and treated it as “the feeding
and care of the Russian bear.”

Essentially the question was: -
will the next President deal with +h
Soviet Union? Try as they ve
of the candidates are likely to e
being asked this question.
stakes” being what they cil

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fact that because of him, almost
overnight the narrower issues and
petty politics started to fade. Sud-
denly each candidate finds that the
standard by which he will be
measured is his ability to cope with

Mr. K., or his successor, without ap- |

peasing the Russians on the one
hand, or reviving the cold war on
the other. Their difficulties are made
no less by the fact that there will
be circumstances over which they
will have no control, notably shifts
in Soviet policy, a renewal of the
power struggle within the Commu-
nist Party of the Soviet Union, or
the foreign policy of Red China.

When the balance sheet is finally
drawn up on the Khrushchev tour,
the tremendous shift in the domestic
politics of this nation may loom as
its single most important item. Each
candidate is already engaged in as-
sessing what it means to his own
chances, as well as to the future
of the country. None seems quite to
have figured it out yet. The political
and psychological items that went
into the making of the “K-bomb” are
too complex to lend themselves to
ready and easy analysis. All the good
feeling that now exists could change
rapidly. That candidate who is 1ir-
revocably committed to any fixed
position might find himself a politi-
cal has-been before he ever had the
chance to become anybody.

AS BOTH parties and every candi-
date grope for the answers to the
problems left in the wake of the
Soviet Premier’s tour, several things
seem fairly clear. The starting point,
so far as the 1960 Presidential cam-
paign is concerned, is one of public
relief that tensions have lessened for
the nonce, coupled with skepticism
that the cold war is really nearing
its end after fourteen years of crisis.
Along with this is an awareness
among officeholders that $40 billion
—two-thirds of the tax dollar—is
being spent on armaments, research
and other aspects of “defense.” What
economic dislocations might result

_ from abrupt ending of the cold war?
We have no “war party” in this
country, but we have long had a
_ “short-of-war party” which includes
men otherwise as divergent in their
viewpoints as Senator Stuart Sy-
i. -mington,

Dean Acheson, Senator

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ie i
Tel

Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, Sena-
tor Styles Bridges, former Senator
William Knowland, Harry S. Tru-
man and Congressman John Mc-
Cormack of Massachusetts.

OF THE Presidential possibilities,
only Senator Hubert Humphrey, as
head of the Senate’s disarmament
subcommittee, has spoken of the ur-
gency of “preparing for peace” if the
golden age of disarmament is really
upon us. Symington, on the other
hand, feels that the Administration
is trifling with deep public emotions
and deluding us about the prospects
of peace. His line of reasoning, as I
understand it, is that if the country
had not been so complacent about
Soviet technological achievements,
the Russians would never have
matched or gotten ahead of us—and
we would have avoided in that case
what seems to him the humiliating
spectacle of the American President
breaking bread with the Soviet dic-
tator. What his position will be as
the campaign develops, and as the
world picture changes, remains to be
seen. My impression is that he be-
lieves we can avoid war with the
Communist world only by continuing
to pour money and talent into the
arms race. Underneath all this, I
suspect, is his belief that war is in-
evitable.

Against this viewpoint is the Eisen-
hower theory, only now being voiced
more or less publicly, that there are
too many American businessmen with
a vested interest in continued world
tension. Sometimes he seems to be
saying that our huge armament pro-
gram results, in almost equal por-
tions, from Soviet misconduct and
propaganda by our “munitions
lobby.” The President has reportedly
used the term “munitions lobby” in
private conversations, but even long
before he did so, White House Press
Secretary Jim Hagerty was using it.
He sandwiched it in once on a CBS
panel program conducted by Eric
Sevareid, although the panelists did
not take him up on it.

Hagerty probably sees exploitation
of the “munitions lobby” theme as
an opportunity to tag the Demo-
crats as the party of the arms-makers.
If Symington should be the candi-
date, it will be only a short step

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to labeling the Democrats as the
“war party,” a tactic Hagerty would
be happy to see used.

However, the President’s personal
position is understood to be some-
what different. As an old Army man,
he has long witnessed the waste at
the Pentagon and found it appalling.
Basically a conservative on domestic
policy, improved world conditions
also would give him a new opportu-
nity to push his “balance the budget”
argument. On top of all this there
still lingers the influence of Charles
(GM) Wilson, who never could per-
suade himself that all the wasteful-
ness in the Defense Department
resulted from Soviet policy as much
as from vested economic interests of
certain industrialists and Pentagon
job-holders. Wilson was never one
to wear blinders, even though GM
itself was a prime defense contractor,

EISENHOWER, of course, need not
think about running for office again,
but for the younger men in the
Republican Party the reversal of the
old Dulles policies creates difficulties
and hazards that they probably
would rather have laid aside, until
after 1960. The only Republican who
can find genuine satisfaction in the
course the Administration is now
probing is Harold Stassen. His posi-
tion vis-a-vis the Russians seemed at
last to have triumphed. For the mo-
ment, however, he is out of the na-
tional picture, running for Mayor of
Philadelphia.

Of all the Republicans actually or
remotely being considered for the
nomination, the biggest headaches
are those of Vice President Richard
M. Nixon. As the dust settles from
the Khrushchev tour, occasionally
he finds himself belabored by his
right-wing associates who tend to
blame him for much of what has
ensued since his own mission to
Moscow. Of the epithets they have
privately hurled in his direction,
“Tricky Dicky” is the mildest. The
situation apparently became so acute
that Senator Barry Goldwater had
to reassure a Chicago meeting of
ultra-rightists that Nixon was dis-
mayed by the invitation to Mr. K.
and that deep in his heart he is still
a “conservative.” Goldwater may
not be the brightest of the right-
wingers, but he is a literal man.

‘io
“

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,
not

WW ited he said Nikon hid told him
that that was the way the Vice Presi-
dent felt about the invitation, it is
probable that he was giving an ac-
curate account of the conversation.

Nixon himself felt compelled to
correct this interpretation and he
offered a defense of the Administra-
tion’s decision to invite Mr. K. But
there is no doubt that he was re-
lieved when, the day after Mr. K.
departed, the Associated Press said
the Soviet leader “appears to have
nominated Vice President Nixon as
one American who doesn’t want to
end the cold war.”

So far as it is possible to know
where Nixon stands on any issue,
the Vice President appears to be
playing the traditional politician’s
“wait and see” game. If no violent
reaction sets in to the Khrushchev
visit, Nixon will take the bows for
his part in the cold-war thaw. If
things should freeze up again, then
he can always point to what his
good friend Goldwater reported was
his “real” position.

GOVERNOR Nelson Rockefeller is
in the happy position of not being a
federal officeholder. He managed to
avoid participation in the Soviet Ex-
hibition at the New York Coliseum,
or meeting Mikoyan, yet he was able
to get across his own message when
. Mr. K. came to the big city. The
message, reduced to essentials, was
simply that the American way of
life was not capitalism but “free-
dom.”

Since he is not a “candidate,”
Rockefeller has not yet had to ex-
press himself in specific terms as to
what he might do about the Soviet
Union if he were President. There
are some friends of the New York
Governor who feel that he is fatalistic
about an eventual showdown _be-
tween the two systems. As evidence
of his attitude, they cite his ap-
parent preoccupation with construc-
tion of nuclear-bomb shelters. Others
maintain that the Governor has al-
ways been essentially optimistic
about foreign relations, as he is about
other things. They insist that his
whole record as a White House as-
sistant, and earlier as Coordinator
of Inter-American Affairs, has been
to stress development, with less a
less emphasis on military aid. by

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At this stage there is no “party

line” on how to deal with the Soviet
Union; the issue cuts across both
major parties, just as the debate be-
tween isolationism and intervention
did nineteen years ago. But if it is
correct that the “Russian issue”
poses tough problems for Nixon, the
GOP front-runner, it is probably
even a tougher problem for Sen. John
F. Kennedy, currently the Demo-
cratic front-runner. During the weeks
Khrushchev was here, there was lit-
tle evidence of either the Kennedy
profile or courage. He was just ab-
sent.

A FEW days after the Soviet Pre-
mier arrived, Kennedy did speak at
Cincinnati. He listed the “six great
challenges” that will face the nation
from 1960 on —none included the
challenge represented by the Kremlin.
Only after Mr. K. had left the coun-
try did Kennedy mention him—and
then only to tell a Rochester audi-
ence that, in his opinion, the Khru-
shchev-Eisenhower talks had _ pro-
duced “nothing tangible, enforceable
or essential to the achievement of
our foreign-policy objectives.”

Since Estes Kefauver seems to
have taken himself out of the run-
ning this year, only Lyndon Johnson
and Adlai Stevenson remain among
the leading Democratic possibilities.
Johnson, weary from a long and
fruitless Congressional session, did
not this time talk or act as if he
considered himself the titular head
of the Democratic Party. The extent
of his participation in the K. affair
was a group photograph with Khru-
shchev after the Premier’s meeting
with the Foreign Relations Commit-
tee. Except for one venture into the
hazy atmosphere of space satellites,
which won him a title as the “Sen-
ator from Outer Space,” Johnson has
been content to leave the big issues
to other men. He said, of course, that
we must back the President during
his talks with the Soviet leader, but
he accepted no responsibility for the
talks or developments since.
Between Kennedy’s skeptical po-
sition and Symington’s more belli-
cose attitude, Stevenson has adopt-
ed a let’s-feel-our-way-forward ap-

coe

_blance to that of

Presidential possi

writing and speeches, it is obvious
that Stevenson has devoted much
thought to future Soviet-American
relations. His journeys to Russia do
not seem to have had the purely po-
litical quality that was attached to
the trips taken by some other Amer-
ican visitors. From what he has said
and written, it seems clear that
Stevenson was among. the first to
believe that the death of Stalin
marked the beginning of a more ma-
ture and relaxed attitude inside Rus-
sia. Eventually he seemed to think.
it would be reflected in her relations —
with the West. He has never gone
overboard on the subject, but
Stevenson’s attitude seems to have
been hopeful ever since Mr. K. rose
to power. '

HOW AMERICAN politicians treat
“the issue” will depend to a great
extent on what Mr. K. and his col-
leagues themselves do to relax ten-
sions. If they create crises, whether
in Berlin or the Far East, as a
means of exerting pressure on this
government, the chances are that the
backfire will be extremely serious.

The Russians would do well not
to underestimate the American tem-
perament at this present delicate —
stage of U.S.-USSR relations. Be-
fore Khrushchev came there were |
many high-ranking officials who
hoped the trip might be canceled.
During his tour there were those who
wondered if there might be a repe-
tition of the Japanese Kurusu-
Nomura double cross on the eve of
Pearl Harbor. Even the slightest in-
dication of bad faith could unleash
a wave of anti-Soviet feeling that
might even surpass the era of Mc-
Carthyism.

But if this does not happen, the —
public will expect the candidates to
develop thoughtful and complete pro-
grams for dealing with Russia and—
the economic effects of ending the
cold war. How do we coexist? How
do we compete? Is it necessary to
sacrifice freedom for some people in
Europe to maintain peace? Should
we put forth a set of Western ‘
mands” for Europe and Asia? Do
accept the status quo?

Provided nothing happens be
now and 1960 to heighten
again, some of the candidates n
even come up with some answe!

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* ar

ONE MAN’S ELEVEN-YEAR FICHT FOR JUSTICE

Seventh Execution of Caryl Chessman . . by Gene Marine

Los Angeles
ON JANUARY 19, 1948, in the hills
above Pasadena, Mrs. Regina John-
son sat in a car on a quiet road with
a friend, Jarnigan Lea. Another car
approached, flashing a red spotlight,
apparently of the type used on police
vehicles; it stopped, its occupant
alighted and, on reaching the Lea
car, displayed a gun. Taking Lea’s
wallet and car keys and Mrs. John-
son’s purse, he then ordered the girl
into his own car, parked just behind
Lea’s. The bandit ordered her to
“commit an act of a sexual nature
proscribed by Section 288a of the
Penal Code.” Afterward, he took a
five-dollar bill from her purse, re-
turned the purse and Lea’s car keys,
and let her out of his car. He drove
away.

Three nights later, in another iso-
lated area, a bandit approached in
the same way a car containing Frank
Hurlbut and Mary Alice Meza. Told
by Hurlbut that neither had any
money, the bandit neither searched
them nor asked for the man’s wallet
or the girl’s purse. He took Miss
Meza in his car to another lonely
spot—leaving her purse with Hurl-
but—and again, sexual acts were
“committed. The girl was later re-
leased near her home.

The next day, two men entered a
clothing store at gun point; the own-
er and a clerk were forced into a

_ stockroom in the rear and their wal-
lets taken. The clerk was brought
back to the front of the store, and
forced to open the cash register.
After taking some clothing in addi-
tion to the money, the men left but
not before one of them had struck
the store owner with a gun.

The crimes are here described as
they were by the State of California.
There were other “red light bandit”
crimes, and Los Angeles newspapers,
never noted for restraint, played
them big. Under pressure, the police
were broadcasting a description every
few hours, based on descriptions

GENE MARINE is The Nation’s
West Coast correspondent,

226

given by the victims. The call was
for a white man

. possibly Italian, swarthy com-
plexion, 25-35 years, five feet six to
five feet ten, 150-170 pounds, thin to
medium build, dark brown wavy hair,
close cut, dark brown eyes, crooked
teeth, narrow nose with slight hump
on bridge of nose, sharp chin, possi-
ble scar over right eyebrow. Armed
with a .45 old-looking black auto-

matic. . . . Uses gray or beige club
coupe. ... A red spotlight has been
seen on left and right side of car. ...

A few hours after the clothing-
store robbery, police in Hollywood
chased and caught a Ford sedan an-
swering the description. Trapped,
two men in the car climbed out and
ran. Both were caught, the driver
after a bullet had grazed his skull.

The car proved to have been
stolen. In the glove compartment
were an old .45 and a pen-type flash-
light (the “red light” bandit had
used one of these). In the car it-
self were clothes which were later
identified as those taken in the rob-
bery earlier that day. The car had a
spotlight. The driver, who had been
stunned by a bullet, was Caryl
Chessman, whose case is now the
most litigated in the history of
American criminal law,

CHESSMAN and the man with him
were both relatively small-time
hoods; when arrested, they were
both on parole from Folsom Prison
(Chessman on an armed robbery
charge). Being together was a parole
violation for each of them, and
meant going back to Folsom—which,
Chessman says, is why he fled the
police. He has never said whether
he knew the car was stolen, or that
the .45 was in the glove compart-
ment, or that the clothes in the back
had also been stolen.

He does say—and admittedly it
sounds a far-fetched tale—that it
was two other fellows; 7.¢., that he
got into a car with three other men
in it, along with some clothes; that
one got out soon thereafter; that
three of them were still in the car
when the police spotted it; that the

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third man had gotten out just before
the car was captured, and that the
third man was the one to whom the
car “belonged.” Chessman has never
identified the “third man.”
Chessman also says that, at the
time, he was committing crimes. A
gambler in another county, he says,
wanted to move in on a police-pro-
tected bookmaking setup in Los An-
geles; this gambler had hired Chess-
man to hijack the L. A. bookies and
their collectors. The police, Chessman
says, knew this—and knew also that
he wasn’t the “red light” bandit.
They threatened him with that
charge, he says, to make him talk
about what he was really doing; he
called their bluff; and suddenly they
had both gone too far to retreat.
Chessman was held for three days
at the Hollywood police station,
where he says he was severely beaten.
Naturally, the police deny this, and
point out, with justice, that allega-
tions of police persecution and bru-
tality, like patriotism in another con-
text, are often the last refuge of the
scoundrel. For eleven years, Chess-
man has been asking that lie-detector
tests be given both him and the po-
licemen involved on this question,
as well as to him alone on the ques-
tion of his guilt or innocence in the
sex-attack crimes. No one has ever
called that bluff—if it is a bluff.

SECTION 209 of the Penal Code,
California’s “Little Lindbergh Law,”
said at the time that anyone who
. seizes, confines, inveigles .. .
kidnaps or carries away any indi-
vidual . . . with intent to... com-
mit... robbery .. . shall suffer
death for life imprisonment without
possibility of parole] at the discre-
tion of the jury [if] the person...
subjected to such kidnaping suffers
... bodily harm.

Careful reading shows that under
that Jaw—as the State Supreme
Court was to rule in 1950—any rob-
bery is a kidnaping, and any robbery
in which the person robbed gets hurt
is a capital offense. But the name
given the law at the time of passage

2. om
\ AL I’ \TION
Leip ss fle a”:

—“Little Lindbergh Law”—shows
that that wasn’t what the legislature
had in mind. This was proved when,
after the 1950 decision, the legisla-
ture immediately amended the law
to get rid of the robbery-is-kidnap-
ing interpretation.

An incidental result of this bit of
legal history is that Chessman is
probably doomed to die for some-
thing that is no longer a capital
crime. Certainly the clothing-store
robbery would no longer be a capital
crime in California, And it has al-
ways been the case in this state that
a criminal can kidnap a girl and
carry her from one end of the long
state to the other, violating Sec-
tion 288a every twenty-five yards,
and not be subject to a death pen-
alty. That penalty in the Chessman
case rests on three requirements, all
of which must have been present
for the penalty to hold up: First,
that the bandit “kidnaped” the vic-
tims under the language above; sec-
ond, that his intent in doing so was
robbery; third, that the victims suf-
fered bodily harm.

Under the new law, it is doubtful
that the state would charge that
forcing Mrs. Johnson from one car
to the other was “kidnaping.” In the
Meza case, (1) no robbery took
place, and (2) if a robbery attempt
had been involved (the bandit’s only
pertinent words were “This is a
stickup”), it was abandoned before
the kidnaping took place. The girl’s
purse was left in the car, and the
bandit made no attempt to take any
of her or Hurlbut’s property.

It would come as a shock to most
Californians to be told that Chess-
man has never been charged with
killing anyone, and that he was not
condemned to death—officially—for
any activity remotely sexual.

MARY ALICE MEZA identified
Chessman not in a line-up, but when
he was brought to her house, hand-
cuffed. Other victims, he says, iden-
tified him (again, not in a line-up,
but alone) in response to police
phone calls to the effect that “We’ve
got the red light bandit—come down
and identify him.” Some of the vic-
tims said he was not the man, but
Chessman claims he was never given
the names of these so that he could
subpoena them.

October 17, 1959

Two attorneys advised Chessman
to “cop a plea”—plead guilty to some
charges in return for a state agree-
ment not to press others. He refused,
claiming an unwillingness to accept
the stigma of conviction on sex-
crime charges. A third attorney,
Ward Sullivan, agreed with his po-
sition, but asked an exorbitant fee.

Feeling that he needed more than
the routine representation of a Dep-
uty Public Defender (Chessman
wrote later, “I needed more than a
watchdog . . . I needed an inspired
advocate ... a dedicated champion

willing to fight for me every inch of
the way”), Chessman decided to de-
fend himself. The Master Calendar
Judge questioned him sharply, to de-
termine whether Chessman’s inten-
tion was to stall and ask later for a
continuance. He ended by sharply
warning Chessman to be ready on
the trial date.

He wasn’t. One of his later legal
briefs (in which he speaks of him-
self in the third person) gives his
reasons:

. jailers refused his repeated re-
quests to be allowed to interview wit-
nesses or other persons connected
with the case at the jail... . They
also refused his repeated requests to
possess and use personal legal books

papers, clerical supplies or a

typewriter. .

They also refused, he says, to let
him write to the judge to complain.

(These statements of Chessman are
not contested.) The defendant then
sought out a fourth lawyer, made an
arrangement for him to be paid with
money to be borrowed by Chess-
man’s father—and Chessman’s father
fell ill. The trial date appeared, and
Chessman asked for a continuance.

With his father and the lawyer in
court to back him up, Chessman
said he couldn’t help being unpre-
pared, and asked to subpoena jailers
to testify to this effect. The judge
said it was Chessman’s own fault for
turning down a public defender, and
ordered the trial to continue.

At least this is what Chessman
says happened. The record is ex-
tremely unclear on this and other
points—but that part of the story
comes later.

DEFENDING himself with the aid
of Deputy Public Defender Al Mat-
thews as legal adviser (not as coun-
sel), Chessman found himself under
orders to remain seated at the de-
fendant’s table’ (though Deputy
District Attorney J. Miller Leavy,
of course, was free to walk around).
Aside from the fact that Chessman
and a witness could not examine evi-
dence together, or the fact that in
talking to the jury Chessman had
to lean out and around the prose-
cution table, the situation almost cer-
tainly tainted the jury’s concept of
the traditional presumption of inno-
cence.

The accused’s request for a daily
transcript of the proceedings was de-
nied on the ground that the prose-
cution had not joined him in the re-
quest. Judge Charles W. Fricke (now
deceased ) later testified that he could
not remember any other capital case
in which he had denied a daily tran-
script—and Judge Fricke was re-
nowned for the number of capital
cases he handled. Testimony in sub-
sequent hearings shows that the
prosecutor had the court reporter’s
notes available to him throughout
the trial, and that he therefore had
the advantage of a transcript with-
out asking the court formally to
make it available.

Without such a transcript, of
course, the defendant was unable to
go back and check verbatim testi-
mony. With hindsight, we can see
now that the judge’s refusal of the

227,

transcript made the whole “Chess-
man case,” as we now know it, pos-
sible.

Finally, Judge Fricke informed
the participants, on the day that ar-
gument for the defense was to begin,
that he would allow only one coun-
sel to address the jury on each side.
Matthews was unfamiliar with some
aspects of the case, and Chessman
was under orders not to leave his
chair.

This point alone should raise an
eyebrow. Section 1095 of the Penal
Code seems plain enough: “If the
indictment or information be for an
offense punishable with death, two
counsel on each side may argue to
the jury.” The state now contends
that Matthews wasn’t a “counsel” —
but the record, such as it is, clearly
shows that the judge was willing to
let either Matthews or Chessman
argue, but not both.

The jury had the option on the
penalty, as we have seen. On May
21, 1948, they decided that Caryl
Chessman must die. On June 23,
with Chessman not yet formally sen-
tenced, Ernest R. Perry died.

PERRY was the court reporter. His
notes of the trial, at the time of his
death, were in shorthand. Some
pages—a little less than a third—had
been dictated for transcription be-
fore his death. Most had not.
California law requires that every
death-sentence case automatically go
to the State Supreme Court on ap-
peal. It requires also that the record
on appeal—the verbatim transcript
of the trial—be prepared by the re-
porter who took the notes, and that
it be certified by him to be “cor-
rect.” A dead court reporter can’t
do that very well. But the law pro-

vides no alternative procedure.
Therefore, when Chessman was for-
mally sentenced two days after

Perry’s death, he moved for a new
trial, because no adequate record
could be prepared. Judge Fricke de-
nied the motion, and ordered a rec-
ord prepared through the use of
what he called “human ingenuity.”

The late Chief Judge William
Denman of the U.S. District Court
of Appeals was to write in 1955:

How important California regards
this transcription and_ certification
by the reporter is apparent from the

228

fact that in civil cases the death of
the reporter before his transcription
and certification gives the trial court
the discretionary power to set aside
the judgment and order a new trial
[Citation]. By some quirk in Cali-
fornia legislation this does not apply
to criminal cases. [From a certifica-
tion of probable cause for appeal,
Application of Chessman (1955), 219
F.2d 162, 164].

“By some quirk in California leg-
islation,’ Chessman went to San
Quentin under a sentence of death
which still hangs over him more than
eleven years later. No execution date
could be set until the State Supreme
Court heard the automatic appeal,
and no automatic appeal was pos-
sible until a transcript was forth-
coming.

On the recommendation of the
prosecutor (and over the formal pro-
test of an association of Los. Angeles
court reporters, who contended the
notes were unreadable), Judge
Fricke appointed a reporter named
Stanley Fraser to complete transcrip-
tion of the Perry notes. Fraser had
first recerved the notes from Leavy
“some time in July of 1948,” had
studied them for “two weeks, may-
be ten days,” and had “concluded I
could make an accurate transcrip-
tion” (quoted from Fraser’s testi-
mony at a 1958 hearing). Leavy told
the judge that Fraser and Perry had
been friends and that Fraser could
read Perry’s notes “as well as his
own.” No one asked Chessman or
any representative of his whether
there was any objection to Fraser.

ON SEPTEMBER 7, 1948, negotia-
tions were concluded between Fraser
and Los Angeles County, under
which Fraser was paid, by his own
later testimony, “approximately $10,-
000” for the job—considerably more
than the statutory fee. Chessman’s
appeal that such a proceeding was
invalid was denied. In the course of
the hearing, Leavy filed an affidavit
promising that Chessman would be
allowed to be present when the tran-
script was “settled”—e., officially
accepted—in Judge Fricke’s court.
But he wasn’t. In the first days of
June, 1949, with no one present ex-
cept Judge Fricke, Leavy, Fraser,
and the court reporter then on duty,
the Fraser transcript was accepted.

i af ay ~
wo

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=

os v
It went to the State Supreme Court
for the automatic appeal, certified
not as “correct” (as the law requires)
but as “correct according to the best
of my ability.”

The record, by the way, shows that
in the interim Chessman asked
Fricke that any “raw transcript” by
Fraser be furnished to him, Chess-
man. It never was. It was later tes-
tified that Fraser showed his “rough
draft” to Leavy, however, consult-
ing with the prosecutor about it, and
that the “rough draft” was later de-
stroyed.

Chessman insists that the Fraser
transcript is all wrong about his re-
quest for a continuance (which goes
directly to the question of whether
he was allowed a fair trial); about
his wanting to subpoena certain wit-
nesses and records; about the testi-
mony of some of the police witnesses;
about his objections to a number of
things, including the consolidation of
eighteen counts against him for trial
all at once (important because if he
didn’t object to it in trial court, he
can’t object to it on appeal). Except
for one point—the question of
whether a certain witness was or
wasn’t cross-examined—his erstwhile
“legal adviser,” Matthews, backs
him up on his complaints. So does
the attorney who was in court when
he requested the continuance at the
trial’s beginning.

Most important, Chessman says
the behavior and the statements of
the prosecutor and judge are all
wrong in the Fraser record. Leavy,
says Chessman, was far more abu-
sive and legally out of bounds than
the record shows—and as it is, the
State Supreme Court was obviously
worried about it. At one point they
said that Leavy’s actions might have
involved “reversible error” except
that Chessman’s guilt was otherwise
shown (another eyebrow-raising con-
tention); on another occasion the
same court admitted excesses in the
prosecutor’s behavior but said he
had been goaded into it by Chess-
man’s “bold technique” of conduct-
ing his own defense.

In the case of the judge’s instruc-
tions to the jury, Chessman claims
that the judge made it appear that
the death penalty was mandatory.
He advances other procedural objec-
tions, involving such questionable

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_ prosecution tactics as the introduc-

tion of direct evidence on rebuttal,
generally frowned upon in criminal
practice but defended by Leavy as
the only way to deal with “a Chess-
man.” Here, too, the State Supreme
Court clucked mildly but refused to
reverse,

CHESSMAN lost the “automatic
appeal,” took it to the United States
Supreme Court—getting the first of
his six stays of execution to do it—
and lost there, too. He then began
to attack the validity of the tran-
script, and the procedure by which
it had been prepared, in federal
courts. The first court turned down
his petition for habeas corpus, but
an Appeals Court judge thought the
case strong enough to be heard, and
Chessman’s | execution was stayed
again—three days before the second
execution date.

It was nearly a year later, on May
28, 1953, when the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals ruled two-to-one
against Chessman. He had begun
Cell 2455, Death Row—the first of
his three books—in the meantime,
had acquired some legal assistance
(notably that of Rosalie Asher), had
taught himself quite a bit of law,
and had made some private arrange-
ments for funds.

Chessman took the Appeals Court
decision to the U.S. Supreme Court,
again without success. He was pil-
ing up information, but he had run
out of courts, except for the slim
legal possibility that habeas corpus
might come from a branch of the
State Superior Court other than
Judge Fricke’s.

His execution at this time was set
for May 14. In despair, he asked
Gov. Goodwin Knight for a ninety-
one-day reprieve to give him time
to prepare an application for clem-
ency, incorporating his new_ infor-
mation. It was the closest Chessman
ever came to asking for mercy.
Knight turned him down.

Chessman’s book was published
on May 3, and a cry against his exe-
cution went up around the world—
but in California, a counter-cry de-
manding his death went up almost
as soon and twice as loudly. The first
two weeks of May found the Chess-
man case all over the California

beaaaii ks. ig nis

On May 13,

Berwyn (“Ben”)
Rice, a San Rafael attorney now
helping to represent Chessman, ap-
peared in the Superior Court of Cali-
fornia, County of Marin, Judge
Thomas F. Keating presiding. The
judge listened, agreed that Chess-
man’s habeas corpus application de-
served a hearing—and stayed the
execution.

But Assistant Attorney General
Clarence Linn went before Judge
Keating that same day with a mo-
tion to vacate the stay. Judge Keat-
ing took Linn’s motion under ad~
visement.

In his cell, Chessman waited, the
earphones of his Death Row radio
to his head. California waited with
him. At 6:29 P.M.—fifteen and one-
half hours before execution—Judge
Keating denied Linn’s motion. The
stay remained in effect.

But Keating ultimately ruled
against Chessman, and another exe-
cution date was set. Chessman ap-
pealed Keating’s decision to the
State Supreme Court. After that
court had adjourned, its decision
came down. The appeal was denied
—nine days before the execution.
Chessman’s next move was to the
U.S. Supreme Court, but he needed
time.

Two state justices had sided with
Chessman. Ben Rice went looking
for Associate Justice Jesse Carter,
vacationing in a remote part of the
northern California forests. Travel-
ing by car, then by helicopter, then
by burro, Rice found Carter, showed
him some of Chessman’s informa-
tion. With one day to yare, Carter
used a tree trunk asa a tab on which
to write out still another stay

: A ay ‘*

moved that the State Supreme Court
vacate Carter’s stay—an action of
dubious legal validity but of deadly
purpose. The U.S. Supreme Court
did not sit until October. If the stay
were set aside, Chessman would be
dead before they sat, and his final
appeal would never be heard.

The State Supreme Court got out
of settling the question of whether
it could vacate the stay by waiting
until the U.S. Supreme Court was
back in session, and then denying
Linn’s motion without ruling on its
merits. On October 25, 1954, the U.S.
Supreme Court said “no” again, and
Judge Fricke set still another execu-
tion date.

But possibly Judge Fricke hadn’t
read the eighteen-word kicker in the
U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, The
Court denied certiorari “without
prejudice to an application for a
writ of habeas corpus in an appro-
priate United States District Court,”
and thus, in effect, told Chessman
what to do next.

The application was made—and
denied on January 4, 1955. Chess-
man again had ten days to live, but
Chief Judge Denman of the District
Court of Appeals found three sep-
arate probable causes for appeal and
stayed the execution once more.

Denman’s court, however, went
against Chessman (two to one), and
he went back to the U.S. Supreme
Court. Another execution date had
been set, and it, too, was stayed,
this time by Associate Justice Tom
Clark of the U.S. Supreme Court.

THROUGHOUT the history of the
Chessman case, newspaper accounts
have referred to his “miraculous
cheating” of the death penalty, and
to his astute use of “loopholes” and
“technicalities” to keep himself alive.
Actually, with the possible exception
of Judge Keating’s in May of 1954,
none of Chessman’s stays was any-
thing but predictable. His execution
had now been stayed six times:

J. After his automatic appeal to
the State Supreme Court was denied, |
Justice Carter of that court granted
a stay to let Chessman appeal his’
conviction to the U.S. _ Supreme
Court. —

2. That Shonal denied, Chivebenaill
turned to the question ‘of whether _
the transcript was accurate; the Fed-—

eral District Court turned down a
habeas corpus request, but the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals thought he
at least deserved a hearing, and
Judge Albert Lee Stephens of that
court granted a stay.

3. That appeal also denied, and
the denial upheld by the U.S. Su-
preme Court, Chessman went with
new information’ to the Superior
Court of California, and got the stay
from Judge Keating.

4. When Keating ultimately ruled
against him, Chessman went again
to the State Supreme Court, was
denied, and asked for time to go
again to the U.S. Supreme Court;
Justice Carter granted a stay for
that purpose.

5. As noted, the Supreme Court
denied certiorari but pointedly told
Chessman what to do next. He went
into Federal District Court again—
on the matter of the adequacy of
the transcript, and with his new in-
formation—and was again denied;
Judge Denman granted a stay to al-
low this decison to be appealed.

6. That appeal denied, Justice
Tom Clark gave Chessman time to
take the federal case on the tran-
script—not the state case now—to
the U.S. Supreme Court.

Whether these were “technicali-
ties” or “loopholes”—as is the popu-
lar impression in California—can be
judged from subsequent events. In
October of 1955, the U.S. Supreme
Court granted certiorari, reversed
the District Court of Appeals, and
remanded the case to the Federal
District Court for hearing. Had Cali-
fornia’s press reported the case with
any degree of accuracy, the “loop-
hole” theory would have died on
that date.

Even this action, of course, did
not mean that Chessman’s new evi-
dence on guilt or innocence, if he
had any, would be heard. It simply
meant that he was entitled to a
hearing on the question of whether
the transcript of his first trial was
accurate. But Chessman had some
information about this too.

For one thing, he had discovered
that the substitute court reporter,
Stanley Fraser, was (and is) a
chronic alcoholic, and, on the occa-
sion of his employment, had made
misleading statements about his
work record, with the effect that his

Riis be 2 pee df fee an ps oen

RETA pee Vest
“fs

alcoholism was concealed. Further,
Chessman found that Fraser—who
got his job on the recommendation
of prosecutor J. Miller Leavy—was
(and is) the uncle of Leavy’s wife.
There was nothing to indicate that
either of these facts was known to
Judge Fricke when he appointed
Fraser. Evidence from other court
reporters seemed to cast serious
doubts on Fraser’s ability accurately
to transcribe his own notes, much
less anybody else’s.

On November 30, to the astonish-
ment of Chessman’s attorneys, the
District Court assigned the case to
Judge Louis E. Goodman, the judge
whose original decision had been re-
versed. Goodman had made several
public statements castigating Chess-
man, and had left little doubt of his
personal opinion in the case. Late in
December, Chessman asked formally
that Goodman disqualify himself.
Goodman refused.

Chessman’s third book, The Face
of Justice, details a series of harass-
ments to which he and his attorneys
were subjected in preparing for the
Goodman hearings. Clearly Califor-
nia did everything it could, through
one or another of its agents (prison
officials included), to make Chess-
man’s preparation for the hearings
as difficult as possible.

THE record of the hearings them-
selves is also instructive. The Chess-
man petition for habeas corpus was
built squarely on the charge that
Perry’s notes were “indecipherable
to a large degree” and that Fraser
was “incompetent to transcribe”
them. That’s what the hearings were
about. But Goodman, on several oc-
casions, refused to allow the subject
to be dealt with.

I don’t think [the Court said at

one point] the Supreme Court .. .

intended me to spend in this court

days or weeks of time in determining
the accuracy of this transcript.

Whether they did or not, [ am not

going to do it.

The record makes plain that this
hearing, seven and one-half years
after the death sentence was first
passed, provided the first look for
Chessman or any representative of
his at the Perry shorthand notes.
Judge Fricke testified that, although
he had heard on some authority that

ee
the notes were untranscribable, he
had taken Leavy’s word that Fraser
could do it.

The judge hadn’t known about
Fraser’s relationship to Leavy (there
is testimony by Leavy in the record
that says he did tell the judge;. one
of them is apparently mistaken). He
had no idea of Fraser’s alcoholism,
had acted on the representation that
Fraser had worked steadily as a court
reporter for many years (Fraser was
later to testify that he had taken
as much as a year off work because
of drinking; other testimony indi-
cated that fellow employees had
been covering up for his alcoholic
absences and incompetencies for

years).

FRASER, from the record, might
have been testifying for Chessman.
He had on several occasions (per-
haps more than twenty-five times,
according to Leavy) checked his
rough draft with the prosecutor, and
had made changes at Leavy’s sug-
gestion. Further, Fraser had check-
ed his draft with two prosecution
witnesses—with the knowledge, and
in fact at the suggestion, of Leavy.
(In other words: Outside of the court,
and without the knowledge of the
judge or the defendant, a part of
the record had been built up through
the collaborative efforts of the prose-
cutor, the prosecutor’s uncle-in-law,
and two prosecution witnesses, both
policemen.) —

Two of the witnesses had been
jurors at the original trial. They
seemed to remember perfectly the
judge’s instructions to the jury
(there had been over forty), and,
under cross-examination, to remem-
ber very little else. Both were clear-
ly shown to be strongly biased. One
had written a letter to a newspaper,
demanding Chessman’s immediate
death because he had driven Mary
Alice Meza insane.

One of the most emotional aspects
of the case has been the matter of
Mary Alice Meza, one of the “red
light” bandit’s victims, whose
mother, now Mrs. Ruth Shaw, rare-
ly misses a Chessman court hearing
or an opportunity to tell reporters
that her daughter, now a patient
in the Camarillo State Hospital,
cannot be cured until Chessman, her
attacker, is executed. It is standard

: . e NATION
ie The sATION.

.
|
;
if

essman-case mythology that the

“red light” bandit attack drove the
girl into the asylum, and the press
has played this up. Actually, Miss
Meza went to Camarillo more than
a year and a half after the trial—
about two years after the assault it-
self. Furthermore, the unfortunate
girl had a previous history of mental
disturbance.

The Goodman hearings ended on
January 25, 1956. In February,
Goodman stunned Chessman and his
attorneys by denying habeas corpus.
The attorneys felt (and feel) that
they thoroughly ' discredited the
state’s witnesses, and completely
established their case. All a reporter
can say, in this space, is that the
record is there.

Chessman appealed to the District
Court of Appeals. He lost, two to
one. On January 24, 1957, Chessman
filed still another petition for cer-
tiorart with the U.S. Supreme Court.
And two days later, according to
Chessman, he planted his now-fa-
mous “time capsule.”

On that date, he says (and Rosa-
lie Asher confirms), he turned over
to Miss Asher clear evidence of his
own innocence, of the identity of
the real “red light” bandit, and of
police suppression—on condition that
she not reveal it. If Chessman is
vindicated, he gets the material
back; if he’s not, she is to reveal it
(or, presumably, see to its being re-
vealed) fifty years after California
declares a moratorium on capital
punishment. Asked why he doesn’t
get himself out of all this by mak-
ing the information public, he in-
sists that he’s simply and stubborn-
ly determined to prove his own
innocence, not someone else’s guilt;
it is a matter of principle with him.

THE U.S. Supreme Court granted
certiorari and later heard argument.
On June 10, 1957, the opinion in
Chessman v. Teets (1957), 354 U.S.

156 [Teets is warden at St. Quen-

tin] was handed down, written by
Mr. Justice Harlan. Anyone who has
since that date expressed an opinion
on the Chessman case without a
clear knowledge of what this opinion
said and meant is out of order.
Harlan’s decision held that Caryl
Chessman had, in fact, been denied

yduie Process of ae for nine _—

and that there was no way to de-
termine whether he was denied due
process of law even before that. It
ordered “an adversary hearing [22.,
one in which both sides are repre-
sented, with full rights to call wit-
nesses, cross-examine, etc.] focused
squarely on the issue of the ade-
quacy of the transcript.” Chessman,
it said, “has never had his day in
court upon the controversial issues
of fact and law involved in the set-
tlement of the record upon which his
conviction was affirmed.”

The malignantly imaginative news-
paper picture of the evil genius, who
had taught himself so much law that
he was forever finding new loop-
holes in obscure statutes, disappears
in the measured language of Justice
Harlan.

And so the case wound up back in
Judge Fricke’s court with its

strangest episodes yet to come. On.

August 20, 1957 (unknown to Chess-
man), Judge Fricke appointed a
woman named Bessie Lill as an ex-
pert on the kind of shorthand Ernest
Perry had used before his death.
During the first week of September,
Mrs. Lill got photostatic copies of
the Perry notes and a copy of the
Fraser transcript.

THE JUDGE agreed to appoint two
experts chosen by each side. Chess-
man requested appointment of
Frank Hanna, veteran court reporter
and former head of the Success
Shorthand School in New York City;
then he ran out of experts. Los
Angeles television newscaster Bill
Stout mentioned on the air that
Chessman needed experts in Pitman
shorthand. The few qualified people
were reluctant to associate with
Chessman (as is shown in the tran-
script of the hearing); after some
time, a housewife with a long back-
ground of shorthand experience re-
luctantly came forward. Her name
was Molly Kalin.

On November 13, the hearing was
turned over to Judge Walter R.
Evans of Monro County, sitting in

place of Judge Fricke at the latter’s

request (and over Chessman’s pro-
test; Chessman wanted the oppor-

tunity to have Fricke disqualified for
bias). On Novembe 25, the hear-
ings began. | os ’

These hearings d demand peecteptiek

wid}

reporting, impossible in this brief
space.’ Among many other things,
the testimony shows these highlights:

Stanley Fraser testified that he
had been one of the official reporters
of the Los Angeles Superior Court
from 1926 until 1953. He had been
an old friend of the late Perry. He
said that Perry wrote the Success
system of shorthand, and that he
himself wrote the Graham Pitmanic
system, which was “very close.”

In his work on the transcript,
“Mrs. Fraser” had done much of the
typing (“Mrs. Fraser,” it develops,
was not Mrs. Fraser legally until
December of 1953; in 1956, Fraser
had her committed to the Camarillo |
State Hospital, alcoholic and hope-
lessly insane).

IN 1949, at the original settlement
hearings (with no one there to
cross-examine, remember), © Fraser
had testified that he had “dictated —
and transcribed actual words which
[he] found in the signs and symbols
of Mr. Perry,” and that he had not
supplied “any words anywhere in
this record of questions or answers
or any statements of the Court.”

But under cross-examination in
1957, Fraser admitted that he might
have failed to transcribe hundreds
of symbols because he couldn’t read
them. Directed to one spot by Chess-
man, he agreed that he had in fact
skipped eight lines of symbols. Chess-
man showed him other spots; thirty
pages of the hearing transcript are
filled with Fraser’s admissions that
he had failed to transcribe particu-
lar symbols in particular places. He
had added words to complete sen-
tences, changed language where the
notes didn’t “make sense.” He had
credited statements to Leavy be-
cause he knew how Leavy spoke
(though nothing in the notes said
that Leavy was speaking). He. had
at one point changed Perry’s record

4,9

” J
—

i
a ent . * se oe “es

its
as

Aes.

1S0 does the entire Chessman case. It |
hurts a reporter to leave out definite —
perjury by either a juror or an
torney; the absence of physical cdma
tying Chessman to the crimes; psychi
atric testimony on whether Chessman is
the sex-crime type; testimonial contra-
diction between judge and prosecutor;
the story of a man named ga who
was arrested in 1956, and questioned
about his association with the “red
light bandit”; or any of several - er
other matters for which this . Tr
has no space.

on something Judge Fricke had said,
because he, Fraser (who had not
been at the Chessman trial), had
decided that the judge hadn’t meant
to say it!

Perry, Fraser said, “might have
left out half of these proceedings,
and if there is not a line there to
show it, how would I know what
happened, since I wasn’t there?” It
is difficult, reading Fraser’s testi-
mony, not to get a picture of a piti-
ful, broken old man, groping for a
lost respectability.

AND THEN came Bessie Lill, re-
tired and nearing eighty, on whom
the case turns today as it once turned
on Stanley Fraser. In 1949, Leavy
had told the judge that Fraser’s
record was “as accurate a record as
Mr. Perry could have prepared.”
In 1957, state expert Bessie Lill
brought into court eighty-three pages
of her “findings,” suggesting 1,862
changes (her word was “emenda-
tions”). And that was before cross-
examination.

She had not included, she said,
a number of places where Fraser had
left hundreds of Perry’s symbols un-
transcribed. If she’d put in “every
single word, I would have had an-
other volume here the length of
Gone with the Wind, probably.”

Perhaps her juiciest testimony
came when Chessman asked her how
come, on direct examination, she’d
said she could “read and transcribe”
the Perry notes, but on cross-exami-
nation had been unable actually to
do so. Her “apperceiving, mass,”
Bessie Lill answered, functions bet-
ter on some days than on others.

Chessman’s expert, Frank Hanna,
testified (after a detailed analysis)
that

. . . As the trial progressed, the
quality of the reporting markedly

and progressively deteriorated. . . .

The notes show repeated instances of

apparent mental confusion and lack

of coordination. .. . Page after page

. . . show [it to be] almost if not

quite impossible to decipher the out-

lines, much less to read them with
any continuity. ...
_ That was about the original notes;
of the Fraser record, Hanna said
that it

..» has been freely edited . . . he
has failed to transcribe at all

ane a eae >

hundreds of outlines whose meaning
I also am unable to determine... .
There is hardly a page of the tran-
script where he has*not added con-
necting words or phrases .. . there
are hundreds of places where I be-
lieve the meaning placed upon par-
ticular outlines . . . is not justified.

And there was still another point:

Mr. Fraser, or some one, has filled
many pages of the note books with
his own pencilled outlines,

In conclusion, Hanna said—length-
ily—that the notes were no good,
the transcripts were no good, and
the sense of what had taken place
at the trial must inevitably have
been altered. Unable to shake him
on cross-examination, Deputy Dis-
trict Attorney Crail pounced on the
fact that he was Chessman’s expert.
Hanna testified that he had wanted
to talk to Chessman before agreeing
to serve. Crail asked him why.

Well, in the first place [Hanna
replied] ... [Chessman] might per-
haps have the impression that if
I were appointed as an expert at
his suggestion, that I might be fa-
vorably disposed to his side of the
case, and I wanted to disabuse his
mind of any such idea....

The prosecution recalled Bessie Lill
and asked her to give a “reading”
of four pages of the notes. She rat-
tled them off, including a rendition
in dazzling prose of a clumsy pas-
sage she’d haltingly stumbled through
once before on the stand. On cross-
examination she admitted to having
been told in advance, by Crail, what
she would be asked to do. She had
spent, she said, “several hours” on
each of “several days” preparing.

Chessman had her read other por-
tions, then called Leavy. The pros-
ecutor testified that events at the
trial had not happened the way
Bessie Lill’s readings described them.
One portion of the Lill readings,

va a 0

se
wie é " ae,

Leavy was forced to.agree, made no
sense. whatever.

Finally, Chessman got Mrs, Lill to
admit that in her own eyes she was
“committed to be a witness for the
State” (when she got off the stand,
she passed Crail with the comment,
“Y’m afraid I haven’t been a very
good witness fer you this morning”).
She was paid $7,000 for her “expert”
testimony, which has to be read to

be believed.
CHESSMAN called Molly Kalin,

who gave a blackboard lecture on
the Pitman system for the judge,
and made all her points about the
transcript visual by continuing to
use the board. Her summary said
that “the meaning placed upon [the
symbols] by the transcription can-
not be reconciled or justified at all
in my opinion.” At one point, she
copied parts of the notes on the
board, wrote Mrs. Lill’s rendition
above them, and then showed how
Mrs. Lill’s words should have been
written. The difference was immedi-
ately visible, dramatic and marked.

Molly Kalin, who reluctantly came
to the Chessman case from a tele-
vision appeal, now believes Chess-
man innocent.” One reason grew out
of her examination of a page of
notes (selected at random by the
judge, at Chessman’s request) which
she analyzed on the blackboard.
When she attempted to explain some
scratched-out symbols, Chessman
told her to ignore them, and any
penciled notations; he was inter-
ested at that point in the original
Perry notes.

But overnight, Mrs. Kalin had the
opportunity to tell Chessman some-
thing. The scratched-out symbols
were apparently Perry’s. Different
symbols — which were later tran-
scribed — were added in, in “very
clear... and much smaller” writing
that was “radically different.” This
had been done on several consecu-
tive pages in several different places.
No one has ever denied, disputed,
or explained these notes, apparently
in a foreign hand, which replaced
Perry’s original notes in the short-

2As does virtually everyone who has
independently investigated the case;
this reporter, whose investigation was
comparatively brief, has at least serious

doubts of Chessman’s guilt.

The Nal ON

Pye?

hand record of the Chessman trial,
and which now form a part of the
official record.’

Fraser having testified that from
September, 1948, to February, 1949
—when he had been preparing the
transcript — he had not taken a
drink, Chessman called Fraser’s per-
sonal physician, who said Fraser had
been an alcoholic throughout the
period from 1947 to 1953. (In 1953,
Fraser had been in the County Hos-
pital, claiming among other things
that the Mafia was after him.)

Chessman showed, by subpoenaing
Fraser’s work record from the court
secretary, that at least one judge
would not have Fraser in his court,
and that another judge had had him
replaced. Fraser himself testified that
he often didn’t go to work because
of drinking, and that in the early
1940s “I took a sabbatical year with-
out pay, a couple of years.”

The work record showed that mis-
conduct charges had been filed
against Fraser and had been sched-
uled to be heard by a group of
judges; but the charging papers and
the papers showing disposition of
the case had disappeared. Chessman
called several witnesses, attempting
to find the papers. Nobody knew
anything.

ON FEBRUARY 28, 1958, Evans
denied Chessman’s motion for a new
trial, and said the transcript was a
valid one, subject to certain cor-
rections (a list was attached to the
judge’s order). Mostly, they were
the emendations of Bessie Lill and
her “apperceiving mass.” One of the
corrections Evans ordered incorpo-
rated, incidentally, was the gibberish
reading of which Leavy had testified
that it made no sense.

Chessman’s reaction to the Evans
decision is set forth starkly in his
appeal:

Let us assume that at the begin-
ning of the hearing ... Judge Evans
told appellant:

“Mr. Chessman, I am going to
give you a full and fair hearing . . .
in the sense that you will be ac-

*Molly Kalin’s appointment as an ex-
pert was later canceled at her own re-
quest, so that Chessman’s plea for an
independent, court-appointed expert
would not be jeopardized. This decision

. eost her at least $5,000, probably more,

o Bi 4 1959

corded every opportunity to present
all the evidence you have im support
of your claims.

“But, Mr. Chessman, I also want
to tell you that no matter how con-
clusive or overwhelming your show-
ing is, it won’t be good enough, for
I intend to rule against you... . I
may have to make 1,000, 2,000, or
even 3,000 changes in the transcript,
but . . . I shall hold these changes

. really make no difference. .
[R]egardless of how thoroughly re-
pudiated it may be, I intend to say
that... this is a good transcript and
that Stanley Fraser was and is...
specifically qualified. . . .”

Judge Evans, of course, never said
that. But . . . that was the result
reached.

I must write here that it is diffi-
cult to read the 5,527-page transcript
with any attitude remotely approach-
ing objectivity and not to agree with
Chessman.

BUT there was more to come. On
March 13, 1958, with Chessman back
in San Quentin, Judge Evans ap-
pointed Stanley Fraser an “expert”
on his own work nunc pro tunc —
“now for then” — retroactively to
November 27! This extraordinary
ruling meant not only that Fraser
would be paid several thousand dol-
lars for his appearance as an expert
witness. It meant also that his testi-
mony as to the validity of his own
work was given “expert” status.
Both sides agree that the nunc pro
tunc means that on November 27,
Judge Evans intended to make Fra-
ser an expert. But on that date when
Chessman challenged the court to
let Fraser take all the time he needed
and then to show that he could read
the notes, Crail asked who would
pay Fraser, and the court said, “I
don’t feel that the Court would be
justified or could ask him to do it,
I mean, as an order, and ask some-
body to pay for his time.” In other
words, on the day on which Evans
intended to make Fraser an expert,
he could find no way to order Fraser
to do expert’s work or to pay him

an expert’s fee.

On December 3, six days after the
judge first intended to make Fraser
an expert, Chessman asked Fraser
a question, and this passage ensued:

MR. CRAIL: Well, that is cer-
tainly calling for the conclusion of

the witness and. would be expert
testimony.

THE. COURT?” Yes,

[Emphasis added.]

There are rules for appointing ex-
perts. They are supposed to have
been given opportunity to study the
material under discussion; Fraser
testified, and Crail argued for the
state, that he had not studied the
notes for some years. Experts are
supposed. to be impartial; Fraser’s
work was precisely the point in issue,
and he could hardly pass impartially
on it. The nunc pro tunc order is
the most fantastic thing in the fan-
tastic Chessman case, with the pos-
sible exception of the fact that a
higher court upheld it.

There have been legal moves since,
but so far they have gone against
Chessman. He has a new execution
date now, his seventh. The date is
October 23, 1959.

Chessman has had his “day in
court,” “focused squarely on the
issue of the adequacy of the tran-
script,” but it turned out to be a
strange “day” indeed. And ironically,
he has never had a legal opportunity
to present the evidence of his in-
nocence which he claims is now avail-
able. It would have been inadmis-
sible in any of his court actions since
he began his independent inquiry.

sustained.

THERE are at least two more legal
moves planned. Hope is not high.

In June of 1959, Governor Ed-
mund Brown (the state’s Attorney
General through most of the time
in which Chessman was fighting the
state) commuted the death sentence
of another man, also convicted under
Section 209. No one in the state
raised much fuss about that com-
mutation — but every word Brown
used in announcing his reasons can
apply equally to Chessman.

And there is at least a hint that
Brown would like to act in the Chess-
man case — but he would run a
grave political risk in granting Chess-
man, the “monster,” the “depraved
predator,” the “evil genius,” even
so much as a ninety-day reprieve.
If the legal action by Chessman
doesn’t pan out, Chessman’s life
will be in Brown’s hands, and it’s
doubtful whether the Governor will
act unless some support comes from
somewhere, and soon.

|
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7 a

BOOKS and the

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‘

Joyce: Portrait Without Irony

JAMES JOYCE. By Richard Ellmann.
Oxford University Press. 842 pp.
$12.50.

David H. Greene
JAMES JOYCE once referred to him-

self as “a man of small virtue, inclined
to alcoholism.” Like his many other
remarks of self-disparagement the de-
scription was not without irony. Joyce
had integrity and he never became an
alcoholic, though few men have enjoyed
the pleasures of alcohol more than he.
But the irony of Joyce’s remarks was
not always apparent, and so the legend
we are familiar with began to take
shape when Joyce arrived in Paris from
Trieste in 1920 to find himself the leader
of a new movement in literature. The
legend continued to grow because the
only corrective, Herbert Gorman’s biog-
raphy, was written with Joyce’s coopera-
tion and under his eagle eye. Gorman
complained to his publisher, “TI will never
write another biography of a living man.
It is too difficult and thankless a task.”
Joyce frightened Gorman out of describ-
ing his life after 1922, rewrote parts
of Gorman’s manuscript, demanded
omissions of unflattering references to
himself and his family, and succeeded
in modifying Gorman’s picture of him-
self so that it tended to corroborate
the legend of the persecuted artist which
Joyce wanted kept alive.

Now, after seven years
Richard Ellmann—author of two ex-
cellent studies of Joyce’s countryman
W. B. Yeats—gives us a portrait of
the artist as he actually was. Only in
its unpretentious title and in the re-
straint with which it is written can
James Joyce be described as a modest
book. Its narrative is more than 300,000
words, ballasted with sixty pages of
documentation and more than 2,000
citations of testimony. Mr. Ellmann
identifies more than a hundred of Joyce’s
surviving relatives and acquaintances
whom he interviewed. He has written
a biography of Boswellian proportions
which students of Joyce will consider
definitive.

of research,

DAVID H. GREENE, whose J. M.
Synge: 1871-1909 (in collaboration with
Edward M. Stephens) was published
last spring by Macmillan, teaches Mod-
ern British Literature at New York
University.

More than any other novelist Joyce
seems to have taken the materials of
his art directly from his own life. Con-
sequently Mr. Ellmann is quite sound in
his assumption that if you look hard
enough at Joyce’s life you will find just
about everything—or the reason for it—
in the pages of his novels. Joyce used
people he had known, including himself,
with a fine disregard for propriety and
the laws of libel. In some instances he
altered neither their names nor their
facial lineaments, but in others the meta-
morphosis is so artful that Mr. Ellmann
separates composite characters into
their components so that he can identify
for us their multiple prototypes. If we
hadn’t already suspected that the hero-
ine of Ulysses was larger than life, Mr.
Ellmann tells that five women, including
Joyce’s wife Nora, were required as
models for Molly Bloom.

The legend of the persecuted artist
was false insofar as Joyce largely created
persecution where it did not exist and
then manipulated it for the nourishment
it gave him. When Stephen Dedalus,
the autobiographical hero of Joyce’s first
novel, assumes his isolation he makes
sure that he has a good audience he
can tell it to. “When he rebels,’ Mr.
Ellmann writes, “he hastens to let them
know of his rebellion so that he can
measure their response to it. He searches
for disciples who must share his motives
vicariously. . . . He buys his own ticket
for Holyhead, but claims to have been
deported. . . . Having stomped angrily
out of the house, he circled back to
peer in the window.” He could not live
in Ireland but he could not live without
it either, so he brought a wife, a brother
and a sister with him, and also the
family portraits—like Aeneas with his
household gods.

MONEY seems to have been one of
the important problems in Joyce’s life
because he had such a disregard for
it. The poverty he lived in for many
years was real enough, but even after
he started receiving patronage from
Harriet Weaver—Joyce admitted once
that in one period of less than five
years she had given him £8500, more
than $40,000—he was still unable to live
without financial emergencies. Mr. ElIl-
mann remarks that Miss Weaver’s bene-
faction “did not make Joyce rich; no
amount of money could have done that;

but it made it possible for him to be
poor only through determined extrava-
gance.”

Although Mr. Ellmann’s method is
one that draws no distinction between
the man and the writer, there are
separate chapters of criticism on Joyce’s
major works. Mr. Ellmann is quite right
in calling “The Dead”—Joyce’s first
song of exile—a linchpin in his work.
It was also an affirmation of Irish na-
tionalism and a prediction that Joyce
would come round, in Mr. Ellmann’s
phrase, to “sharing Ireland’s primi-
tivism.” Of that bewildering book Finne-
gans Wake, which Mrs. Joyce called
“that chop suey he’s writing,” Mr. Ell-
mann admits that it might have been
more “direct” but that Joyce did not
appear to have any alternative to writing
it as he did. All through his work he
had moved gradually from the waking
consciousness to the mind asleep. “That
the great psychological discovery of this
century was the night world he was,
of course, aware, but he frowned on
using that world as a means of therapy.
Joyce’s purpose was not so didactic;
he wished, unassumingly enough, to
amuse men with it.”

MR. ELLMANN’s sympathetic § treat-
ment of Nora Joyce will be appreciated
because she needs and deserves to be
seen in the light of fact. When Joyce
met her in 1904—he immortalized his
first date by making it Bloomsday—she
was a country girl from Galway, with
little formal education. She remarked
in later life, “You can’t imagine what
it was like for me to be thrown into
the life of this man.” Why one of the
most rarified minds of this century, as
Mr. Ellmann describes Joyce, should
have selected her as his wife may have
puzzled many people. But Mr. Ellmann
makes it clear that his choice could not
have been sounder. Joyce once com-
plained that of all his friends only “two
ill-equipped women, to wit, Aunt Jo-
sephine and Nora, seem to be able to
get at my point of view.”

Nora had a supreme indifference to
her husband’s work which must have
been galling at times to a leader sur-

_rounded by disciples. Joyce told Frank

Budgen, “I have an effect of some kind
on people who come near me and know
me and who are my friends. But my
wife’s personality is absolutely proof
against any influence of mine.” Jung
complimented Joyce for the profound
knowledge of the psychology of women

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|
|

which lay behind Joyce’s portrayal of
Molly Bloom. But Nora put it different-
ly: “He knows: nothing at all about
women.”

One finds it hard to believe that if
she treated Joyce like an ordinary man
she did not know all the time that he
was not ordinary. When someone asked
her, after her husband’s death, if she
had known André Gide she replied,
“Sure, if you’ve been married to the
greatest writer in the world, you don’t
remember all the little fellows.” And
to her sister in Galway she wrote, after
Joyce’s death in 1941, “My poor Jim—
he was such a great man.” Few people
will now deny that he was a great man
or even that he was the greatest novelist
of our century. But for the first time
with Mr. Ellmann’s biography we can
also believe that he was very much a
human. being.

Gentle Knife

A KINDLY CONTAGION. By Walter
Toman. Bobbs-Merrill Co, -218 pp.
$3.95.

Robert Hatch
WALTER TOMAN, a psychologist and

professor of that subject at Brandeis
University, is possessed by an exuberant
imagination which he must be at pains
to curb in his scientific work, As a
respite from this self-denial, perhaps,
he writes very brief short stories of
fractured reality which, when they hit
the mark, lodge permanently in the
reader’s mind. His fables, contes, anec-
dotes—whatever it is they should be
called—occasionally suggest Kafka or,
more gently, Thurber, but the resem-
blance is most often illusory: there is
a grim jauntiness about Toman at his
best that does not pigeon hole.

Not that he is always at his best.
Because, as I suppose, Toman writes
stories for the fun and exercise of it,
and not because his life depends on it,
he seems not to care when he is off
his game. All the pieces in A Kindly
Contagion are disconcerting, but some
are so in ways not intended by the
author. Thus, “The Do-It-Yourself
Living Space,” in which the tenants of
a large apartment house gain additional
room by breaking through walls and
seizing the adjacent territory, suffers
from a too-insistent working out of the
international parallels; and “A Plea for
Paternity,” in which a cuckold begs for
the right to believe that at least one
of his children in his own, is no more
than conventional pathetic irony. There

may be eight or ten tales in the hook
that fail in some respect, but the book
contains thirty-two entries (I said they
were short) and the balance is markedly
in our favor.

There is the minatory history of a
flavorless young man named Henry King
who became King Henry the First by
the banal process of writing his flavor-
less name on every available surface;
there is the cold-minded philanthropist
who throws dinner rolls from his hotel
baleony to study the reactions of a
crowd receiving manna in limited quan-
tity, but who loses his enthusiasm for
the study when some of his subjects
develop the gift of flight; there is the
inmate who argues with awful per-
suasiveness that one of our forward-
looking foundations might well subsidize
an international exchange of lunatics.
Once on a streetcar the passengers began
offering one another their seats and went
on from that to fondly stroking one
another—unfortunately they were crisp-
ly rebuffed when they carried the prac-
tice to the sidewalks. A loving couple
is frustrated by the armor they feel
constrained to wear, and a lion tamer—
he is a hauntingly familiar type—suffers
a predictable accident because he insists
upon inflicting increasingly painful in-
dignities on the animal while his head
is in its mouth,

OTHER readers will have other favorites
—I have not exhausted mine, but I
don’t want to go through the book skim-
ming the cream off Toman’s jests. If
one must sum up his attitude, it is that
he has found man quite incompetent
at the job of being human, but never-
theless cherishes the species for its
extraneous qualities of entertainment,
surprise and a kind of woolly sweetness.
He is most effective when he cracks
reality, but leaves it still in the frame,
and his best stories are beguiling and
rewarding quite aside from whatever
moral plums may be embedded in them.

Toman’s yarns retell very readily, and
shortly we shall be hearing them, some-
what mangled, at the more knowing
parties. References to Busse’s World
Theater, or Bob the Cop, or John De-
Haven, the inventive mortician, will be
dropped with increasing frequency as
the word spreads; it might be well to
get them first from the author’s mouth.

Toman is an Austrian and writes his
fictions in German, but he has found
in Harry Zohn, a colleague at Brandeis,
the perfect translator. The prose is clean
and idiomatic, but faintly foreign, like
the speech of one of those delightful
Europeans who make us proud of our
language by speaking it so handsomely.

an GG GE GH
a Kenneth
Rexroth
f Bird wn

In this collection of what he calls
“obvious essays''—on literature,
art, cultural movements old
and new—Rexroth ranges from
jazz and D. H. Lawrence to Sung
painting and the Chinese concept
of science, from Edward Gibbon
to Henry Luce. Included in this
collection of eighteen essays
are "Rimbaud as Capitalist
Adventurer’, "Samuel Beckett
and the Importance of Waiting,"
"The Hasidism of Martin Buber,’
"The Plays of Yeats." An ebullient
iconoclast, Rexroth here deflates
fashionable reputations and
seeks out neglected values with
energy and insight. He combines
prodigious erudition in many
fields of world culture with a
colloquial approach which makes
the abstruse simple and the

patterns of contemporary thought
as exciting as fiction.

ND PAPERBOOK, $1.55
Hardbound, $3.75
NEW DIRECTIONS
333 Sixth Ave., New York, N. Y.

Now Available

RECENT
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A Brief Anthology
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Exposition Press / 386 4th Ave., N.Y. 16
235

The Monster and the Mirro

NOTES OF A SOVIET DOCTOR. By
G. S. Pondoeyv. Consultants Bureau.
238 pp. $4.95.

George A, Silver
THE MORE the Americans and the

Russians attempt to emphasize then
differences, the more the similarities
emerge. It is embarrassingly trite to be
forced to declare again “Human, all too
human!” but it may be as useful as
it is necessary. This recent book by a
Soviet doctor is a case in point.

The introduction (by an American
physician) underlines the value of the
book to American readers, throwing in
only a slight barb: “The reader will
encounter three distinctive personalities
—an urbane, well read, and broadly ex-
perienced doctor, whose counterpart is
to be found among the best the world
over; a doctrinaire who pontificates a
straight line orthodoxy; and an illu-
minated humanist who is committed to
—and endeavoring to communicate to
his professional successors—man’s as-
pirations for the true, the good, and
the beautiful!” Then a cautionary word:
“Tt is this order of paradoxical juxta-
position of bald fact and moonshine in-
terpretation that makes the Notes some-
times read like the notations of a split
personality.” Thus the reader will be-
ware of Marxist dogma in the author’s
proud emphasis on Russian contribu-
tions to medicine. But except for an
occasional whistle, the Marxism never
really gets in the way.

The fact that doctors are subservient
to the State, and that all citizens are en-
titled by right to medical care, without
charge, does not seem really to separate
the Russian doctor from his American
counterpart. The concept of medicine as
science and skill is universal. “If we
compare the modern doctor, trained in
biological and medical science and able
to make use of medical instruments and
laboratories, with the doctor of antiquity,
possessing only his own senses, we can
understand why the activities of the
latter were looked upon as an art.” And,
more and more, American medical jour-
nals would publish remarks such as
this: “There is no sickness in a man but
there is a sick man.” Or “Disease and
the environment constitute an indivisible
entity: to treat them separately implies
falling into a profound methodological
error.”

K urthermore, not only does the doctor

GEORGE A. SILVER, M.D., is chief
of the Division of Social a apes a
Montefiore Hospital, New York. t

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the task. At prese
Attaché in London, Pe

see his profession very similarly in the
two countries, doctors themselves should
be seen similarly: “This ‘something’ is
by no means supernatural, but is per-
fectly natural. It is those traits of char-
acter which the patient craves to see in
his doctor: gentleness, tact, warmth,
kindness, self-sacrifice, sympathy, ability
to console and reassure and so on.”
And patients in the two countries
apparently have the same damnable
habits: “When he is not cured as quickly
as he would like, the despairing patient
begins to wander from one doctor to
another; some try in this way to confirm
the first doctor’s diagnosis by that of
the second; others hold the view that
one head may be good but two are
better; yet others, to use the specific
expression of the patient, say ‘they are
clutching at straws, although in the

Have We Been Americanized?

Oreste F. Pucciani

AMERICANS have always been proud
of the fact that there is no such thing
as an American orthodoxy, no code for
behaving like an American. Our national
character would seem to be best defined
by the sum of our differences, and tra-
ditionally we have seen these differences
as indicating our devotion to freedom,
even as a guarantee of the survival of
freedom among us. Now there are signs
that this is changing; that freedom in
America is being measured increasingly
by standards of uniform behavior which
an older generation would have judged
conformist. Such at least are the impli-
cations of the many studies that analyze
our collective ways and suggest at least
that we are no longer the individuals
we once were. Such also is more than
implied in a recent brilliant study of
American civilization by Professor Cy-
rille Arnavon, L’Américanisme et nous,
which has just been published by Del
Duca in France. As the French title
indicates, Professor Arnavon is alarmed
lest America, having “Americanized” it-
self, should now dogmatically Ameri-
canize the rest of the world, and France
in particular.

L’Américanisme et nous cannot be put
aside on the pretext that it is another
example of bigoted French “anti-Ameri-
canism.” It is on the contrary a sober
and scholarly study of our civilization
by a man who has devoted his life to
the French Cultural

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eas
great majority of cases, nobody believes
them to be drowning; these ‘clutchers’ —
will listen to any hearsay advice, even
so far as having dealings with quacks.”

The student must learn to deal with
patients individually (in the Soviet
Union!): “Frivolous patients... can
unfortunately be restrained from ex-
cesses by one thing only—frightening—
and not by good and sensible advice”;
and he sternly admonishes, “It is...
inadmissible in any case to express one’s
thoughts aloud: ‘Heart and aorta en-
larged, murmur at the apex, accentua-
tion of the first sound’ and so on.”
And, “Cries, sobs, roars and tears—these
are the usual reactions of the sick child,
and whoever cannot endure them should
not be a children’s doctor.”

The book is charming in its formal
and serious dedication to medicine as a
calling, and profoundly moving in the
implication of the common humanity

of doctor and patient, U.S.A. and USSR.

is the author of a full-length history of
American literature; he has written
dozens of articles and several volumes
on the American novel. He was formerly
Professor of American Studies at the
Universities of Lyon, Lille and Dakar.
He enjoys, moreover, the unusual dis-
tinction of having taught American
literature at Columbia, Harvard and
New York Universities. Altogether, if
America can be understood by a French-
man, it can be understood by Professor
Arnavon.

Professor Arnavon’s thesis about
America can be summarized as follows:
“Americanism” is a doctrine which im-
plicitly contains the seeds of an Ameri-
canization of the world. Since World
War II, America’s position has evolved,
officially at least, toward a conservatism
which is often reactionary and which
has made America unfit to provide
leadership for those forces of popular
liberation which are now seeking ex-
pression in the world. Since 1945 “The
Great Change” has brought with it at-
titudes and policies which are seemingly
a direct reversal of more traditional
American attitudes. America has gradu-

ORESTE F, PUCCIANI is the author
of The French Theatre Since 1930. He
teaches contemporary French literature
at the University of California, Los
Angeles, but is at present on leave in —
France, where he is working on a oe

—— om

er =

ally come to occupy the contradictory
position of a great power which, founded
in revolution, is now slowly becoming
reactionary. Our attitudes are there for
the world to see: the aid we have given
to dictatorial regimes in South America;
our opposition to popular liberation
movements in Greece and Spain; our
policies in the Near East; our hysterical
response to communism. Professor Arna-
von is not the first to have been struck
by American paradoxes nor to have
pointed out the irony implicit in our
becoming, of all nations, the prototype
of status quo philosophy. But he is one
of the first to probe beneath contradic-
tions and to ask if perhaps the “Ameri-
can Heritage” is entirely as liberal,
revolutionary and dedicated to the prin-
ciple of freedom as we always assumed.

IN THIS respect, L’Américanisme et
mous is a more profound book than
many in both America and France which
have inspired it. Turning to American
history, Professor Arnavon finds cause
to believe that “Americanism” is a co-
herent program of American domination
in the world. It is nothing less than
American capitalism advanced to a
philosophical position and bolstered by
an unscrupulous appeal to “Manifest
Destiny.” The analysis goes still deeper.
There is something shallow and empty,
Professor Arnavon feels, about the pro-
gram which “Americanism” implies.
This is not, however, because America
as a civilization is perforce shallow and
empty. It is rather that “Americanism,”
which by no means represents our whole
culture, condemns itself to a false posi-
tion by the fact that it is, at bottom,
no more than an economic doctrine—a
method—posing as an ideology. Perhaps
I am pushing the author’s thought too
far, but he would seem to-imply that
American capitalism, when sufficiently
hard pressed, reveals itself for what it
is: a doctrine of expediency. Anchored
in the past and mortgaging the future,
“Americanism” is a desperate enterprise
of success for its own sake. In order to
make itself respectable, it hides under
many guises: liberalism, free enterprise,
even God. Yet at bottom it remains
singularly sterile. It fails in those areas
of value and spiritual richness in which
ideologies must be tested. The great
forces which have made America were
often marked by singular discrepancies.
Even the Puritan mind, with its hypoc-
risy, its pragmatism, its primitive
Manicheism, its literal supernaturalism
was already, in its own way, an “Ameri-
can” phenomenon. On the one hand the
Kingdom of God; on the other hand
the World. The two points of view could

7, 1959

as seen in ee and Rese conversations
by their friends and colleagues

“DIALOGUE ON
JOHN DEWEY

la this exchange of opinion and reminiscence,
the great philosopher and educator comes vividly
to life. We meet him with his family and friends,
¢ overhear his lectures, glimpse him at work, dis-

cuss fig books, see him absorbed in ideas and above all “living his philoso-
phy.” Readers will find here a delightful and instructive companion for
the Dewey Centennial year.

Participants in the discussion: James T. Farrell, James Gutmann, Alvin
S. Johnson, Horace M. Kallen, Harry W. Laidler, Corliss Lamont, Ernest
Nagel, John H. Randall, Jr., Herbert W. Schneider, Harold Taylor,

Milton Halsey Thomas (A biographical sketch of each participant in-
cluded in the volume).

DIALOGUE ON
GEORGE SANTAYANA

A paradoxical and poetic nature is re-
vealed in this book about the philosopher
who was also a beloved teacher and friend.
We learn of his personal life and of his
ideas; hear his self-estimate as a man of i

letters; learn of his increasing isolation. Out of the conversation emerges
a portrait of absorbing interest.

Participants in the discussion: James Gutmann, Horace M. Kallen,
Corliss Lamont, Milton Munitz, Ernest Nagel, John H. Randall, Jr.,
Herbert W. Schneider (Biographical sketches included in the volume).

Originally recorded on tape — both dialogues have been edited by

CORLISS LAMONT

with the assistance of MARY REDMER
HORIZON PRESS

Both books published on Tuesday, October 20 (John Dewey's Centennial)
At all booksellers * EACH VOLUME $2.50

NEW YORK 36, -N. Y.

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238

no more hope to meet than “Manifest
Destiny” could hope to become recon-
ciled with “Self-determination.”

What emerges finally from Professor
Arnavon’s study is the rather chilling
prospect of a modern doctrine, “Ameri-
canism,” which has absorbed the tensions
and contradictions of the past and fused
them into a single concept. The con-
tradictions are now expressed in a
rhetoric which permits us to rationalize
as “idealism” our own brutal responses
to utterly realistic situations. The re-
sulting shabbiness shows itself for what
it is: American bad faith choosing the
immediate over the ultimate. Professor
Arnavon’s views would find practical
application in the vogue—it can hardly
be called more—of self-criticism which
is sweeping over us at this moment.
We criticize our schools, our philosophy,
our ultimate goals, even our religious
needs. Yet we somehow do not get down
to essentials. Even Riesman and C.
Wright Mills have been better diagnos-
ticians than surgeons. Why is this? The
bitter possibility remains that, if we
do not get down to essentials, it is be-
cause we do not intend to.

IT SHOULD be clear by now that such
questions emerge from reading L’Améri-
canisme et nous because Professor
Arnavon is not a dispassionate observer,
but has himself taken up a_ position.
It is the position of the French intel-
lectual, traditionally allied to the ideal
of democratic revolution and. doctrinaire
liberalism. It might be described «as
radical rationalism. Professor Arnavon’s
essay often recalls, though it is less
extreme, the positions taken by Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir, or Camus: non-
Communist of the Left.

Such a position, unpopular in the
United States, has the merit of revealing
a doctrinal struggle in the world. It
makes clear that questions of theory
cannot be avoided indefinitely; that there
are social and historical consequences
to the act of thinking itself. We may
hide from this fact for a long while,
in the pious hope that our differences
will dissolve. But sooner or later we are
condemned by history and by the world
to assume responsibility for our contra-
dictions, to commit ourselves to action
and to be judged. As pragmatists, we
Americans have long felt that a basic
functionalism was sufficient test of our
intellectual stamina and moral good
faith. We have, with considerable pride
and with what we called wisdom, avoid-
ed the entangling alliances of thought
and the hair-splitting theological quarrels
of intellectualism. We now discover,
through such books as L’Américanisme

Mie

bush | by

et nous, that the world: is judging us
not only on the basis of our atomic
power, but according to the coherence
of our thinking.

THOUGH there are signs that the
American intellectual is beginning to
bestir himself, he has been singularly
lazy in his most essential work. Perhaps
this has been because, as Professor Mills
has suggested, the American intellectual,
for all that he is stigmatized as an “egg-
head,” has. not. been as alienated from
the operating society as his Continental
counterpart. ‘The question which then
inevitably arises is: Why not? For what
ends has the American intellectual allow-
ed himself to become institutionalized?
Why is there, as Professor Barzun has
pointed out, such a remarkable lack of
concern for intellect even in our univer-
sities? Why is the. American intellectual
seemingly incapable of coming to grips
with this problem? Why, for that matter,
does Professor Barzun himself not come
to grips with it after he has pointed it
out? It.is a curious fact—and Professor
Arnavon’s. book. is a case in point—that
the. French ‘intellectual, who is in his
person far more “institutionalized”. than
the American, is still more independent,
more critical, more fearless in. pursuing
his theoretical work. ;

These are some of the questions which

Inside Athens
(Note on a Vanished Forensic Art)

Before Dale Carnegie began

To demonstrate that any man
Subscribing to a weekly plan
Could Jearn to wield the gavel,
Demosthenes, an. earnest Greek,
Who had a tendency to squeak,
Had disciplined himself to speak
Successfully with gravel.

While walking on the beach alone,

He’d stuff his mouth with bits of stone,
And then, in lieu of mictophone,

He’d orate to the ocean;

Till one damp day a vagrant breeze,
Blew on his neck and made him sneeze,
Evoking in Demosthenes

A fascinating notion:

From that day hence, whenever he
Addressed a crowd on liberty

And someone in the baleony

Yelled, “Boo! Sit down, you rebel!”
Demosthenes would not reply,

But fixed the heckler with his eye,

And puffing out his check, let fly

A swift, unerring pebble.

(N.B. The Grecian word for it
Was kachlex, or, in English, “grit.”)
H, J. Gorriiss

‘he N ION
7 oo ALTLON-

v , i ‘
L’Américanisme et nous will raise in the
minds of thoughtful readers. Broadly
stated, they might be summed up as
follows: Just what does it mean when
man asserts that he is free? Perhaps
one of the ironical side effects of this
remarkable book will be the discovery,
for Americans, that “nows’” refers not
to the French at all, but to ourselves.

it
7
n

THEATRE

Harold Clurman

AFTER seeing The Gang’s All Here,
Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s po-
litical melodrama (Ambassador), I felt
somewhat like the street orator who
challenged “Do you believe in God?
Take either side.”

This does not mean that I had several
sharp reactions of divergent nature or
that I had no reaction at all. What I
felt was a sort of benign neutrality. But
out on the sidewalk after the second act
a critic I respect indicated that he
thought the play unusual — and “ad-
vanced” — for these days: meaning
something to be encouraged. In the
theatre we are constrained to a consid-
erable degree of relativism in our judg-
ments.

The Gang’s All Here is the story of
a nonentity elected to the Presidency
of the United States in the twenties
through the machinations of a group of
Ohio racketeers who constitute his Cab-
inet. They hornswoggle the unfortunate
man into betrayal of the country and
finally into a moment of “greatness”—
which consists of committing suicide.

As melodrama, the play, though trim
_ and never uninteresting, is not particu-
larly tense; as journalism it is not suf-

ficiently detailed; as sociological inter-

pretation, primitive with a dash of
-hortatory patriotics; as character study,
thinly sentimenal. Yet a theatre critic
is disinclined to dismiss the play out of
hand. For the earnest professionals and
many theatregoers these days seem to
suffer a sense of guilt about the back-

_wardness of our stage in reflecting the

_ contemporary scene, particularly in re-
gard to what might be considered con-
troversial matters.

- While there is psychological justifica-
tion for the uneasiness, it does not seem
to me concretely sound. Our theatre’s
impotence to confront reality is surely
a symptom of our general shrinking
_ from any public discussion that might
involve decided disagreement, but it

nO SS

mand more topical drama—thesis plays
ee ‘

=i
.

does not follow that we ought to de-—

about such immediate issues as. dis-
armament, atom tests and the like.

In addition to the fear and confusion
which have bedeviled us in the past
ten years or more, our stage has been
increasingly thwarted by disastrous
economics, so that producing a play un-
conventional in content as well as in
form has become almost quixotic. But
quite apart from this, there has de-
veloped of late something like a rooted
habit of discussing everything in swift
and facile generalizations—Time fashion
—so that the high school- and college-
educated citizen knows something about
everything—art, science, politics, medi-
cine, foreign affairs, etc.—and precious
little about anything.

Nothing seems to be experienced. We
harbor a multitude of opinions and
possess almost no convictions. Even
our doubts are doubtful. The noise
about us—which includes more infor-
mation in the head of a schoolboy than
Aristotle could ever have absorbed or
acquired—renders us essentially igno-
rant even on the one subject with which
we might be familiar—ourselves.

Just Out:

David Carper:
Paul Jacobs:
Frank Marquart:
Harvey Swados:
Daniel Bell:

B. J. Widick:

Dan Wakefield:
Sidney Lens:
Everett Kassalow:

75¢

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New Trends in American Labor
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The UAW: Limitations of Unionism
New York’s Hospital Strike

Little Labor: The Forgotten Unions
Automation and Unions

DISSENT: 509 Fifth Avenue, New York 17, N.Y.

Hence American history on our stage
is usually juvenile and boring. Our mem-
ory of the recent past is so sketchy
that not only have most theatregoers
forgotten that the material of The
Gang’s All Here was treated years ago
in the novel, Revelry, and its drama-
tization, but I heard a middle-aged lady
in the audience having a joke in the
play explained to her by being remind-
ed that there was Prohibition during
the twenties. So that finally a play
about such recent events as the scandals
of the Harding administration—which
I believe did not really shock the coun-
try, any more than have more recent
scandals—becomes a play about a good-
natured boob betrayed by pals with no
respect for public office. We look on
undisturbed as the poor guy in his
death throes voices the sentiment that
nothing like his situation will occur in
the future.

It is not “daring” themes, the strong
stuff of general dispute, we need so
much in our theatre as dramatists to
deal with what they truly feel and
know. They cannot make any real con-

$3.00 per year

No Longer
A Forbidden Subject!

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Address
(City...

The veil of hush on the forbidden subject of
adultery has been lifted. To be properly
informed concerning its existence in modern
society, it is vitally necessary to have a full
understanding of it. Dr. Raley Husted
Bell’s challenging study was formerly re-
stricted and sold for as high as $5.00 a
copy. It is now offered to adult and sophis-
ticated people for only $1.00, sent postpaid.
Mail the coupon for your copy while our
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a ee oe (O97 ae 1

tact with us through research on “im-
portant” subjects. Serious drama is not
serious through studied hearsay and
good intentions. The way to get under
your audience’s skin is first to get under
your own. The American playwright is
too often a man whose spiritual range,
no matter what subject he has chosen,
is confined to the limits of Shubert
Alley. He does not seem to be vitally
engaged in anything but making a
good living at his shrinking profession.

7 wel” See ee

The one thing I unqualifiedly enjoyed
in’ The Gang’s All Here was Melvyn
Douglas in the central role. Douglas is
that rare and stalwart phenomenon: a
leading player who is always doing his
job—on the road or in town, whenever
and wherever he has an appropriate
role ina play of some discernible merit.
This hardy dedication gives the char-
acter of President Griffith P. Hastings
in The Gang’s All Here a. dimension
the authors must have hoped for.

ART

Fairfield Porter

THE new. show at the Museum of
Modern Art is held together by a tenu-
ous theme. It is called “New: Images of
Man,” and like most ‘themes, it is forced,
and therefore mteresting. The common
superficial look of the exhibition is that
it collects monsters. of mutilation, death
and decay. It is less an exhibition for
people interested in painting and sculp-
ture than an entertainment for moralists.
It has a painterly-plastic side and a
Jiterary side. The painters are Appel,
Bacon, Diebenkorn, Golub, Balcomb
Greene, de Kooning, Lebrun, McGarrell,
Miller, Oliveira and Pollock: the sculp-
tors, Armitage, Baskin, Butler, Campoli,
César, Paolozzi, Richier, Roszak, Wester-
mann and Wotruba. Dubuffet and Gia-
cometti appear in both categories. In
the introduction to the catalogue, Peter
Selz, director of the exhibition, says,
“Like the more abstract artists of the
period these imagists take the human
situation . .. rather than formal struc-
ture, as their starting point.” And in
the preface, Paul Tillich, the theologian,
writes: “The image of man became
transformed, distorted, disrupted and it
finally disappeared in recent art. But
as in the reality of our lives, so in its
mirror of the visual arts, the human
protest arose against the fate to become
a thing.”

- The most monstrous creations are
contributed by the sculptors, and the
most horrible paintings by the British
Francis Bacon. His gratuitous horrors
illustrate the conclusions of untold
stories: why is the Cardinal screaming
(or maybe yawning) in his brass cage;
and Van Gogh’s shadowed face, is it
mutilated by a leprosy? After a while
Bacon’s images become absurd. With a

FAIRFIELD PORTER is a painter and
the author of Thomas Eakins, recently
published by George Braziller.

very few notable exceptions the English
have been literary artists, at least since
Blake, Their strongest impact or most
haunting memory comes from a sug-
gested story. For instance, Paolozzi’s
muddy concretions of broken clockwork
are richer for the suggestion of the after-
math of a bombardment. Paolozzi_ is
British. But Dubuffet’s Knight of Dark-
ness or César’s incomplete torsos are
essentially plastic and say their say in
terms of volumes. They are French. So
is Germaine’ Richier. She makes human
figures of insect vitality from the slash
left by the lumberman. She sees figures
in the forest. Hers is not so much a
new view of man as an anthropomorphic
view of nature. Baskin is American. His
smaller than life-sized, unemployed fat
men come out of a Turkish bath. They
have none of the eloquence of his state-
ment: “. . . Our human frame, our
gutted mansion, our enveloping sack
of beef is yet a glory. ... Between eye
and eye stretches an interminable land-
scape.”

THERE are straight monsters, and there
are formal ambiguities. There is the
ambiguity in a Baleomb Greene painting
about what is light and what is form.
There is the ambiguity of making some-
thing real by looking to one side. In
this way a figure by Giacometti is real
because its thinness and height bound
the space around it: its surface is in-
finity’s single limit, as zero is the single
limit of the series of all the numbers.
Instead of feminine grace, de Kooning’s
women have the grace of the stroke of
the brush at the end of his arm, Dieben-
korn’s ambiguity is that one is doubt-
ful, not of what anything is, but only
of where it is: the definiteness of struc-
ture comes from the indefiniteness of
spatial relations.

‘To react against formalism is to begin

hit. be
i ie fi '
~ ide “ pe é ed

a new formality. It would be difficult
to say for sure whether the first mo-
tivation of these artists is formal struc-
ture or the content of the human pre-
dicament. For instance, Golub’s archaic
classical giants covered with an artificial
patina, or Oliveira’s re-rendering of a
Renaissance painting, show neither “total
commitment” nor a concern with the
human predicament. Neither do they
show any clear preference for formal
structure.

Or if one takes as his subject matter
the pit of Buchenwald, as Lebrun does,
one takes for subject matter something
safely remote from the smallness of
daily-life experience. Are these artists
protesting against the terrors of the
modern world, or against a fear of not
being accepted? Are they protesting the
dehumanization of modern man, or are
they afraid of the responsibility attached
to an assertion of individuality? Do
they show man-become-a-thing because
they are. afraid of it, or because they
wish- to be so themselves; because they
wish to be ordinary? The violence of
their subject matter may very well hide
a fear of appearing ridiculous. The
violent image ‘of man has the purpose
of making a creation acceptable to
critics, it gives an easy subject ‘matter
to critical writing, for these paintings
and sculptures seem to mean something
profound in proportion to the amount of
distortion and the violence of their ap-
pearance, and in this way the artist
clears himself from a conscience made
uneasy by his choice to be only an
artist in a society where moral threats
emanate from sociologists and practical
threats from politicians. The artists
want to be as needed as scientists or
generals or bureaucrats or entertainers.
The new image of man may be a dis-
guise, an excuse, an apology for the
artistic profession.

On hearing Stavrogin’s confession of
his ugly crime, Dostoevsky’s priest com-
mented that fear of ridicule would pre-
vent him from making his confession
public. And in the same way the artist’s
indifference to moral censure covers up
his fear of ridicule. He may seem to
be courageously facing the human pre-
dicament, but this courage saves him
from the harder necessity of accepting
the difficulties of art and public con-
tempt. It has probably been like this
only since the artist was told that he
is a prophet, and that art is a substitute
for religion. His job would be easier
to face fruitfully if he did not think
that he was supplying a lack that it
is not his business to supply. The fate
to become a thing may not be so terrible
as the pressure to become a seer,

P Tone

i 7 Th N TLON

Crossword Puzzle No. 838

By FRANK W. LEWIS

ACROSS:
1 Two-tun description of older ale,
rubbed the wrong way. (6-8)
9 See 15 across

10 Game, not to be confused with a
sparker. (7)

11 A bad actor, perhaps, but may drive
the point home. (6)

12 Walk in London?
barred. (8)

14 Acted like a Yankee, limned point-
lessly? (7)

15, 9, 21 down, and 23 How the poet
started out, but didn’t anticipate
the fall. -(1,.4,(2,.5;.4, 3;.3,)

17 In Peer Gynt Suite, “Ase’s Death”
doesn’t make one uncomfortable. (5)

19 Gypsies traditionally wear one. (7)

21 Likely to run, if it 15 across with
another division. (3,5)

23 See 15 across

25 Saw, perhaps, in the sort of hard
‘work the city provides. (7)

26 Ca way to separate the stranded.

It might be

27 Harold went with a question of
earthly content. (4, 2, 3,5)
DOWN:

1 Reaper speed? (5, 4)
2 Defenseless with limbs lopped off
at the trunk. (7)

October 17, 1959

With taking ways? (9)

and 6 Ran after an accompaniment
to 9, perhaps like a cowboy. (9)
The left portions of the rider’s
name? (10)

6 See 4 down

7 Look at what might be on the line!
8

® CO

It’s nonsense! (7)
and 24 Once Huns might have been,
if anapprochable in likeness. (8)
18 Turning away from what George
couldn’t tell to the country? (10)
Rises with Paddy’s worry, perhaps.
(5, 4)
16 Put up with the retotaled correc-
tion. (9)
18 The language of the obligations we
dishonor. (7)
20 A mass of 21 across with the best
part missing. (7)
21 See 15 aeross
22 How the occupants of 12 sleep. (5)
24 See 8 down

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 837

ACROSS: 1 In the meantime; 10 De-
viate; 11 Cheerio; 12 Parboiled; 13
Aisle; 14 Inbred; 16 Infidels; 19 Neigh-
bor; 20 States; 22 Meade; 23 Secretive;
25 Crimson; 26 Roomers; 27 Trans-
parently. DOWN: 2 Never; 3 and 9
Head over heels in love; 4 Meekly; 5
Acceding; 6 The Man in the Moon; 7
Mare’s nest; 8 Adoption; 15 Brigadier;
17 Suspense; 18 Loosen up; 21 Scorer;
22 Mock; 24 Ideal.

=
an

RESORT

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new Konkapot development. $1650. up. Water,
electric, phone. Roads, views, trees, wild-
flowers, nature trails. 2 miles to Tanglewood.

Walter Wilson, P.O. Box 1673, Lenox, Mass.

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The new cars rolling off the assembly line offer a bewildering
variety of qualities: more power, better acceleration, more visibility,
a more luxury, greater economy, increased speed, greater size, fancier

bodies. Indeed, if you are so minded, you can even get smaller size,
plainer bodies, less speed and still greater economy. . . .

But how much safety do you get?

The Cornell Safety Car —an archetype of the safe car developed
jointly by Cornell University and the Liberty Mutual Insurance
Co.— made its debut last July at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington.

. But for Nation readers this same car made its debut three months
earlier —in our issue of April 11, 1959 to be exact —wm an article
by Ralph Nader entitled “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy.”

One day — if not this year — you'll be able to buy that car, or
something close to it. Even Detroit is slowly learning that 300 horses
under the hood can be 200 too many, and that auto buyers will not
forever accept chrome as a substitute for structural strength.

Characteristically, The Nation reader is always a little bit ahead
of most people in learning about the shape of the future — whether of
cars, politics, the arts, the sciences or social problems. For The Nation
reader, truth always comes a little earlier.

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hy ' 10-17-59
Hh At ee . “ ‘ *
Hp cas } ‘ ’ ai nial ad “i asin hi ,

The Quiz-Whiz Fraud

HAIL,
BLITHE SPIRIT.

Dalton Trumbo

The Maemillan Victory

R. T. McKenzie

Dilemma of Soviet Trade

Harold J. Berman

LETTERS

Daring the H-Bomb

Dear Sirs: A great deal of concern has
been expressed over the French proposal
to test an atomic bomb in the Sahara
Desert. |See “Poisoning the Sahara,” by
Ira Morris, The Nation, Sept. 5.] The
loudest protests so far have come from
the people of Nigeria and Ghana. For
the prevailing wind from the desert,
which blows continuously for two
months during the dry season, may car-
ry radioactive particles of sand over
their countries.

The British Direct Action Committee
Against Nuclear War ts planning to make
a dramatic protest by sending an inter-
national group into the test area in the
Sahara. This group, by running the risk
of imprisonment, injury or death, hopes
to remind the world of the extreme
danger and folly of testing nuclear weap-
ons, and of allowing ownership of such
armaments to spread to yet another
country. The committee (it is unaffili-
ated with any political party) organized
the London-Aldermaston March and
the non-violent resistance at the Swaff-
ham rocket site. Its policy is unilateral
nuclear disarmament by each power now
possessing nuclear weapons.

The protest team will assemble in
Ghana and, announcing in advance their
intentions to the French Government,
travel by automobile from Ghana to the
Reggan area of the Sahara, where the
first French atom bomb is shortly to be
tested. If they manage to reach their
destination, they will try to dissuade the
scientific and military personnel on the
spot from carrying out the test. If un-
successful, they will remain in the area
themselves when the test is made.

We appeal to all those in sympathy
with this project to make a donation
toward the extremely heavy costs that
will be incurred. Contributions should
be sent to The Direct Action Committee
Against Nuclear War, 344 Seven Sisters
Rd., London N.4, England.

Eart RussEty, Lorp Boyp Orr,

Par Arrowsmitu, Aprit Carrer,

Donatp Soper, ALEX Comrortr
London

The West’s Fault

Dear Sirs: Regarding Frederick Kuh’s
article, “East Germany Is No Mirage,”

in your October 10 issue, no reference is

made to the very powerful forces of
subversion used by the West to weaken
the East German regime. It was this

factor which caused the “blockade” of

1949 and has caused the present Berlin

at Uh ee eee Bp i . .

|, Ae

situation — not to mention the June,
1953, riots.

It also explains, in large part, the
failure to “ease political repression”
which is so lamented by Mr. Kuh.

Max Bers
Bethayres, Pa.

Is it also the West’s fault that East
Germans are still fleeing to the Federal
Republic at the rate of 3,000 weekly? —

Tue Epirors

Swallowing the Rat

Dear Sirs: Regarding your September
13 editorial, “Then and Now,” concern-
ing recent motion pictures which recall
the Nazis “as a bunch of great chaps
who played on the other team,” [ think
you might be guilty — if I may borrow
one of Khrushchev’s latest expressions
— of not being able to swallow or spit
out a dead rat which has caught in your
throat.

None of us needs to be reminded that
the Nazis were desperate and obscene
men with diseased minds. But it must
also be granted that not every German
soldier was a thoroughly indoctrinated,
cold-blooded fanatic. The German heroes
of both The Young Lions and The
Enemy Below were . fictional ex-
amples of a minority group of militants
who may have been deeply wrenched by
internecine forces — the oppressing duty
of the soldier and the basic belief in the
dignity of the single human being. I
believe that any intelligent person will
readily concede that such men existed
in the German army... .

Frank H. Crowrner
Associated Editor, Daily Tar Heel
U. of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, N.C.

There is, unfortunately, a generation
now growing up who will never know
that the Nazis were “desperate and ob-
scene men with diseased minds” if it has

to rely on Hollywood’s current treat-
ment of World War Il. — Tue Eprrors.

Man-Kating Bears

Dear Sirs: 1 wonder how long Professor
Wade Thompson [“My Campaign
Against Fraternities,” Sept. 26] can
hold on at Brown? Every generation or
two, Brown finds itself plagued with at
least one humanistic scholar: E. Benja-
min Andrews, Perey Marks, and now
Wade Thompson. Sixty-three years ago
my father suffered with E. Benjamin
Andrews, who spoke out too honestly
for Bryan and humanity. Thirty-three
years ago I was not allowed to meet:
Perey Marks, who had just spoken out
too honestly for The Plastic Age. And
now, Wade Thompson. Has he spoken

ie ae _ > Ay ri iy - >]

Fe fi<. 9 ; . at = at Fe ar

“ey ea, hig 7 al. Wd rn - W _ M iF a
i, Neg : r 2 ‘

out too honestly concerning the chief
industry of Athol, Massachusetts?
Would that every Brunonian of the
class of 1963 could read and ponder
this September 26 issue of The Nation
which I did not have the wit to read
and ponder thirty-three years ago! With
humor and insight Professor Thompson
has helped me to relive some of the
most intense months of my youth.

Morris SHARP
Chicago, Ill.

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
241 '@

ARTICLES

243 @ The Quiz-Whiz Fraud: Hail,
Blithe Spirit!
by DALTON TRUMBO
246 @ Dilemma of Soviet Trade
by HAROLD J. BERMAN
249 '@ ROTC: Failure of a Mission
by GENE M.’ LYONS
251 @ The Macmillan Victory
by R. T. McKENZIE

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

254 ‘@ On the Art of Book Publishing
by EMILE CAPOUYA

255 @ Overhearing (poem)
by WILLIAM STAPPORD

256 ‘@ In the Time of Fall (poem)
by RALPH GUSTAFSON
257 @ Notes from the Future: Two

Poets
by M. L. ROSENTHAL

258 '@ Letter from Chicago
by JEAN MARTIN

259 @ Theatre

by HAROLD CLURMAN
260 '@ Art

by FAIRVIELD PORTER

Crosword Puzzle (opp. 260)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

HOUMA

ieorge G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, Wditor

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Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. Js. Rosenthal, ‘Poetry
Lester Trimble, Musie

Alexander Werth, Wuropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager

The Nation, Oct. 24, 1959. Vol, 189, No. 13
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allies,

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1959

VOLUME 189, No. 13

EDITORIALS

Pre-Summit Contretemps

If one freezes one’s toes, the pain begins when a bit
of warmth reaches the frozen capillaries, and grows
worse as the circulation improves. Something analogous
is happening in the cold-war-thaw project on which
Messrs* Eisenhower and Khrushchev have established
a gingerly collaborative relationship. The heads of gov-
ernment can sit and talk, but their vast complexes of
military machines, Machiavellian diplomacy,
vested interests and ambitions, and apparatus for per-
suasion of the multitudes — all these respond only
sluggishly to the new demands. And this is true of both
the Eastern and Western blocs. Mr. Khrushchev sched-
uled his talks in Peking immediately after his conversa-
tions at Camp David with the obvious intent of placat-
ing his powerful and bullheaded Chinese ally. His suc-
cess Was not conspicuous. While exhorting the glowering

Chinese to abandon thoughts of downing capitalism by

force, he could not refrain from the His Marxist
reservations concerning “liberating, just” wars which,
of course, in Red Chinese eyes precisely fit Formosa,
the Pescadores, Quemoy and Matsu. At the same time,
not by accident, our bullheaded Chinese ally sounds off
loudly about the impending counter-revolution in China
and his victorious return to the mainland. On the other
side of the world, in the midst of preparations for serious
disarmament discussions, Washington announces that
an American IRBM base is to be established in Turkey.

Further depressing examples could be adduced, but
it is not quite true, as Ray Tucker says, that “almost
every international development since the Eisenhower-
Khrushchev meeting seems designed deliberately to em-
bitter Russo-American relations and to prevent a sum-
mit meeting for relieving tensions and preventing wars.”
The Turkish IRBM base, for instance, has been in the
planning-negotiation stage for at least a year and could
not have been jettisoned at the last minute. Even the
State Department publicists, not renowned for their
sensitivity, treated the announcement as a hot potato.
A planned base shoots no missiles; this one may never
be built. The most serious contretemps is the one in
China. Chiang still has a third of his forces gar-
tisoned on Quemoy and Matsu. Under Secretary of

ae Douglas Dillon says there my) be total war if

A prime example of the politician earning his living the |

inclined to go along with the let’s-be-tough-with-Russia,

1. p 4 : / -

THE

NATION

the Chinese Communists
the offshore islands.”

attempt to seize Taiwan and
The Chinese Reds cannot seize
Taiwan, but they may try to seize Quemoy and Matsu.
It would be a signal contribution to the liquidation of
the cold war to turn these miserable islands over to their
rightful owner, Le.,
possession of the ‘naitnilacedl

whichever power happens to be in
Deeds, as well as words,
are required not only of the Sovicts but of us, and this
is one sensible action which could be taken now, while
the shooting is in abeyance, but which will become
psychologically impossible if the Reds should mount a

serious attack.

Testing the Thaw

While the foreign situation is so fluid, for domestic
politicians it is a time of watching and waiting. The
potency of foreign policy in deciding elections is shown
by the victory of the British Tories: One factor un-
doubtedly was that Macmillan, because of his role in
bringing about the conversations between Eisenhower
and Khrushchev, was thought best qualified to represent
Britain at a Summit. The American electorate may be
similarly influenced. If the cold war is renewed, no can-
didate will have a chance unless he breathes defiance
and promises to be tough with the Russians. But if the
international climate continues to improve, the voters
will look for a President who believes that East-West
differences can be settled by negotiation.

Less decisively, but in a degree not to be ignored,
these criteria will influence the voting for Congressmen. —
The O’Konskis and the Scherers have no choice: they
can breathe only in an atmosphere of international
smog. But most Congressional candidates are not ir-
revocably committed. If Meyer of Vermont and Byron
Johnson of Colorado can be re-elected, the run-of-the-—
mill Congressional candidate will gladly assume a more
or less similar position.

At high levels the uncertainty is even more painful,

hard way is the Vice President. Mr. Nixon is clearly

don’t-believe-Khrushchev, we-must-keep-up-our-guards _ a
as In about two angeee out of three, he uses —

their concepts. It is perfectly clear that a foreign-policy
breach is developing, if it has not already developed,
between the President and Mr. Nixon. Yet, so powerful
is the popular yearning for peace, not at any price but
as an objective consistent with patriotism and national
integrity, that in his third speech Mr. Nixon graciously

approves of the President’s invitation to Mr. Khru-

shchev and even takes a little of the credit for what-
ever has been achieved. Then, after some prudent hedg-
ing along these lines, he reverts to wooing the fire-and-

brimstone vote. Yet even this ratio reflects the strength,
in terms of practical domestic politics, of the peace
movement. In the United States it shows itself in in-
numerable ways — the Democrats appoint a predomi-
nantly liberal science-policy commission, a professor in
Georgia asks the commission to work out the economics
of disarmament, a professor at Yale proposes an across-
the-board budget arms cut, businessmen wonder out
loud what would take the place of the armament in-
dustry if peace should break out. The wind shifts, but
it blows this direction, and the
politicians, high and low, seem to sense it.

predominantly in

The Public and the AEC

In the wake of Grace DesChamps’ Nation article on
the dumping of “hot” atomic wastes in waters near
Boston (September 19 issue), the Atomic Energy Com-
mission has held “informational” meetings at Boston
and on Cape Cod. At the Cape Cod briefing, two ex-
perts offered assurances that neither the inshore nor off-
shore dumpings presents a danger of contamination. But
the Cape Cod selectmen, as their questions indicated,
were not fully reassured. If the “hot” wastes were harm-
less, why were they placed in steel drums? If one of the
drums collapsed in the hearing room, would there be a
hazard? (“I won’t say it wouldn’t be a potential haz-
ard,” one of the experts responded, “but I’m not saying,
either, that it would be a real hazard.”) Did the Inter-
state Commerce Commission control govern transpor-
tation of “hot” wastes to storage places and disposal
areas? (The AEC could and did obtain “exemptions”
from these regulations. )

When the selectmen asked what assurance could be
given that there would be “a formal, public hearing”
before another license for the disposal of waste materials
was issued, they were told that this would be a question
for the AEC to decide. (Meantime, on another front of
the atomic-dump problem, the AEC has set either
December 1 or December 8 for hearings on whether
New Britain, Conn., will have to harbor an atomic-
waste storage site; see “Test Case on Atomic Waste,”
by Gerald McCourt, The Nation, August 1.)

Local communities are surely entitled to more infor-
‘mation that was provided at this session. As Philip

‘ _ rische
| Siekevitz has pointed out (The Nation, September 26), a American Motors; Vertol Aircraft Corporation and Dor-

Cae } Kare is

most of thet official pronouncements on ‘radiation com-—
ing out of Washington are in the form of just such brief-
ings by men who have been delegated to the job by
government. And since all governments have an official
policy, the briefings are not always unbiased explana-
tions of the results of scientific experiments. At the Cape
Cod hearings, one of the experts was from the staff of
the AEC and the other is associated with a scientific or-
ganization that derives support from that agency. The
assurances these men offered may have been entirely
objective and valid, but local communities are entitled
to assurances of another character. From the outset, the
AEC has been insensitive to the public implications of
its policies and programs. Recently, for example, the
Coast and Geodetic Survey set a large number of bottles
adrift, some of which were found by persons on the
beaches at Martha’s Vineyard; only after local inquiries
had been made did the AEC announce that the bottles
were related to a study that was being made of atomic-
waste disposal. After this data has been gathered and
analyzed, the commission will convene a group of ma-
rine scientists to evaluate the results.

To the layman, it would seem that a study of this type
might more properly have been undertaken before the
dump sites were selected.

Here We Go Again

There is a phenomenon in psychology known as déja
vu: the impression that the beholder has been there be-
fore, although actually he is in the place for the first
time. In the relations between American and German
industry and finance the phenomenon recurs, and it
has an easy, naturalistic explanation. It is simply that
American capitalists have more money than they know
what to do with, that they want to invest it profitably,
and that German industry, on the whole the most ad-
vanced in Europe, exerts a powerful attraction, which
becomes downright irresistible after American industry
has exerted itself to destroy German industry in a war.
It is a kind of lethal lovers’ quarrel: they try to kill
each other, then they embrace. It happened after the
first World War, it is happening again. Appropriately
enough, the principal channel is armaments manufacture.
“United States armaments manufacturers have begun
to pour massive amounts of capital and technical ex-
perience into the reviving West German arms industry,”
writes Arthur J. Olsen in The New York Times (Octo-
ber 14). The motive to “get into Germany” is the
“widespread conviction that the Bonn Republic is
destined to become a major weapons producer.” Cited
are some mergers and tie-ups: Lockheed Aircraft and
Heinkel-Messerschmitt (the latter has been building
bicycles and midget cars); General Electric and Baye-
Motorwerke; Bayerische Motorwerke and ff

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r Gaited} Aiteralt and A. G. Weser (contiblled by
Alfried Krupp); Perkin-Elmer (manufacturer of the
Sidewinder missile) and Bodensee Werke-Pekin-Elmer;
Continental Motors and Kloeckner-Humbolt-Deutz
(Ruhr steel company); Studebaker-Packard and Daim-
ler-Benz; General Dynamics and Hispano-Suiza _ of
Geneva, which manufactures an armored personnel-car-
rier for the West German Army; and Bell Aircraft and
Henschel of Kassel. The resounding Teutonic names
ring in American ears; to some they mean profits, but
to others they stir memories of the mangled bodies of
comrades-in-arms.

When Pranks Turn Lethal

At the University of Southern California, a fraternity
pledge choked to death on a quarter-pound piece of oil-
soaked liver. At Cornell, during the first ten days of
the fall term, six students received medical care for in-
juries suffered during hazing. At both institutions, pub-
lic shock and anger have produced counteractions. An
undisclosed number of students will be expelled from
U.S.C. and the president of the university has issued
new regulations which, among other provisions, order
that adult advisers be present at all initiations and that
pledge activities be submitted to school officials. (The
new “code” set off a riot so violent that city police and
fire detachments were afraid to enter the campus.) At
Cornell, as a first measure, the Interfraternity Council
is considering the banning of all “non-constructive”
hazing — pledges would be required to do useful house-
hold and community jobs.

Such action is welcome, of course, but it comes under
the head of belatedly locking the barn door. And on
hundreds of other campuses, where this year, at least,

‘THE QUIZ-WHIZ FRAUD

HAIL, BLITHE

“WHo WILL ever be able to forget

iles, agheea

nightly beakers

no tragedies occurred, hazing goes on as usual. A great
many people have been uneasily aware for years that
fraternities are often wickedly discriminatory and that
some of their traditional practices encourage whatever
sadism is latent on the campus. And fraternities, though
apparently part of the university life and university
plant, are in fact controlled by the national organiza-
tions that issue their charters. A local chapter is “for-
eign soil,” like an embassy. Why have not the colleges
long since swept these dubious societies from their
campuses?

The answer is simple and it is financial. Fraternity
houses are, in effect, dormitories that function outside
the university budget. More important, alumni are
fraternity men, the house is where they hold _ their
alumni feasts, and their loyalty to their Greek letters
is at least as great as their love for Alma Mater.
Knock off the fraternities and you would knock off a
large area of alumni benevolence.

We are reluctant to urge heroism on the other fel-
low, so we do not call on trustees and administrators
to wipe out, overnight,’ the present national fraternity
system. But some colleges operate with. only local
fraternities and some with no fraternities at all. If the
immediate behavior of fraternity chapters is the re-
sponsibility of their undergraduate members (and if
they can therefore be expelled when pranks turn lethal),
the long-term existence of these institutions is the
responsibility of the universities themselves. They have
enough evidence to show that ‘a hands-off policy is too
costly. They must decide how eventually they will
abolish or basically modify a system that 1s now estab-
lished on shabby values, ambiguous controls and_fi-
nancial embarrassment.

SPIRIT! ee by Dalton Trumbo

their

club ladies and cowhands, actors and

the days of our glory, before Sputnik
T and Lunik II, when culture came
to Madison Avenue, and eggheads
drew better ratings than murderers?
And who cares to estimate how
many millions of savage little juven-

DALTON TRUMBO won many

honors as a screenwriter under his

own name, and during the M Cages
yon an as yet unrevealed n

of blood, twisted sullenly while the
old man roared his answers at the
sweating slob on the TV screen, and
mother filled the station breaks with
gentle sermons on the cash value of
education?

As for the chara who led this
national assault

where could one find

the ichness, the big
ic variety of the

wiles. On Ju

show clerks, cab drivers and jockeys,
arthritic senior citizens, half-weaned

babes, nubile females, pimply stu-

dents, the dazed, the crazed, the lame,
the halt, the grind: came they all by
the booth, podium, board or pan
and there worked they their ste
‘16, 1956,”
Brothers: and Bamum heads

ae outclassed — by the
twitching, sti

Circus pulled. down the Big. Top or
= ie

‘

2h +, Ae mY. at ent pe bs
¢ ees ys? teh ; > iat :
: 4 Me en er es

balls who prowled) the American
rumpus room from sea to shining sea.

The winners’ pictures nested regu-
larly on the front page of the na-
tional press. Editorial ' columns
flowered with laudatory essays on the
virtues of a country in which treas-
ures of the intellect—or, at least, of
memory—stood so high in_ public
esteem, and paid off so handsomely.
Sermons were preached. Lecture
tours were arranged. Morals were
drawn. School teachers looked ner-
vously ahead to a time when con-
ceivably they would be readmitted
to the national community. Oceans of
lotions, lathers, depilatories and de-
oderants were sold. In Vegas they
were laying eight to. five on the
renaissance by 1960.

AND THEN they had to go and
spoil it. Somebody hired this co-
median as a “standby contestant,”
whatever that is. He stood by until
a regularly employed contestant in-
cautiously left her notebook in a
dressing room. He filched the book.
He read it. His heart stood still.
Written there were questions cum
answers for the next time around.
Dear God, the show was fixed! Out-
raged conscience impelled him to le-
gal threats.

The owners of the spectacle ar-
ranged for him to be paid $1,500,
for which he signed a statement that
the show was clean as a hound’s
mouth, and promised that he’d not
talk to the Jaw about anything. Short-
ly afterward, conscience nibbling
once again, he lapsed. He began talk-
ing to all sorts of people until, in the
lovely argot of his tribe, he “blew
the whistle” on practically every-
body. Asked why he hadn’t stayed
bought, he replied that the show was
fraudulent, and he didn’t regard the
$1,500 as “hush money” any more.
On this gamey note, the fat flew
into the fan.

By the time the odor spread from
Madison Avenue to the district at-
torney’s office and the chambers of

the grand jury, the TV industry, as

it is called, was in movement: people
investigating other people, people

writing affidavits, people testifying —

boldly for free, people testifying shy-—

ly under subpoena, people dodging
subpoenas, people \
people coaching people, people lying,

leaving town,

< ae Loa) BS il ee ie igs ite le eee at iat

people being shocked, s
furiated, betrayed, deceived, alarmed
—and even indicted. Recusancy
turned epidemic among former con-
testants, some of whom were cruelly
trampled in the general rush to reveal
how cunningly virtue had been
snatched. s

A young philosopher, whose testi-
mony may ruin the life and destroy
the career of his opponent, won $49,-
500, which is valid sugar for a phi-
losopher, and then was forced to

“take a dive.” Although he had
cheated on every rung of the ladder,
it was the cheat to lose that troubled
him most. He heard his name men-
tioned in NBC commercials “day
after day,” with rhetorical specula-
tions whether he would “crack the
$100,000 mark.”

Gloomily he recalled, “And I was
sitting there saying, ‘No; he won’t;
he’s going to take a dive tonight.’ ”
As diving time approached he be-
came “very upset”; he urged the
producer “to let me play an honest
game.” But no: dishonest it had
been, and dishonest it was to be.
“On top of that, when I. took my
planned nose dive, I was forced to
go out on a question about a motion
picture which I had seen only three
days ago. This can be embarrassing.”
Dishonestly missing a question he
honestly could answer now seemed
more reprehensible than dishonestly
answering questions he honestly
couldn’t. It was a stern moment for
a philosopher who hadn’t yet “crack-
ed the $100,000 mark.”

Some time after hitting the can-
vas, at a speak-bitter luncheon with
the producer, he remarked that his
successor was doing very well. “Oh
no, he’s playing it honestly now,”

is ee iy

prised, in- said the producer.

cess being natural enemies in the —
TV jungle, our philosopher hustled
out to bet $5,000 at two to one that
his former rival would go down next
time around. Sure enough! Instead
of $49,500, $59,500 now nestled in
the poke.

As it always happens, security
gave rise to afterthought. He found
himself assailed by general nervous-
ness and pangs of guilt. He developed
a “strong feeling that I had myself
engaged in the fraud for too long.”
It took ten months in psychiatry, and
a good chunk of the swag, to disen-

‘tangle id from ego from libido. Then

he talked.

OTHERS, who had won less than
the philosopher, suffered fewer
pangs, or none at all. A union or-
ganizer got “sick of the business”
after collecting $15,000, but not sick
enough to turn down the additional
$9,500 still owing him and later paid.
A restaurant manager, who dragged
an impartial $15,200 from two shows
—one on CBS and the other on
NBC—asked if he thought taking
a dive “fraudulent,” blandly re-
plied, “I am not convinced of it.”
A producer earnestly explained that
he was “trying to put together an
exciting and interesting show and I
never did feel there was anything
terribly wrong with it.”

Some contended they appeared on
the show, not as legitimate con-
testants, but as paid entertainers:
“If the truth were known, there
wouldn’t be any entertainment.” A
high-spirited housewife, who made
off with only $1,460, refused to beat
about the moral bush. She admitted
her fraudulent performance may
have made it difficult for rivals to
come up with anything as “spritely.”
For herself, “I feel perfectly blithe
about it... . They were having a
happy time, I was, everybody was.”
And—bless her wise little innocent
heart!-—no one had the slightest
reason to disbelieve her.

A producer who lied to the grand
jury did so because “I was panicked,
I was terrorized, and I did it.” In
1957 and 1958, NBC had held a
series of meetings with producers
and agents of a gyp-show, and
thereafter had

that charges against the show were —
' ve ‘ mu N hd ts J
fl 4, the NATIONS
5." te'«
ae Lat ie fe i '
‘aa

issued a statement |

PPPOE

baseless, and the network had com-
plete confidence in its integrity. In
this dreary autumn of 1959, a vice
president of NBC delivered himself
of the bizarre opinion that his cor-
porate master had “no reason to
suspect any rigging,” adding that he
and his rustic colleagues were “very
badly deceived.” On top of this, a
vice president of the sponsoring phar-
maceutical gravely an-
nounced that he “was shocked.” He
hastened to explain that “Our posi-
tion was such that until such time
as we had any facts to back up
the newspaper stories, we would sit
tight.”

A sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, lured
hy an ad for folk singers, sworn to
secrecy even from her family, and
Fagined into the mysteries of cheat-
ing, found it not so easy to sit tight.
When rumors circulated about the
show, the child’s mother asked for,
and received, from her daughter—
along with such tears as every
parent can imagine—the bitter truth.
Later, over a bugged telephone, the
producer urged the child to perjure
herself if investigated.

Questioned about her reaction to
the fraud, the girl said, “I didn’t
even think about it... . The over-all
excitement appealed to me. I saw
it more as an opportunity to sing
than anything else.” The plan, she
explained, was for her to tie twice
with a contestant, and “finally beat
him, and the interest would be
enough that I could bring my sister
on the show.”

Said the mother, whose family the
producers had violated, “Any parent
would be outraged when their child
had been deliberately led to be de-
ceptive. .. . But when a youngster
is asked to commit perjury or led
in that direction, I thmk it’s dis-
graceful.” The girl, now eighteen,
asked if she thought her conduct
two years ago questionable, said:
“Yes—I’m here now trying to help
clean it up.’ Which is much more
than the sponsors, the producers, the
advertising agencies, and the network
executives are doing or intend to do.

And so the sorry tale unfolded. As
almost always happens in the climac-
tic passion of Congressional investi-
gation, the real fraud consisted in the
exposure of fraud. No Congressman
can hope for headlines if he dwells

company

October 24, 1959

,
aoe

iC ma

on the carcinoma factor in cigarettes,
the worthlessness of snake oil as a
cure for senility, the calculated fal-
sity of practically all televised com-
mercials, or the arrogant greed of
men who have appropriated the free
air and turned it imto a witches’
bazaar of howling peddlers hawking
trash. A sixteen-year-old girl makes
safer copy than the president of
NBC and has fewer lawyers.

IN ONLY one aspect of the scandal
can we take real satisfaction: all who
participated in the fraud were certi-
fied, loyal Americans. The elaborate
system of blacklisting, by which the
networks deny use of publicly-owned
channels to those with whom they
disagree, makes certain of that.
Everybody connected with the shows
had been cleared by the American
Legion, The House Committee on
Un-American Activities, the Senate
Internal Security Committee,
AWARE, ALERT, Red Channels,
sponsors’ check-ups, the agencies’
private eyes, the networks’ corps of
dedicated snoops. And Heaven knows
how many private nuts, crooks and
crackpots.

The people who dived, and the
people who won, and all who ar-
ranged the cheat and _ sponsored
it, and distributed it, had never
been controversial; they had never
publicly dissented from anything;
they had never joined a verboten or-
ganization; they had never given
money to unpopular causes. To the
last child they were authenticated
patriots, well-oathed and clean as the
whistle that finally blew them up.
Though tens of millions of dollars

were earned by sponsors, broadcast-
ers, and producers of the fraudulent
shows, though the trust of a nation’s
children was ravished by them, at
least the Republic could take com-
fort that it hadn’t been gulled by a
gang of subversives.

Once that crumb has been digest-
ed, the rest is nightmare. The eerie
landscape of Madison Avenue, per-
ceived through the private agony of
eifted men who mirrored and now
must atone for its knavery, reveals
the future which there has been
projected for us a future boldly
rigged for the naked worship of
things and self, animated by a mate-
rialism so primitive that it is incap-
able of developing either philosophic
basis or moral objective: a future
of true godlessness, of pure degener-
acy, of corruption absolute.

IY WAS not intended this way. In
the early twenties, David Sarnoff
prophesied of radio broadcasting:
“As the picture will become plainer,
there will emerge, in radio, musical
foundations, operatic foundations
and lecture foundations, endowed or
supported by great public-spirited
Americans, who will see in this vast
instrumentality of the air another
means to become benefactors.” What
did we get? Twenty-one, Tic Tac
Dough, Dotto and The $64,000 Ques-
tion, not to mention the assorted in-
citations to murder regularly pur-
veyed in Western and detective dra-
mas, and the general reduction of
sex from love to lust.

In 1922, when it was learned that
station WEAF, in New York, had

sold air time to hawk real estate,

Secretary. of Commerce Herbert
Hoover, whose department gave the
boys. their licenses, said: “I don’t
believe there is anything the people
would take more offense at than the
attempt to sell goods over radio
broadcasting.” (Thee did not take
and neither did Mr. Hoover.
Instead, they surrendered their free
air, as an absolute monopoly, to a
gang of merchandisers whose ethical
standards are defined in a single
question: Will they believe it? )
By now it no longer matters
whether we believe, only that we
acquiesce. And we do acquiesce. We
expect the news to be slanted; we ex-
pect the statesman to he; we expect
the politician to make deals; we ex-
pect the advertisement to be false;
we expect the repairman to cheat us;
we expect the fight to be fixed; we
expect men to place self-interest
above any conceivable social end.
And when our expectations are

offense,

fulfilled — when the fraud is finally
revealed — we are never surprised,
and rarely angry. Publicly and be-
fore the children, we deplore it.
Privately, we admire its audacity,
and marvel that it went undetected
for so long. We sharpen our wits on
its details (but never its cause) and
are wiser citizens for what it has
taught us.

THE UNLUCKY young men of TV,
whose downfall we shall applaud as
all good Philistines must, haven’t
really harmed us. They haven’t vio-
lated our innocence. We had no in-
nocence. We never did believe.
That is the crime we have com-
mitted, not against ourselves alone,
but against our children, our country
and even the broken victims of pros-
tituted television. It is a crime that
renders us morally unfit to judge
those who have betrayed us. They
have been judged enough already.

| They have suffered the “anguish ol

exposure; their lives have been
soiled; one or two of them may’ ge
to fel on peripheral charges of pers
jury; the networks and_ sponsors
who financed their trickery and sold
it and made millions from it have
virtuously cast them into limbo.

Let’s forget the whole sad mess.
Let’s close the book and wait for
the next show, Congressional or
quiz. Let’s remember with John C.
Doerfer, chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission, that
“sometimes we have to endure ill
for the over-all public good. We can’t
have everything perfect.” ;

Of course we can’t. We don’t even
expect it. Yet there are occasions,
late at night and alone, when [’m
touched by the chill apprehension
that we no longer live in America,
we merely occupy her; that we no
longer love her, we only sit in the
bleachers and root.

DILEMMA OF SOVIET TRADE e « by Harold J. Burman

MR. KHRUSHCHEV’S proposal,
reiterated during his visit to this
country, for the negotiation of a
Soviet-American trade agreement has
elicited some indications in Wash-
ington that we might be ready to
ease present restrictions on trade
with the USSR in return for a settle-
ment of lend-lease, or some other
concession. But, as Governor Rocke-
feller pointed out last week to the
New York Board of Trade, the ques-
tion of finding a suitable quid pro
quo does not go to the heart of the
matter. The real problem is whether,
in view of the nature of the USSR’s
foreign-trade system, we can trade
extensively with that country with-

out danger to our own system.
Mr. Rockefeller has advanced a

HAROLD J. BERMAN of the Har-
vard Law School. faculty is the au-
thor of Justice in Russia and other
books on Soviet law, and served as
General Reporter at the UNESCO
Conference on Legal Aspects of
Trade Between Planned and Market
Economies (Rome, 1958).

series of conditions for East-West
trade which, in effect, would “de-
communize” Kremlin trade policies
and make them conform to the prin-
ciples of free multilateral trade de-
signed for market economies. Since
Mr. Khrushchev is not likely to
agree to such conditions, the ques-
tion still remains whether a mutually
advantageous expansion of trade be-
tween the United States and the
USSR is possible.

There can be no intelligent re-
sponse to the question without an
understanding of how the Soviet sys-
tem of foreign trade operates. Also
we must face the fact that any agree-
ment to do business with the Soviet
Union will require a new type of
cooperation between the federal gov-
ernment and American importers and
exporters.

SOVIET foreign trade is conducted
entirely by state agencies, operating
under a national economic plan. At
present there are twenty-eight sep-
arate organizations, called “com-
bines,” each: possessing a monopoly

of export and/or import transactions
in a particular sphere of the econ-
omy. Thus, for example, all Soviet
exports and imports of lumber and
lumber products such as cellulose
and paper are transacted by the
“All-Union Export-Import Combine
Eksportles” — or just ‘Exportles”
(les being the Russian word for
“lumber”). Similarly, all exports and
imports of oil and oil products are
carried out by “Soiuzneftexport.”
Each of these foreign- trade com-
bines is a legal entity, a legal person;
that is, it may in its own name ac-
quire rights in property, incur obli-
gations and sue and be sued, and is
responsible for its debts out of those
assets which are within its power
of free disposition. It receives a
charter which enumerates its powers
and declares the amount of its
chartered capital. The Soviet state
—i.e., the state treasury—is not
liable for the obligations of the com-
bine, and the combine in turn is not
liable for the obligations of the So-
viet state or of any organization
other than itself, The combine ap-
pears in foreign nN in the guise, |

t The Natt LON rid

so to speak, of a capitalist trader,
and its techniques of trade are more
or less normal. It fully accepts the
traditional institutional framework
of commercial custom which is the
common heritage of exporters, im-
porters, bankers, shipowners, marine
underwriters and others engaged in
foreign trade throughout the world.
The Soviet law and practice regard-
ing FOB and similar contracts, let-
ters of credit and other financing de-
vices, ocean bills of lading, etc., do
not differ basically from those of
Western countries which are heirs to
the “law merchant.”

ON THE other hand, each combine
is subordinate administratively to
the Soviet Ministry of Foreign
Trade. The Minister appoints the
head of the combine, and its profits
—after commissions and bonuses are
distributed—are ultimately returned
to the state treasury. And, above all,
the combine’s purchases and _ sales
are within limits set by the national
economic plan for the economy as a
whole. More precisely, the Council
of Ministers of the USSR, which
runs the Soviet economy (and of
which the Minister of Foreign Trade
is a member), allocates export con-
_tingents to various administrative

agencies which allocate them in turn
to their subordinate state business
enterprises; on the basis of a corre-
— sponding export plan, the foreign-
~ trade combine then procures the ex-
port goods from those enterprises.
— Similarly, in importing, the foreign-
trade combine, on the basis of the
import plan handed down to it by
the Ministry, gets specifications from
the ultimate domestic user and then
goes into the foreign market to pro-
cure the goods. In other words, the

ec ace is an export-import broker;

for Soviet producing and consuming

organizations—all of which are, of
course, managed by state officials
subordinate ultimately to the council.

The export and import practices
of the Ministry of Foreign Trade are
thus bound to reflect the economic
policies of the Council of Ministers
and of the State Planning Commit-
tee which is attached to the council.
Mr. Khrushchev, who is the head of
the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, is also Chairman of the Coun-
cil of Ministers, so that the export
and import policies of the Ministry
of Foreign Trade are also bound to
reflect the political goals of the party.

However, the experience of four
decades teaches that the Soviet lead-
ership is very reluctant to sacrifice
long-range economic objectives for
the sake of immediate political gains.
While willing to spend a certain
amount of money for immediate po-
litical purposes, the bulk of its for-
eign trade is conceived as a means
of achieving national economic in-
dependence, rapid industrialization
and the building up of reserves. Even
now, when the Soviet economy has
reached the point where it is pos-
sible for it to afford some interna-
tional adventures, usually the Rus-
sians get as much in economic terms
as they give, even to the under-
developed countries of Asia, Africa
and Latin America. Although the
Russians have occasionally been
guilty of “dumping’—in the sense of
selling at abnormally low prices—
the great bulk of their exports are
sold at the highest price obtainable.

Thus the power which the Soviet
Union gains from the absolute cen-
tralization of its foreign trade has
limitations. If the Ministry of For-
eign Trade, in conjunction with the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, decides
that there would be distinct political
advantages in expanding exports of
machinery to Argentina, for example,
there are going to be several other
ministries to report on how. that
would affect the development of the
internal economy.

If WOULD be interesting to be
able. to listen in on such | a debate.

businessmen would like to know

more about how Soviet foreign trade
is planned. He replied, “How we
plan our foreign trade is our own
business and we are not going to tell
you or anyone else!”—and he smiled.
But in fact we can tell a good deal
about Soviet foreign-trade policies
by observing their operation in world
markets, and especially by studying
the bilateral trade agreements which
the Soviet Union has entered into
with non-Communist — countries.
These agreements constitute a_bi-
lateral program for mutual deliveries
of goods between two countries, with
each government agreeing to issuc
licenses for the export or import of
particular goods, in particular quan-
tities, over a particular period of
time—a year, three years, in some
cases even five years. Such agree-
ments were common among Western
European countries immediately
after the war, when exchange prob-
lems were acute. The Communist
countries have them with each other,
and there are some thirty such agree-

ments now in force between the So- —

viet Union and non-Communist
countries, and some 240 all told be-
tween Communist countries and non-
Communist countries.

It is apparent that the planning,
administration and operation of a
system of foreign trade such as the
Soviets’ is made easier by these
agreements, which enable the Soviet
Council of Ministers to make an allo-
cation of export contingents among
its subordinate industries. Similarly,
import planning can be geared into
the bilateral program of exchanges.
Of course the trade agreement is not
self-executing; particularly in the
case of a free economy, a govern-
ment cannot commit its private

traders by such an agreement, but
can only commit itself in advance
to issue licenses if contracts are ne-
gotiated. Also the planned economy
may not fulfill the agreement—
though techniques are available for
encouraging fulfillment and for coun-
teracting delinquencies.

THE reported trade agreements
which the Soviet Union has entered
into with France, Sweden, West Ger-
many and other countries of West-
ern Europe indicate a definite pat-
tern. In general, the Soviet Union
attempts more or less to balance its
trade bilaterally, and also to distrib-
ute it widely. Typically, such agree-
ments will provide for total annual
trade of about $100 million to $200
million with each of the major West-
ern European countries.

Now of course such bilateral agree-
ments are a limitation upon the free-
dom of action of private traders;
they violate the principle of free mul-
tilateral trade. The Soviet govern-
ment’s agreement with the Yugoslav
government, for example, to import
leather from Yugoslavia adversely
affects American leather exporters
who might otherwise be able to com-
pete on the Soviet market. I know
that personally, because when I was
in Moscow four years ago I tried to
interest a Soviet import combine in
the purchase of American leather. I
got nowhere, and when Borisov, in
the interview of two years ago to
which I have already referred, called
United States trade policy “discrim-
inatory,” and insisted that in con-
trast the Soviet Union stood for free
multilateral trade, I said to him: “I
represent an American leather ex-
porter; if I can show you that his
leather is cheaper and better than
the leather you now get from Yugo-
slavia, will you buy it?” He replied,
“No. We have a trade agreement
with Yugoslavia.”

Despite the fact that such bi-
lateralism violates American free-
trade principles, it is probably the
best solution to the problem which
the Soviet foreign-trade system poses
for free economies. In the first place,
under our system of export controls
we have already decided that the
principles of free multilateral trade
are not applicable to trade with
Communist countries. Secondly, a bi-

lateral trade agreement could put.
Soviet-American trade on a basis of
reciprocity which ‘it now lacks. At
present the Soviet government plans
and conducts its trade with the
United States from the point of view
of the national advantages that might
accrue to the Soviet Union; the pri-
vate American trader who deals with
a Soviet foreign-trade combine is nec-
essarily concerned only with his own
profit—-an objective which may or
may not correspond with American
national interests.

SPECIFICALLY, a trade agreement
of the kind proposed could promote
our national—and_ international—
interest in the following ways: (1)
our government could assure a sup-
ply of some Soviet products which
our importers want but which are
not now available because the Rus-
sians are selling them under trade
agreements with other countries; (2)
it could assure the purchase by the
Soviets of some products they now
procure from our exporters’ competi-
tors in other countries; (3) it could
prevent purchase by the Russians
of very small quantities of ma-
chinery bought merely as models to
be copied (a practice of which we
often complain); (4) the extra bar-
gaining power which the Soviet com-
bines sometimes derive from their
monopolistic character could be par-
tially offset; (5) a more efficient
protection would be provided against
the export of strategic goods than
our present system of controls, since
our government could determine in
advance which products desired by
the Soviets it would be willing to li-
cense; (6) we could obtain Soviet
commitments not to dump; (7)
some of the obstacles to normal trade
relations created by the Soviet sys-
tem could be reduced—i.e., we could
perhaps secure Soviet commitments
to give our traders direct access to
their producing and consuming en-
terprises, to permit branch offices
and licensing arrangements to be
established, to give us more infor-
mation about their foreign-trade
plans, and to reducé some of their
legal obstacles to tfade.

From the Soviet viewpoint such
an agreement would eliminate diffi-
culties created by the enormous tom-

plexity of our present export-licens-
ing system, and also might serve as
a means of getting. Congress to elim-
inate the discriminatory tariffs now
imposed on imports of Soviet goods
as well as the very narrow limits (six
months) on’ commercial credits
which may be extended, under the
Johnson Act, to Soviet combines.

IN JUNE, 1958, Mr. Khrushchev
proposed a Soviet-American trade
agreement in a letter to President
Eisenhower. The letter listed many
types of peacetime industrial prod-
ucts which the Soviet Union would
like to purchase here, and many
types which the Soviet Union would
offer to sell us. It also proposed that
American specialists be sent to the
Soviet Union and that _ licensing
agreements could be made in indi-
vidual cases. It suggested that a very
large expansion of Soviet-American
trade would raise questions concern-
ing the possibility of long-term cred-
its, but added that “of course, it is
possible to begin the development of
commerce on the basis of reciprocal
deliveries.”

President Eisenhower’s _ reply
stated that “the United States fa-
vors the expansion of peaceful trade
with the Soviet Union,” but it re-
jected the bid for an intergovern-
mental agreement:

As you know, United States export
and import trade is carried on by in-
dividual firms and not under govern-
mental auspices. There is no need,
therefore, to formalize relations be-
tween United States firms and Soviet
trade organizations. Soviet trade or-
ganizations are free right now, with-
out any need for special action by
the United States Government, to
develop a larger volume of trade
with firms in this country....Fur-
thermore, many of the more impor-
tant Soviet trade items mentioned in
your letter are accorded duty-free
entry into the United States. While
the extension of long-term credits for
Soviet purchases in the United States
would raise complex legal and politi-
cal questions, the normal commercial
credit terms presently available to
Soviet trade organizations permit
the further expansion of trade be-
tween our two countries.

While it is undoubtedly true that
Soviet-American trade could be ex-
panded without any changes in ex-

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isting American governmental or Ic-
gal policies or practices, it 1s also
true that American restrictions place
severe obstacles in the path of such
an expansion. The products which
Khrushchev proposed to buy from
American firms are, for the most
part, neither on the “Positive List”
of strategic exports nor on the spe-
cial list of “peaceful” goods subject
to general license for the Soviet
area. Each item requires, therefore,
a validated license, and there can be
no advance assurance that such li-
censes will be granted. Since the
items mentioned by Khrushchev for
the most part comprise industrial
plant and equipment, American
manufacturer-exporters would have
to conduct elaborate preparations in
order to make bids; few firms would
be willing to go to this expense with-
out advance assurance that export
licenses would be granted. As to So-
viet exports to the United States,
while it is true—as the President
stated—that some of the products

listed by Khrushchev are duty-free,
others (such as manganese) are sub-
ject to a tariff rate far higher than
that which is applied to the same
products imported from other coun-
tries; and even those which are duty-
free may fall within various other
import restrictions. Also, the restric-
tion of private commercial credits to
six months is onerous in many cases.

I BELIEVE that it was a mistake
for us to reject Khrushchev’s pro-
posal out of hand and to treat it, as
it was almost universally treated by
the American press, as “mere propa-
ganda.” The Soviet system of for-
eign trade creates for us a serious
dilemma. But we cannot escape that
dilemma by ignoring it. It is the sys-
tem under which the foreign trade
of the entire Communist world is
conducted; and it is a system which
is likely to be with us for a long time
to come. It is not true that our
existing commercial and legal frame-
work is adequate to accommodate

Sovict-American trade. Moreover, to
state, as our government officials
have repeatedly stated, that the Rus-
sians are really only interested in
buying strategic goods, or in obtain-
ing huge credits, and that they real-
ly have nothing to sell us, is no
answer to a concrete proposal tO) X=
change peaceful products. If it is
true that the offer is a mere bluff,
then the best answer is to “call” it
If it is not a bluff, then the best
answer is still to put down our chips.
By withdrawing from the game at
this point we avoid, it is true, the
very difficult readjustment of exist-
ing concepts of the relationship be-
tween business and government
which would be required by negotia-
tion of an intergovernmental trade
agreement for the mutual exchange
of goods—something we have never
before done. But without such a re-
adjustment of existing concepts we
shall not be able effectively to trade
with, or effectively to compete with,
the Communist system.

ROTC: Failure of a Mission... by Gene M. Lyons

THERE ARE units of the Army,
Navy and Air Force Reserve Officers
Training Corps on more than three
hundred college and university cam-
puses across the country. At least
once a week, 250,000 undergraduates
put on uniforms to march, maneuver
and take instruction in weaponry,
tactics and military administration.
This is a sizable commitment in
terms of student effort. It is also
of little practical value. What the
students learn in ROTC bores them,
gives them a dim view of what their
military service holds in store, and
has so little effect that almost all
they learn has to be learned over
again once the young officers enter
on active duty.

The trouble is that while the
armed forces want to attract some

GENE M. LYONS, co-author with
John W. Masland of Education and
Military Leadership: a Study of the
ROTC (Princeton), teaches govern-

ment at Dartmouth College.
October 24, 1959 .

of the best students into the service
as career officers, they treat them
as if they were immature high
school sophomores. Young officers
bound for duty on nuclear-powered
submarines and supersonic aircraft
need instruction in mathematics and
physics. Instead, they are forced to
give up academic time to the nuts-
and-bolts of pre-atomic warfare. Col-
lege and university administrators,
even though they maintain that
ROTC units are a genuine contribu-
tion to national defense, often give
the program less attention than the
Junior Prom.

THIS being the situation, it would
seem that things could work out if
everyone just gave more time and
thought to the ROTC, and the pro-
gram made more truly a part of the
student’s educational — experience.
Such a program would include com-.
pletely voluntary participation, less
military training on the campus, and

_an increased number of specialized

and liberal courses useful to men in
their military service.

This, of course, is easier said than
done. It has, moreover, little mean-
ing unless seen against the purposes
the ROTC is supposed to serve. The
ROTC was originally established and
long maintained as part of a system
of citizen reservists that lay at the
heart of American military policies.
Today, however, it is a vast recruit-
ing device for the professional officer
corps. This is no accident of time or
history. Factors that once made the
reserve system practical no longer
exist. A large, standing military force
is now in existence which requires a
great number of well-trained _proics-

sionals of intelligence and_skill.

“day, our colleges and universities are
the largest repositori ies _of the_talent-
ed manpower the services need and
the ROTC is the source through
which they hope to get their share.
Any effort to improve the ROTC

program in terms of making it more
attractive and stimulating for col-

249

} 2

i al? he 6” Se ee ae, Le
> et Ae $y x ¥ hey awe te
4 PRT ey ie

lege students, therefore, presupposes
that civilian colleges and universi-
ties should, in fact, be recruiting
grounds for the professional officer
corps. Here we run into trouble.

‘Lraditionally (at least in the pop-
ular image), the professional officer
came from the service academies.
The ROTC, in the Tast ten years,
has offered college students an al-
ternative to being drafted as privates
or seamen, but was obviously never
thought of as a substitute for West
Point and Annapolis. Yet the fact
is that the service academies are no
longer able to furnish all the young
officers needed to lead_a professional
military force of 2,500,000 men.

One solution, of course, would be
to expand the service-academy sys-
tem. But do we really want to?
There are at least two compelling
reasons for not doing so. First, there
is the grave possibility of develop-
ing an inbred elite of sizable pro-
portions in an important professional
group—a vital consideration in a
society where diversity and_ social
mobility undergird many basic lib-
erties. And second, only through an
expansion program that would, at
best, duplicate the civilian system o
higher education, or, at worst, be an
inferior substitute, could the acade-
mies offer the broad educational
background required by the military
today.

An alternate solution would be to
force the military to choose the ad-
ditional officers they need from
among those young men who do not
attend college. In this connection,

we must remember that we are seek- «

ing, through private and_ public
scholarship and_ student-aid pro-
grams, to eliminate economic bar-
riers to higher education. Do we
want to deprive the military of the
same kind of opportunity to attract
young men of talent and promise
into the ranks of its leadership as
we give General Motors, B.B.D.&0O.,
and Colgate-Palmolive?

If, therefore, we view the problem
faced by the armed forces with seri-
ous concern, we have to begin to

figure make more college

graduates look forward to careers with
the malitary. Despite steps already
taken by the military departments,

‘C-trained officers are not stay-

ing in the service in large or even

—_—_—

250

“le a
ger vA” Be ee) 4 oem

DP ann
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;

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io Hb yi gh:

WH
\

adequate numbers. Some of the rea-
sons lie in the services themselves:
low pay, a discouraging promotion
system, difficult family conditions,
and_the discipline and callousness to
individual problems implicit in the
nature and size of the military estab-

-ishment. But beyond these, an im-

portant reason is that, for the most

part, these young officers never in-
tended to make the military a career

when they entered the ROTC in the

first place. The fundamental trans-
formation of the ROTC to a source
of professional officers has simply
not gotten across to the most im-
portant people involved: the stu-
dents.

NO CHANGE in the ROTC pro-
gram is by itself going to remedy
this fundamental failing. Military
life, from the point of view of pay,
promotion, intellectual satisfaction,

family security and social acceptance,

will simply have to be made more
attractive. This is a task for the
President, Congress, public leaders
and opinion-makers at all levels, and
the military themselves. But in this
process, a good deal can also be done
with ROTC campus activities to

stimulate students’ interest in the

military as a career,
The ROTC programs now offered
on college eampuses fail seriously

in this regard. For the most part,
the courses are vocationally-oriented,

particularly in the Army and Navy
programs. The curriculum is frag-
mentized and has little intellectual

content; relief from technical instruc-
tion comes only in courses in military
and naval history. The Air Force
goes farther than the other services
in the area of social sciences, includ-
ing in its curriculum courses in in-
ternational relations, geography, psy-
chology and administration. In all
three services, however, the instruc-
tion in social-science-type courses is
usually way below par. Not only are
the military instructors not prepared
to teach the social sciences, but they
are forced to rely on inadequate,
service-prepared texts that are nei-
ther very objective nor very excit-
ing. The results of all these efforts
are frustrated officers, angry faculty
and disdainful students.

In some institutions, this unhappy
situation has been avoided. At the
Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology, for example, the Navy has
a special program in which it gen-
erally keeps out of the student’s way
except to remind him that he is, in
fact, going into the Navy, and that
there are a few basic things about
being a naval officer he had better
know. The interests in such a_pro-
gram are mutual: the Navy is anx-
ious to have M.I.T.-trained engineers
in its ranks, and M.LT. is profes-
sionally interested in the problems
of the Navy and wants to offer its —
graduates the opportunities in nu-
clear propulsion and electronics that
naval service opens up. Nevertheless,
M.1.T. was not ready to accept the
prescribed naval ROTC program and
the Navy was sufficiently covetous

/ ey a

The Nation,

of the M.LT. product to know when
to stop insisting.

At Princeton, too, the faculty and
administration put their minds to
the task and developed a number of
courses within academic departments
to replace military-developed Army
courses. Similar efforts, on a less am-
bitious scale, have been made at
Harvard, Yale and Ohio State Uni-
versity. The Air Force has invited
all colleges and universities with Air
Force ROTC units to substitute aca-
demic courses where possible, or to
staff the regular Air Force course
with civilian instructors. Few col-
leges have taken up the challenge,
however. For one thing, the Air
Force itself is the judge of what are
“fit” substitute courses; and, for an-
other, few college instructors are
anxious to get involved in the mili-
tary programs at the expense of their
own work and the regard of their
professional colleagues.

IN MOST colleges and universities,
therefore, the question remains to be
answered: How can we meet the re-
sponsibility of preparing young men
for military careers? Leaving aside
the doubtful probability of a com-
plete metamorphosis of attitudes and
values, the formula can now be stated
in some detail:

1. The military officers now on
campus are there to do three jobs:
to teach technical military subjects;
to give a special military “twist” to
non-technical subjects included in
the ROTC curriculum; and, through

counseling, observation and_ their
very presence in uniform, to recruit
the most highly motivated students
into the career service. The third
function is the only legitimate one
the military have in the college com-
munity, and even this should be
carried out in conjunction with an
over-all college program on career op-
portunities. Technical subjects should
be left to summer training and post-
commissioning service schools; non-
technical subjects should be left to
the college.

2. Compulsory ROTC, as_ prac-
ticed in most land-grant and state
universities during the freshman and
sophomore years, should be dropped.
As college enrollments increase, com-
pulsory ROTC will become an in-
creasingly uneconomical affair. The
factor of compulsion will, moreover,
always tend to negate any efforts to
point out to students the compara-
tive advantages of a military career.

The problems involved in de-
veloping a pre-professional program
for a military career need study by
joint administration and faculty: com-
mittees wherever ROTC units are
located. This does not mean. that
Brown and Iowa State should try
to duplicate the curricula at the
service academies. It is more and
better education that officers need,
not more military training. Indeed,
recent curriculum changes at West
Point and Annapolis have been in
this direction. Where, after study, it
nevertheless seems clear -that a
worthwhile program, from the view-

point of the students and the career
service, is not possible, then steps
should be taken to drop ROTC.
The kind of program that could
then emerge where ROTC is retain-
ed would not, it must be admitted,
completely satisfy the vast majority
of students. Only abolition of the
draft would do this. But these stu-
dents would at least be relieved of
what they now call “Mickey Mouse”
courses and be given the opportunity
to devote their full time and ener-
gies to the best education their col-
lege or university can provide. For
those who are inclined to consider
a military career seriously or who
(and they are many) have no par-
ticular career plans, such a program
would do more to excite their in-
terest than the uninspiring experi-
ence they now have to go through.

The idea of consciously preparing
young men for military careers is
undoubtedly .hard for many faculty
members to accept. Perhaps only this
need be said: Even if one seriously
believes that the abolition of arma-
ments, soldiers and war is the only
solution to the present military di-
lemma, there is no expectation that
force will soon be universally aban-
doned as an instrument of national
policy. This does not mean that one
should succumb to the pressure of
present realities at the expense of
deeply felt principles. It 1s, however,
reason .to think carefully before
leaving the field to those who are
less concerned with the meaning of
war and peace.

THE MACMILLAN VICTORY .. yr. 7. Mckenzie

London
BRITISH politics will never be quite
the same as a result of the general
election of October 8, 1959. The ac-
tual details of the Tory victory are
not nearly as impressive as the news-
papers have tended to imply. Cer-
tainly the victory cannot be de-

R.T. McKENZIE, a noted British
political commentator and author of
British Political Parties, teaches at

the London School of Economics.

Octobcr 24, 1959

scribed as a “landslide.” The Conserv-
atives, It is true, creased their par-
liamentary majority to about one
hundred, but there was no significant
increase in their popular support. At
the previous election, in 1955, they
captured 49.7 per cent of the popular
vote; this time they got 49.4 per
cent. In other words, a_ slightly
smaller proportion of voters wanted
to see a Conservative government
this time than in 1955. But with a
smaller proportion of the vote, the

Conservatives won more seats, main-
ly because the Labour Party’s
strength was drained away by Lib-
eral gains in popular support. The
Liberals doubled their popular vote,
but made no net gain of seats in the
House of Commons, where they will
still be only six Liberals in a House
of 630. A political party whose total
Commons membership can _ still
travel in one taxi is obviously a long
way from forming a government.

It is worth noting also that the

251

n| total vote obtained by the Conserv-
atives was approximately 250,000
fewer than the vote polled by the
if Labour Party in 1951 (the highest
| poll ever recorded by any party, al-
though it did not bring Labour vic-
tory on that occasion). Nor is the
present Conservative majority of
one hundred very impressive when
compared with the majorities won
by the party in 1924 (223), 1931
(427) or 1935 (247).

In addition, Conservative gains
were by no means uniform through-
out the country. This state of affairs
will not surprise Americans who are
used to regional variations in party

:
{
support, but in British terms this is

a most surprising development, since
normally the “swing” from one party
to. another is amazingly
throughout the whole island.
But this time the Conservative
gains were concentrated mainly in
the Midlands (a district centered on
industrial Birmingham) and in the
South of England, including London.
But there was an almost equal swing
to Labour in the industrial areas of
Scotland and in certain of the Lanca-
shire textile districts. The explana-
tion is almost certainly economic.
There is virtually no unemployment
in the Midlands and the South, while
there is a good deal in Lancashire
and in Scotland. (Even there unem-
ployment is not high by U.S. stand-
ards—it runs to about 3 or 4 per
cent—but it has been persistent over
the past year or two, and Scotland
and Lancashire are bitterly aware
that they are not sharing in the
general national prosperity.)

On the other hand, the workers
of the Midlands and the South have
clearly accepted the Conservative
slogan, “You never had it so good.”
(Actually, the slogan was phrased
in a rather more genteel fashion in
the huge and expensive Tory adver-
tising campaign: “Life zs better with
the Conseryatives. ... Don’t let La-
bour ruin it.”) The result was a
really spectacular turnover of seats
in some urban regions. For the first
time in twenty years, for example,
the Conservatives hold more than
half the seats in Birmingham. And
in the county of London, which has
been ruled in local government af-
fairs by the Socialists for a quarter
of a century, the Conservatives have

258

uniform

‘

LN SS eget a1) ee
2 a . d x i ‘ 7 ss iw 7. vi
t ‘ pe

now managed to break even m seats.
‘here are a half-dozen Conservative
constituencies in which “New
Towns” had been built in a delib-
erate attempt to drain off some of
London’s teeming population and it
had been predicted that these “im-
migrants” from London would carry
their Tory politics with them.

BUT THIS did not happen, and it
may be that we are now witnessing
what The Economist calls, in an
ugly but an appropriate phrase, the
“de-proletarianization” of the British
working class. Macmillan proclaimed
what may become a historic phrase
in his television appearance to thank
the voters: “The class war is now
over.” This proclamation may be a
little premature; but certainly, as
far as the Midlands and the South
of England are concerned, hostilities
have been suspended, What we have
witnessed, indeed, is the first dra-
matic evidence, in political terms, of
what might be called the Americani-
zation of the British working class.
A leading Canadian journalist
talked with me recently about an
article he was writing called “Is
Britain More Prosperous Than Can-
ada?”. My comment was that the
answer was obviously “no,” if one
judged by the absolute standard of
living in the two countries. But the
reason why Britain has given the im-
pression of greater prosperity than
Canada in recent years is partly be-
cause of the exceedingly low level
of unemployment in this country,
but even more important because
Britain has moved for the first time
to the position where the enjoyable
gadgets of modern life have sud-
denly come within the reach of al-
most the whole population. Everyone
has or can soon get television, home
appliances and even motor cars
which in the past were the proud
possession of only 10 or 15 per cent
of the population.

The result has been that in this
campaign the mass of people ap-
peared fairly indifferent to the La-
bour Party’s assault on the huge
(and untaxed) capital gains being
made on the stock market, and to
the evidence on every hand that the
rich were getting richer even faster
than the poor were getting richer.

Also, of course, the Conservative

a A SA a bts

a
. Py fhe

Party, the most. intelligent: right-
ving party in the world, was wise
enough during its eight years in of-
fice not to dismantle, but to: im-
prove, the welfare state; and it also
made not the slightest gesture. of
hostility toward the trade unions.
The Conservatives, in other words,
did nothing to rouse the hostility of
the traditional Labour voter, but
invited him instead to take part in
the exciting prospect of the affluent
society. The ground was simply taken
from under the Labour Party; its
television propaganda was technical-
ly brilliant, but it tended to concen-
trate on the seamy side of life in
Britain, where there are still millions
of homes in which no human being
should be expected to live, and where
pensions for the elderly are pitiable
by North American standards. This
was perfectly legitimate political
comment, but it gave the impression
that the Labour Party was preoc-
cupied with the hangover of social
evils from the past, rather than with
the material joys of today and to-
morrow.

It was also evident that the public
was wholly uninterested in the La-
bour Party’s catalogue of “Tory
crimes.” The Conservative record
in external affairs, involving as it

Gummins (London Daily. Wxpress)

“F'm MacSwmmit, after all!”
| The Nation |

“m

wie
be a

(ees

does the Suez fiaseo; Cyprus, the
Holla murders and the government's
rejection. of its own commission which
reported on Nyasaland, was enough
to drive the traditionally neutral Ob-
server and the Spectator (normally
friendly to the Conservatives) into
the opposition camp. But clearly this
was an egghead reaction. The pub-
lic couldn’t have cared less and in-
deed there is a good deal of evidence
that the attack at Suez, on balance,
won the Conservatives more votes
than it lost.

THE PROSPECTS ahead for Mr.
Macmillan are exciting. He emerges
as a political figure of enormous
power, leading a party which has had
a blood transfusion of new and
younger M.P.s, some of whom are
men of very great promise. And yet
he has several reasons for moving
carefully. The first obvious one is
that his position in the House of
Commons looks more impressive than
the analysis of the popular vote
would suggest. If three voters in
every hundred were to desert him at
the next election, his majority would
melt away. This is perhaps the sur-
est guarantee that his government
will avoid becoming fat and slothful
as did most of the Conservative gov-
ernments of the inter-war years.
But in addition, Mr. Macmillan
must keep a careful eye on his own
right-wing. Last June, I spent an
evening with a group of Conserva-
tive back-benchers and, in the
course of conversation, put to them
the question: “What will happen to
your party if it comes back at the
next election with a majority of
ohne hundred?” One reply has stuck
in my memory: “It will mean the
end of Butler and his Tory social-
ism.” The back-bencher went on to
explain that the Conservative Party
had been, as he put it, “terrorized”
by Mr. Butler and the Tory left-
wing ever since 1945. The Butlerites
had been warning the party that,
unless they were prepared to accept
all of the social changes introduced
by thé Labour Government of 1945,
they would never regain power. Ags
once power had been regained in
1951, the Butlerites had gone on
warning | that the Conservatives could
hold office only so long as they

October 24, 1959

placated the trade unions and con-
tinued to bear the huge taxation
burden required to pay for the wel-
fare state. But, said my back-bench
friend, “if we win the next election
and trounce the Socialists three times
in a row, we will not again be ter-
rorized; we will insist on a genuine-
ly Conservative policy.” By which,
I gathered, he meant above all else
a really drastic cut in income tax
even though this might well mean a
considerable cutback in welfare-state
spending.

These old-guard spokesmen may
well be outnumbered by the new,
progressive Tories who are emerging
under Macmillan’s leadership. And
it must be remembered, of course,
that Macmillan himself is well to the
left of center in the Conservative
Party. Yet there are obvious tensions
within the party which could cause
real trouble within the next four or
five years.

THE LABOUR PARTY now at last
is confronted with the moment of
truth. It took forty-five years for
Labour to win its first (and only)
working majority in the House of
Commons. By 1950, the party had
lost its working majority and at each
of the three successive elections its
parliamentary strength has declined.
In just under four years, Hugh
Gaitskell has done an amazing job
in reuniting the party and in win-
ning it away from its more archaic
principles (such as the one, fatally
embedded in the party’s constitution,
which pledges it to work for the
“cothmon owhertship of the mearis of

production, distribution and ex-
change”). And Gaitskell has man-
aged to do this despite the fact that
he has had no really able ally on
the Right; he has had to work
through Aneurin Bevan and the left-
wing rebels of yesterday.

Yet it is clear that Gaitskell’s job
is only half done; he has not suc-
ceeded in transforming the public im-
age of the Labour Party and until
he does so it will remain the party
of perpetual opposition. In its present
state, the party has reached dead
end; it is no longer able to rely even
on working-class support. It almost
certainly polls a smaller proportion
of working-class voters than does
the Democratic Party in the compa-
rable Northeastern urban areas of
the United States.

Logically, it could be argued that
the Labour Party leaders ought to
encourage their left-wing and die-
hard Socialist elements to “hive off,”
and the remainder of the party
should seek a working alliance with
the emergent Liberals. But there are
desperately difficult obstacles to any
such development. On the one hand,
there is the fact that Joe Grimmond,
leader of the Liberal Party, is now
talking of dismantling certain fea-
tures of the welfare state. He has
been arguing that the main purpose
of state action should be to assist
those genuinely in need, and he ap-
pears to doubt the wisdom of the all-
inclusive insurance principle which
underlies almost all of Labour’s
thinking about social welfare.

There is also the intense hostility
among the older elements in the La-
bour Party toward any suggestion
that they should work with the Lib-
erals. Their attitude is easy to under-
stand, since it is undoubtedly a fact
that Labour’s previous experiments
in taking office—in 1924 and in 1929
—on the'basis of an unwritten alli-
ance with the Liberals, had disas-
“a0 electoral consequences. ,

. Gaitskell’s task is therefore —

not ae yet one thing is certain
and that is that he must act with
utmost speed and ruthlessness i in re-
shaping the party while the lessons
of defeat are writ so large on the
walls of history that even its most
dense members cannot fail to read
them.

On the Art of Book Publishing

Emile Capouya

READING maketh a full man, said
Bacon. He was talking of books, for
newspapers and magazines were yet to
be invented. Now we do have a periodi-
cal press, and we know it has its uses;
but it is concerned with reporting events
as they occur and arguing issues as they
arise; it is concerned with what ts little
more than the raw material of books.
Books still provide the reading that
makes the full man. They embody our
best-organized efforts to turn our ex-
perience into knowledge; they are the
most important vehicle for literary art.
Sooner or later, if we inquire how we
set about nourishing, in Bacon’s sense,
the man and the citizen, we must talk
of books. And in this connection, one
important question is, how do . books
get published, and is it well or ill with
us in that department?

For the purposes of such an inquiry,
book publishing can be conveniently
divided into four main categories, ac-
cording to the agency that does the
publishing: the Government Printing
Office, the university and denomina-
tional presses, the so-called subsidized
publishers and the commercial houses.
The importance and influence of the
government’s publishing program is not
generally appreciated, but official records
and transactions, and the special in-
terests of the governmental depart-
-ments, provide matter for an enormous
number of books. They are generally
distributed at nominal prices made
possible by subsidy, a levy upon the
public purse that is presumed to be in
the public interest.

The second category, the mixed one
of the university and denominational
presses, is the outlet for scholarly and
religious works. Many of these books,
too, are sold at low prices that reflect
_ subsidy, whether contributed by an
endowed press, by an interested organ-
ization, or by the author.

Next comes the class of publishers
A peat ies the books we used to refer
“privately printed,” i.¢., printed
ne athe, author’s expense. In this category,
| here is no a priori restriction on subject

atter or intended audience; the pub-

er undertakes, for a price, to print

EMILE CAPOUYA is an editor with a
New York publishing house.

and distribute whatever the author
may choose to write. To American
publishers as a whole, there is some-
thing a trifle unseemly about allow-
ing authors such unbridled freedom,
and perhaps that is why there is no
adequate trade term to designate the
houses that do it. They are sometimes
called “subsidized publishers” (though
we have seen that subsidy is common to
other areas of publishing), and some-
times “vanity presses.”

But there are better reasons than
mere pique behind the publishing fra-
ternity’s distaste for these firms. For
one thing, the vanity press arrangement
is openly exploitative: the author bears
the major expense and risk; the pub-
lisher has little control over, and some-
times little interest in, the quality of
the books to which fe lends his im-
print. On average, the books are very
bad. Moreover, subsidy arrangements
provide for royalty scales (commonly
40 per cent of the selling price of the
book) that are exceedingly high in
proportion as the publisher’s expecta-
tion of sales is exceedingly small. In
the unlikely event that a book pub-
lished on such terms does sell well, the
publisher must face paying a punitive
royalty on a large number of copies
—i prospect to daunt the stoutest heart
in the business community. Nevertheless,
setting aside the abuses of the system,
the essential feature of the subsidized
publishing arrangement is that it per-
mits an author to publish what he likes,
provided he can pay the bill. That
privilege is granted him in no other
area of publishing.

These, then, are three “special” modes
of producing and distributing books, and
they will warrant a closer look after
we have considered the enterprise com-
monly implied by the word “publishing”
— the commercial book house.

Whether he deals in books for the
general reader, in’ texts, in technical
works, or in other specialized publica-
tions, the distinguishing feature of the
commercial publisher is that he is the
classic image of the small or middle-

sized capitalist entrepreneur, risking his
own money to publish books in the _

expectation of realizing a profit on their
sale, Literature, Ja a pure

science, social ae
a ;

tivated amateur:

tory, music, art — the sum of our
culture is entrusted to this manufac-
turer and merchant, who undertakes to
perpetuate the record of the race in
return for a money payment. His func-
tion is so important that it is worth
our while to look into the manner in
which he discharges it — with particu-
Jar reference to the commercial condi-
tions that determine his actions.

TO begin with, a book has a physical
form; as soon as it can be said to be
a book, it it at least a handwritten or
typewritten manuscript. The publisher’s
business is to see that many copies of
the physical book are made available
to readers, and to that end the manu-
script is corrected, type is set from it,
and sheets are printed and bound. Once
in the hands of a reader, the book is
subject to wear and obsolescence, and
may require to be replaced—reprinted
in its original form, reprinted with re-
visions or additions to the text, reissued
in a different format, and so on. All
those operations cost money, and, gen-
erally speaking, no new book will be
published, and no old one reprinted,
unless the publisher is assured of a pro-
fit on his investment. If there is no
immediate market, on attractive terms,
for Shakespeare, then Shakespeare is
not published. Should you think the
example far-fetched, try to recall when
you last saw a_ legible, intelligently
edited, reasonably priced single-volume
American edition of the Works.
Indeed, we must revise our earlier
statement. The commercial publisher
undertakes to perpetuate that portion
of our cultural heritage for which he
can find cash customers at any given
moment. It would be unfair to blame
him for the deficiencies of a system
that has its cognates in every area of
our economy—a system, moreover, that
is the best now available for keeping at
our disposal the funded knowledge of
mankind. Yet the deficiencies are ser-
ious, and must be faced. Most of them
proceed from the fact that the com-
merical publisher js ultimately respon-
sible, not to culture, conscience, or
craftsmanship, but to the profit-and-
loss statement. It does not avail him
to be in his own person a scholar or cul-
he is constrained to
show a profit even on the books nearest
his heart—or else he must turn to
something more profitable. He is con-
sonal in ame words, to extract a

and yet the book buyer doesnot nec-
essarily profit by the taste and knowl-
edge of the publisher. Oddest of all, in
getting the book buyer to pay him a
sum covering cost, overhead and profit,
the publisher gets no more—least of
all the privilege of indulging his special
tastes or exercising his special knowl-
edge. In this light, the exchange of books
for cash looks more like a ritual gesture
than a rational exchange of values.

AT this point, my argument must
seem paradoxical and wrong-headed to
anyone whose thought has not taken
such a turn independently. Indeed, I
had to serve a good many years in the
book trade before I felt forced to adopt
so. paradoxical and wrong-headed a
view. In any case, one pointed ques-
tion could put an end to my theoreti-
eal difficulties if they were not also
real difficulties. The question is this:
As a matter of common experience, and
theory aside, doesn’t the system work
more or less well? The answer is no.
Not if we have in mind the only rele-
vant criterion of efficiency—how well
it serves the reader who wishes to put
himself in touch with the common stock
of knowledge and inspiration. When
such a reader enters a large bookshop,
he may be overwhelmed by the evi-
dence of the system’s productive ca-
pacity—hundreds of new books! But
suppose he wants to find a number of
books dealing with a particular topic,
including the classic treatments of the
. subject since its beginnings. In most
{ t cases, he will find no help in the book-

shop, and must turn to public, univer-
Ki sity, or private libraries. And that
means collections supported in the main
by philanthropy or public funds. The
bookshop, dealing chiefly in the cur-
rent and topical, caters to the casual
Ng reader, the gift seeker, the buyer on
impulse. The commercial system tends
to reduce books to journalism, so that
more and more they inform, entertain,
or exhort at the level of the newspaper
and magazine. Increasingly, books that
attempt to fulfill their traditional role
find no acceptance with the commer-
cial publisher, who can_ legitimately
plead “insufficient market.”

Even the practice of publishing the
complete works of important authors
in uniform editions has been largely
& abandoned, so that the instrument for
A systematic study of a given writer is
less and less available. Publishers say
that the public taste has changed in
this regard, that readers will no longer
buy a ten-volume set of a favorite
author. It may be true. If it is, what
is the responsibility of the commercial
ober 24, 1959

canon in helping to bring it about—for
instance, because high-rental space 1s
at a premium in a bookshop, and the
shopkeeper cannot afford to display
costly sets with low turnover value?
Commerce is a tyrant. The intellectual
tools that are the special concern, of
readers and publishers are being cheap-
ened and trivialized, and neither side
has any recourse.

Thus far, we have discussed the com-
mercial system’s direct effect upon the
reader’s education and the publisher’s
professional satisfactions. In the long
run, however, its most important effect
on both is exerted indirectly, through
the conditions it imposes on the author.
Obviously, when economic considera-
tions make the publisher look for
ephemera that can return a profit in
the shortest possible time, authors will
be led to write books to that measure.
On a generous ayerage, the effective
lite of books of all kinds published by
a trade house is six months. The back-
list, officially regarded as the health
and virtue of the trade, represents a
very small proportion of the total num-
ber of books published. Moreover, back-
list books are slow pay, and if it were
not for the economies they permit—the
fact that they are usually reprinted
from existing plates, and require little
or no editing and advertising—they
would not be so cherished. Culturally
speaking, the back-list is our civilization;
from the business standpoint, it is a
hedge against current mistakes.

The pressure that bears upon authors
in this form is gross and blatant; it
might very well leave mature, original
spirits quite unscathed. But there is
another force at work here about which
no equivocation is possible. I mean the
rate at which authors are paid.

Overhearing

You will go away some time.

Listen: bees will hum

hunting their flowers through the world
along corridors, their necessary line,

Till night comes over them

when stars weave wide gold cloth
with all of blue space between
on threads made real by time.

Then our one listening star

will coast along through the sky
afraid for awhile to breathe

lest it miss its corridor

The way we missed ours for long—
then these temporary meetings, then on
along our necessary line,

when you go away some time.

Wittiam Srarrorn

ti q 2. in ‘ ;
bg So. at iat , epebite tes. ap ila ae

ee ae ek) a). ; oe

The greater number of books are no —
longer written by clergymen supported a
by tithes or taxes, nor by gentlemen i“
who enjoy a modest competence. They
are written by people who derive their
salaries from the industrial system.
Few authors can hope to earn their
living by writing; most cannot really
afford to write at all. And that unfor-
tunate state of affairs comes about
largely because of the way in which
income from the sale of books is divided
between author and publisher. One con-
tributes talent and labor to the joint
product, the other capital and organi-
zation. Let us assume that the contri-
bution on either side is of equal value.
For his return, the publisher gets..a
profit that he calculates at an average
10 per cent of the wholesale price of
the book (in practice the figure should
be adjusted upward to something like
10 per cent of the retail price, if the
publisher is reasonably efficient). This
sum is net profit, figured after costs
and overhead have been met. The sig-
nificant point here is that overhead 9s
includes the publisher’s own salary. As
for the author, his average return is
approximately 10 per cent of the retail
price of his book, but out of it he must
find costs, wages and profit too. It
takes a clever man to find them.

I hope I may be forgiven for demon- ae
strating what might have been taken ‘apt
for granted—that commercial publish-
ing is a function of the capitalist sys- rng
tem. In this case, if ever, the disparity
between the rewards of primary pro- ne
ducer and entrepreneur has important
consequences. Society is the loser when “eal,
authors must spend their best energies
at some irrelevant if remunerative task,
and must treat the serious business of
their professional lives as an expensive
hobby. Doesn’t the system work more ;
or less well? It is cause for amazement in
that it works at all.

In fulfilling his role, the publisher is
not a villain but a victim—whether he
knows it or not. He cannot choose to
play the game on any other terms un-
less he has a private fortune and is _
willing to see it dissipated. Naturally, —
good luck and singularity of character
on such a scale are not the rule in the
book trade.

SUPPOSE the Government Printi
Office were to abandon its traditic
discretion and publish books of intere
to the general reader, so that it migh
offer competition to the commercial
houses. Suppose that in issuing w

of fiction, biography, history, etc., th
government were to maintain the sta \d
ards of content and format set by

superb) Yearbooks of Agriculture, and
mamta its low The bene-
fits that would spring from such a pub-
lishing TVA, and its yardstick feature,
are obvious—but what of its defeets?
Considering what governments are like,
we cannot reasonably anticipate that
there would be no real disadvantage in
allowing the state to gain a foothold in
still another important activity. The
question is, how great a disadvantage?
For the convenience of a public postal
are foreed to endure the
vagaries of the Postmaster
literary taste and his notions of morali-
ty. That is galling, certainly, but on
balanee we are the winners. [ think the
same line of argument fits the proposal
to have the government enter into com-
petition with the commercial publisher.

The big drawback is that it gives the
state another tool for making propa-
ganda—what might be called creative
censorship. The Voice of America and

prices, too,

system, we

the United States Information Agency

are good examples of what can be ac-
complished in this regard by policy and
selective patronage. But what is abusive
in these activities owes its existence to

public toleration, as in the case of Mr.

Summerfield. Naturally, a plan to help
revivify our national life through a
government publishing program presup-
poses, on the part of the citizens, an
attitude very different from apathy. A
really useful program of the kind we
are discussing is unthinkable without
a spiritual change in the electorate that
would encourage the government to
mind its manners in one department as
in another. The reward we could expect
from a properly functioning govyern-
ment press would be the partial safe-
guarding of our cultural wealth, now
defenseless against commercial oyer-
sight and- commercial greed. And the
fact that all this would entail a change
in our character as a people and the
suppression of long-standing abuses
does not seem to me to be so much

an objection to the plan as an addi-
tional reason for urging it.

The object is to supplement and

chasten the commercial publisher. An-
other way is to broaden the scope of
“5 the

university and denominational
presses by subsidy from public funds.

The university press has taken its char-
acter from the Ph.D. system of certi-

cation, and has as its principal fune-
on the utterance of the books that
— doctoral» candidates are compelled to

4 write; the religious presses are at bot-

_ tom the propaganda organs of one or
another sectarian creed, Both groups,
however, have a moral commitment to

ral

better things, and in practice few con-

General’s '

t themselves with’ Pept simmula- :

cra of scholarship or rane tracts.
little public money might encourage
university and denominational presses
to expand in a direction they have al-
ready shown a willingness to explore—
that of publishing books that are 1m-
portant almost in inverse proportion to
their ability to attract an audience.
Are these men honorable, can they be
trusted? Already the universities get
great sums of public money to spend
directly (mainly on war preparations,
it is true), not to mention their privi-
leged tax position. The churches too
are dispensed from paying a money
tribute to Caesar (possibly in the hope
that they will bless his eagles —in any
case they have always done so). It
would seem reasonable to bestow on
such institutions, already trustees of so
much of the public treasure, the very
modest additional funds that would en-
able them to carry on with increased
dash and sense of civic responsibility.

AGAIN, we have seen how the subsi-
dized publishing firm has been stigma-
tized, for good and for whimsical rea-
sons, as a “vanity press,” and we have
seen that it offers the unique advantage
of freedom of expression to those au-
thors who have a few thousand dollars
to invest in themselves. If the vanity

presses were appropriately regulated,
1.¢., prevented from overcharging for

their services and required to provide
services on a level with the best com-
mercial standard, they could become a
useful adjunct to the book-publishing
system. Right now, authors concerned
for their reputation avoid the vanity
presses, but, properly purified and their
stigma lived down, those firms could
be an outlet for frivolity or genius such
as the more solemn, more highly or-
ganized commercial publishers are not
likely to provide.

Even more important, the vanity
presses could provide facilities for co-
operatives embracing producers and
consumers, designed after the pattern of
the book clubs. Today, the book clubs
are involuntary cooperatives, with the
defect that they reward their adminis-
trators too liberally and their subscrib-
ers not liberally cnough. But_ setting
aside that feature, and the inculeation
of vulgarity that ‘they can be charged
with, there is much to be learned from
their skill in’ distributing large quanti-
ties of books. It should be easy to or-
ganize cooperatives on the book-club
model, whose objects would be to serve
readers and reward authors; in such
cooperatives, each subscriber could
have a yote, and- ‘thigs ae nty to
learn how to use it.

is helpless before »

“edu "af regderst once organized, is

7 Ae

oe a

beet

market. As a group, moreover, readers —
would have access to credit, and could
become publishers, too. Here is a form
of decentralization and do-it-yourself
that has no Cloud-cuckoo-land over-
tones. It could be genuinely useful as
a corrective to commercial publishing.

These observations, if brought to the
attention of practicing publishers, will”
provoke ambivalent reactions. As men
devoted to their profession, publishers
are sensible of the defects in their prac-
tice. As men working within a com-
mercial system, they are involved in
its profit-goal, and scarcely capable of
envisioning another. The devoted pub-
lisher’s reaction to each new, worthy,
unsalable manuscript is a groan, IL
have heard an intelligent and honest
bookman object to paperbacks because
their publisher must sell five times as
many copies to earn the same profit as
with hard-bound books. The enormity
of his argument, and its perfect legit- |
imacy on its own terms, are the real
indictment of the commercial system.

Publishers, accordingly, are not likely
to embrace my conclusions without re-
serve. But what I most fear is the
criticism of those who may follow my
argument with sympathy, but say at
the end, “What then? You must know
that the measures you propose—exten-
sion of the role of the Government
Printing Office, extension of the role of
the university press, the purification of
the vanity houses and the introduction

In the Time of Fall

They were small waves,

more the likeness of time

than sorrow—

sorrow is great and breaks

along the beach

lonely under the search

of gulls and white

with seafoam:

crest and

sky the gulls carve—

these were sidelong,

hurrying swiltly

to the coming tide.

The bay lay curved

within the Jand,

gulls crossed the moon

southeast

the light came on

the hook of headland

beating up the course

of ships home.

The air was autumn,

More than the swiftness of her cheek

were the waves ;
shortly borne, — . ~~

j ‘

iy,

——-~——

SES ISL

of cooperatives functioning through
them—are the merest palliatives. They
are intended to correct an evil that, on
your own showing, is radical, and to
which you plan to allow nearly the same
scope as heretofore, namely, the entire
commercial press. We have followed you
thus far, putting up with your un-
pleasant truths and your misleading

half-truths. But your arguments, if they
mean anything, mean more than you
have admitted.” That is the criticism
I most fear, because only a madman
would feel no trepidation in suggesting,
as I must, that it would take a full-
scale social and political revolution be-
fore books could be published honestly
in the United States.

Notes from the Future: Two Poets

HEART’S NEEDLE. By W. D. Snod-
grass. Alfred A. Knopf. 62 pp. $3.75.

SELECTED POEMS. By Robert Dun-
can. City Lights Books (San Fran-
cisco). 80 pp. $1.

LETTERS. By Robert Duncan. Jona-
than Williams (Highlands, N. C.).
30 pp. $8.

M. L. Rosenthal
“SNODGRASS,” I recently heard a dis-

tinguished older poet say, “is frankly
bourgeois. The rest of us try to hide
our bourgeois nature from ourselves, but
he is plainly and openly what he ts.” I
suppose his calling Snodgrass bourgeois
had something to do with this young
writer's acceptance of simple, normal
marital and domestic relationships as
possible, and desirable, in themselves.
In this sense he is uncritically “bour-
geois”; he apparently has no bohemian
suspicion that a good marriage in which
husband, wife, and children are both
affectionate and responsible to one an-
other is necessarily death to the free,
creative life.

Not that these are happy poems, as
the pieces in John Ciardi’s 7 Marry You
are. In point of fact, the long title-
sequence presents the poet in a state of
deep soul-sickness because of his di-
vorce and because of the dangers which
a new marriage presents to his relation-
ship with his baby daughter. Snodgrass,
though much less violent, is a confes-
sional poet like Robert Lowell, and he
is writing about a stubborn if almost
abject father-love hanging on to its ob-
ject with animal persistence. The quietly
satisfying bourgeois family is for him
an ideal as genuine peace is an ideal for
a world ravaged by actual and by cold
war. The figure is one on which he de-
pends repeatedly:

Child of my winter, born

When the new fallen soldiers froze

In Asia’s deep ravines and fouled
the snows,

When I was torn

By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped

October 24, 1959

mind

To that cold war where, lost, I could
not find

My peace in my will....

The ten-part sequence takes us from
the child’s birth to the divorcee, the sec-
ond marriage, and the muted triumph
that a second winter of separation should
have been survived—‘and you are still
my daughter.” Snodgrass has built a
moving poem out of something we treat
far too casually: early divorce, in which
it is the love between children and their
parents that receives the deepest
wounds. The undramatic misery of the
troubled father anxious to create com-
mon memories—pushing his child on a
playground swing, learning to make
omelettes and pancakes so he can feed
her at home when she visits him, and
so on—has great authority. Snodgrass
gains it through a gift of understatement
that is yet saturated with feeling:

The window’s turning white
The world moves like a diseased heart
packed with ice and snow.
Three months now we have been
apart
less than a mile. I cannot fight
or let you go.

Perhaps another “bourgeois” aspect
of this poet’s work lies in the kind of
psychological problems he admits to

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dealing with the intimate, physieal
contacts of marriage, originally pub-

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having generally. In “April: Inventory”
he recites some of the lessons he has
learned—that is, has had to learn
over the past year:
I] taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who is dying.
| have not learned how often |
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

Karler in this same poem he men-
tions “my analyst,” and perhaps that
phrase too is peculiar to one kind of
bourgeois life adjustment. But [ think
the older poet’s real objection (I’m
somehow sure it was really an objec-
tion, though it has a certain admiration
in it too) was to the absence of hatred
in the poems of Heart’s Needle. Snod-
grass pays token service to the usual
creed of sophisticated aversion to Phil-
istinism and commercialism, sounding
something like a paler Cummings. But
he accepts, always. The explosive anger
of Lowell is nowhere to be found, and
the truly striking notes are of a winning
sensitivity and candor, and an ability
to endure the rigors of experience with
pathetic courage and a nostalgia paid in
advance. These observations are not
meant as moral judgments, but as a
definition of the kind of energy his po-
ems possess. I should add that he has
a disciplined skill that is pure delight
in the delicately modulated “The Opera-
tion,” a poem detailing with the most
vivid impressionism the — successive
physical sensations and shifts of aware-
ness before and after surgery, and in the
restrained sexuality of “Winter Bou-
quet”’—two examples among several
outstanding pieces. He is able to use
description and imagery so suggestively
that he can postpone explicit statement
of feeling, when it is needed at all, to
brief, strategic moments, usually at the
very end of a poem. He uses this ability
so tactfully in the “Heart’s Needle”

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257

sequence that he sustains without fal-
tering a theme that otherwise, over so
long a haul, must have bogged him down
in sentimentality. The poem remains
true to its germinating feeling of quiet
suffering, and to its author’s special
talents.

FEW POETS could be less alike than
Snodgrass and Robert Duncan. Where
Snodgrass is one kind of modern Clas-
sicist, master of a carefully defined
range of sensibility, Duncan is a Ro-
mantic par excellence, reaching out in
every direction for the secret of all
realizations. Moreover, he resists Snod-
grass’ kind of surrender to life’s common
expectations and predicaments. He re-
sists even the nonconformist tradition
to which he himself belongs. For in-
stance, he is tremendously indebted to
William Carlos Williams’ thought-man-
nerisms and cadenced style; but, unable
to liberate himself from this and other
such influences, he indulges his willful,
didactic personality in such a way as
to make his triumphs almost a conquest
over style. “I attempt the discontinui-
ties of poetry,” he writes in Letters, and
sets himself the program: “To interrupt
all sure course of my inspiration.”

the addition of the un
planned for interruption:
a flavor stinking coffee
(how to brew another cup
in that Marianne Moore-
E. P.-Williams-H. D.-Stein-
Zukofsky-Stevens-Perse-
surrealist-dada-staind
pot) by yrs. R. D.

The result is an unusual richness and
springiness of texture when Duncan is
at his best. (For a poet of his powers,
he is surprisingly inconsistent. Although
he is forty years old—some seven years
older than Snodgrass—he is only just
now, in poems not yet printed in book
form, coming into secure control of his
work.) Duncan’s “natural” lyric voice
is a little thin. The effort, therefore, to
give an emphatic personal stamp to his
work—and because it is naturally so
“transparent” he has been most suscep-
tible to the cutting in of other voices
than his own, from Dante’s to Denise

evertov’s—has led Duncan to a_pri-

‘vate mystique and theory. He has cul-

tivated a profound faith that he is run-
ning along paths of fire traced out for
him by the Masters; he must fulfill
their work and, at the same time,
achieve a break-through premised on all
he has learned from them. “As we
‘struggle towards life, it is thru our

they in their time offended.” Letters is
a voyage of exploration into this aes-

thetic program and its implications for
the whole of life. In verse and in prose,
Duncan insists and __ intellectualizes,
superimposing on his basic, uncompli-
cated melodic sense of style the mysti-
cal purpose implied in this voyage:

- Hollows
of underfeelings reveald in all
arrangements.
The design, the drawing draws from us
the secret of a dark from our darkness.

These lines are from “Metamorpho-
sis,” which, together with the poems
on “the theme of Adam” and with “An
Owl Is an Only Bird of Poetry,” is the
most compelling and least derivative
section of Letters. Duncan’s progress in
recent years may be seen by comparing
this book with the Selected Poems, which
is much spottier. A few pieces in the
latter book stand out sharply from the
rest—notably the excited erotic tableau
of “The Mirror,” the brilliantly pathetic
opening part of the “Coda” to The
Venice Poem, and the unusually com-
pressed “‘Processionals IJ.” However, the
usual yardsticks will not measure Dun-
can. For one thing, his poems in any
one period are more or less interlock-
ing, both in the actual continuity be-
tween one poem and the next and in
the symbolic identifications toward
which all direct themselves. For an-
other, the mysticism is not merely a
matter of general attitude, as it is, say,
in Kathleen Raine, but of certain literal,
Blakean intensities. “The vowels,”
writes Duncan, “are physical corridors
of the imagination emitting passionately
breaths of flame. In a poem the vowels

appear like the flutterings of an owl
caught in a web and give awful inti-
mations of eternal life.” The casual
grossness of language in a poem like
“Distant Counsels of Artaud,” the un-
self-conscious sexual frankness of other
poems, the blaspheming that again re-
calls Blake (whose references to “old
Nobodaddy” were merely a function of
his familiarity with the Eternal) are
essential expressions of an indomitably
mystic will.

Duncan moves all but blindly in his
own orbit, yet insists that he sees all
and sometimes does so indeed. At such
moments we are in a realm of apper-
ception a hundred times more meaning-
ful than Snodgrass’, though its atmos-
phere is always endangered by the
clouds of rhetoric and of syntactic fore-
ing. What with the pain the one poet so
lucidly and objectively reports on from
his experience of the well-known world,
and the longing the other expresses to
break out of the encompassing assump-
tions of that w i o-
lutionary and “experimentalist” assump-
tions—it becomes clear that “accept-
ance” and “rejection” as frames of
thought have become obsolete.

THE TWO writers curiously comple-
ment each other. They are each other’s
correctives, as it were. Together, they
suggest the main preoccupations of the
future for bourgeois and anti-bourgeois
alike: the true relation of private sensi-
bility to the realities of day-to-day lite,
and the need to establish a new sym-
bolism to match the expanding creative

-potentialities of man.

LETTER from CHICAGO

Jean Martin

“GENIUS always comes from the di-
rection in which no one is looking,” and
not only genius it would seem, but most
of the important events in Chicago. The
St. Lawrence Seaway, a source of ex-
tensive boredom to many Chicagoans
during its dredging and construction,
has only now gradually begun to seep
into the public consciousness—in much
the same way that the “Chicago school”
of television (the casy-going soft-sell
personified by Garroway, Kukla and
Ollie, etc.) was mildly tolerated locally,
then re-examined with good-natured
delight after its “discovery” by the na-
tional audience. True, there had been

JEAN MARTIN is a pea uan Nation
contributor.

some hullabaloo and fantare before the
Seaway opened, but most of it took the
form of long, stately, educational-type
TV programs replete with maps show-
ing the city as the “hub” of an econom-
ically rehabilitated Midwest, ‘way, way
off in the future somewhere. The re-
sult was public apathy of almost over-
whelming density.

The first awakening of a really alive
interest in the Seaway came with the
International Trade Fair, a kind of
economic Disneyland whieh drew pro-
portionate crowds to Nayy Pier. Under-
scoring, in fact exaggerating, the poten-
tial benefits to be derived from direct
import via the new super-highway to
Europe, the fair offered items, ranging
from) Danish traterackere through gold

;

The

ee
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Jj : eg ri
Jamé ironing-board covers and on up to
foreign sports cars, in single sales at the
reduced price for direct delivery in
bulk.

But the biggest boost to public aware-
ness of Chicago’s new continental posi-
tion came with the visit of the Queen.
By a stroke of cosmic good luck this
took place on a day of exquisite, wine-
like weather, the like of which Chicago
had not seen for ten years and probably
won't see again for another ten. It was
the kind of day on which you could
see the sand dunes of Indiana with the
naked eye from the downtown offices.
From the moment when Philip, in an
impulse of curiosity, stood up in the
landing boat for a look at the city (he
turned and pronounced it “beautiful”
to Elizabeth who remained demurely
seated under a canopy, probably steel-
ing herself for the encounter with this
supposed Chicago Tribune stronghold of
anti-Bnfish feeling) — from that first
moment to the last, when Mayor Daley
(limp from the exertion of pronouncing
words correctly all day) told the serene-
ly smiling, unruffled Queen to “come
again and bring the children,” the whole
thing was a sudden, deep, unexpected
love affair between the crowds and the
Queen.

HAVING thus had its first taste of its
new cosmopolitan role as a World Port,
Chicago plunged with reckless aplomb
into the Pan-American Olympic games
which, as it turned out, was a fiasco of
continental proportions. The weather
this time was a record-breaking heat
wave and the events, scattered all over
town in tacky high school and college
gyms (the sculling events took place
on the Cal-Sag Canal which, as the
name suggests, is scarcely a_ green-
banked Thames), were sparsely at-
tended. The South Americans, battered
by language difficulties and the unspeak-
able heat, found themselves housed as
far afield and in such strange places as
Naperville and Wheaton. The low point
of a grim week was surely the day on
- which two horses (unfortunately both of
them South American) completed the
jumping course at Hinsdale’s Oak Brook
and then dropped dead from heat and
exhaustion.

But the most trenchant reminder of
the way in which the Seaway may
change the city turned up in the course
of a run-of-the-mill hassle on public
housing. In a bitter struggle over the
location of future projects it was pointed
out that Chicago’s public housing is
now occupied by 85 per cent Negroes,
12 per cent whites and 3 per cent Puerto
Ricans. It was that last 3 per cent,
thrown i in as an afterthought, that ‘sud-

4
q
i

denly became of cotne cidine interest, | &

for it was the first statistical appearance
of the deepest way in which the Sea-
way may yet affect Chicago’s provin-
cial outline.

THEATRE

Harold Clurman

PRAISE the Phoenix Theatre for pro-
ducing Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God
Brown anew (Coronet). George Jean
Nathan thought it O’Neill’s best play,
an opinion I do not share, but one step
toward the making of a true theatre in
our country is the production of old
plays of merit.

It is not sufficient, though, that such
plays be seen merely as new “shows”;
they should be comprehended as part
of a development in their author’s work
and as part of our own history. It is no
longer of first importance that O’Neill
used masks in this play, a device con-
sidered highly “experimental” in 1926
when the play was originally presented.
What is important is the play’s theme
and the anguish O’Neill imbued it with.
The theme is the practical man’s envy
of the artist and the artist’s jealousy of
the dominant practical man — a peculi-
arly American theme in the period of
the play’s conception.

O’Neill probed further than this bald
statement might suggest. He saw the
American businessman — for that is
what Brown represents, though O’Neill
made him an architect — becoming in-
fected with the artist’s yearnings, and
unable finally to realize himself
either as one thing or another. Brown
suffers some of the inner dissatisfactions
which plague and impel the artist with-
out possessing the artist’s sensibility or
skill. More ‘strikingly, O’Neill portrays
his artist, Dion Anthony, as a trammeled
human being, really a half-artist with a
gnawing sense of inadequacy in _ his
philosophy, his personality and his ad-

DR. LINUS PAULING

Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist
Supports the Eisenhower-
Khrushchev Meetings

and speaks for a

TICKETS: Sa TOPIC:

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Carnegie Hall, Sunday, Oct. 25, 8:00 P.M. |

“FALLOUT—TODAY’S 7 YEAR PLAGUE”
$5.00 ee ALSO: Hon. Stanley M. Isaacs, City Councilman
$2.00 _-—- Clarenoe Pickett, Co-Chairman Nat’! Committee

mittee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 17 East 45th Street, N.Y. 17 —

I3-N.7. Drama
Critics’ Award

a raisin in the sun

Anew play by LORRAINE HANSBERRY
starring CLAUDIA McNEIL
OSSIE DAVIS * RUBY DEE

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Orson Bean, Guest Star —

Ss
fe

justment to life. That is a crucial Amer-
ican tragedy: the incompleteness of
American civilization as it focuses in
the individual.

This sounds old-fashioned. Today,
only a brief “moment” since the dilem-
ma appeared poignant in the growing
American consciousness, terms and cir-
cumstances have altered their outer
form. The businessman of today is
emotionally more complacent: if he ap-
preciates the artist’s function, collects
paintings, attends concerts and reads
certain books or book reviews, he ex-
presses hjs disquiet otherwise than
O’Neill’s Brown. Similarly the artist. to-
day seems to have taken his “proper”
place in our society, so that with a little
maneuvering, . rationalization, psycho-
analysis and publicity he can feel pretty
much in the same boat as the Browns.
The result is that they are both pre-
pared to moan in monotonous chorus
about taxes and the threat of atomic
extinction.

The core of the matter, however, is
not changed as much as we pretend; if
we believe otherwise that is chiefly be-
cause we rarely think of any “core” at
all, except to indulge ourselyes in a spe-
cious vocabulary of high-brow _ plati-
tudes. O'Neill was no intellectual; if his
play suffers in form and thought as well
as in clarity, its impulse and source are
nevertheless real and deep.

IN O’Neill’s work as a whole the theme
of The Great God Brown recurs again
and again in the most diverse guises;
and if we refer even cursorily to O’Neill’s
life we become aware that the conflicts
which made the theme urgent were
rooted in his relationship to his father,
his mother, his brother. A blood tie
binds Beyond the Horizon, Desire Un-
der the Elms, Marco Millions, Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, A Touch of
the Poet into a single underlying mean-
ing: the individual American has not
reached fulfillment; he is not full grown,
neither as a doer nor as a feeling person
has he yet made peace with himself or
with the world, and all the blather
about the “American way of life” will
not heal the sore.

Note too that O’Neill’s artist, for all
his mockery of Brown, is not presented
as a “genius.” It is always clear that
O'Neill never thought of himself as a
master in any way. He identified him-
self with derelicts and failures. He has
no heroes; all his central figures yammer
and yearn, curse and are as much lost
as Yank the Jaborer in The Hairy Ape.
Immature on the level of ultimate
power, O'Neill is the dramatic poet of
our own immaturity — which in_ his

ir eiete’

eg Pe es hs pe Bee's. . =. ;
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. ‘4 .

work is not merely an artistic or an in-
telleetual flaw, but a lacerating wound.

You may be embarrassed by some of
the awkwardness and feeble verbiage of
The Great God Brown; particularly in
the last act; and you can if you wish

disparage O’Neill, in academic — lofti-
ness, by comparing his plays with

the best work of the European play-
wrights of the past forty years. The fact
remains that he is not only our most
important dramatist, but one whose
total product is, even in some of its
faults, more truly relevant to the Amer-
ican people — whose “story” after all
concerns the whole of modern society —
than any other dramatist of this period
anywhere.

The Phoenix Theatre production un-
der Stuart- Vaughan’s direction is much
more obviously stylized than the origin-
al production directed by Robert Ed-
mond Jones. The new production is
perhaps more lucid than the early one,
or let us say less “mystic.” It is intel-
ligently executed throughout. I also be-
lieve it likely that the comparatively
young actors in the present production
— Fritz Weaver, Robert Lansing and
the others — “understand” the play and
their parts better than did those of the
original cast. Yet I cannot suppress the
feeling that the emotional resources of
our present generation of actors are not
as rich as those of former years. The
distinction 1s not one of talent: it has
much to do with the times. Today we
are perhaps more troubled and possess
less actual experience. Our lesions now-
adays seem to be chronic, and so to
speak automatic, whereas the older
actors were more truly engaged in the
world and in the living theatre. They
had earned their neuroses.

ART

Fairfield Porter

THE REUBEN GALLERY is a new
gallery at 61 Fourth Avenue, New York.
It plans to show avant-garde art that
you can see nowhere else. The first ex-
hibition is not of paintings but is an
“event” consisting of eighteen “happen-
ings,’ by Allan Kaprow. Kaprow has
had thirteen one-man exhibitions, and
he teaches art history at Rutgers Uni-
versity. He wishes to stretch the limits
of art: he wants to make somethin
outside the old classifications, to which
one responds with several senses. Like
a composer of opera, he wants to com-
bine all the arts in one form, He is am-

bitious; and as a teacher conscious of
history he is impatient with the brush:
he resembles the critics who say, “you
can’t do such and such any more, it has
already been done.”

*
- * oT

To see the “Eighteen Happenings” it
was necessary to reserye seats in ad-
vance. During the performance different
things go on in each of three different
rooms, which are separated by semi-
transparent plastic partitions. After two
sets of events, you move, during an
intermission, to another room, according
to instructions given you at the door.
After two more events you move to the
remaining room, and so each member of
the audience sees one-third of all that
goes on; but you can hear and partly
see what is happening in the other
rooms. Actors come in, read or speak or
play a musical instrument, or paint, or
just. move; and accompanying this are
tape-recorded sounds and the activity
and noise of wound-up mechanical toys.
Sometimes the words spoken are drowned
out by other sounds. In one room is a
collage of artificial fruits, partly painted
over. There are vari-colored lights.

The movements are military, dis-
ciplined and solemn: the words spoken
have a similar solemnity, the fragments
of ideas are romanticized, there is some-
thing about time from T. S. Eliot,
phrases like “art: dear to you all” and
“the mocker mocked.” A game is stiffly
played according to plan by two players
with cubical blocks.

THE details, like the details of col-
lage, are ready-made: reminiscences of
sets by Rauschenberg for dances by
Cunningham, of Cage’s music (this in
the quality of timing), of modern
poetry, of Dada and German Expres-
sionism. The action is monolithic, the
materials of the setting flimsy, and the
voices have an unrelieved seriousness.
Kaprow’s method is almost the opposite
of most artists, literary or visual,
who make something out of clichés or
ordinary things or rubbish: he uses art,
and he makes clichés. Kaprow debases
what he quotes and what he refers to.
If he wants to prove that certain things
can’t be done again because they have
already been done, he couldn’t be more
convincing. The “Eighteen Happenings”
devalue all art by a meaningless and
deliberate surgery. And the final totality
is without character, it never takes off
from the sidewalk.

Avant-garde art has the merit of sur-
prise. Kaprow’s avant-garde “event”
constantly disappoints one’s expectation
of surprise. Like so many science fiction
movies about the future, his subject mat-
ter is the undigested immediate past.

‘ ‘' ia)

Vig his eat ell

i ‘ - ; ‘ The fs IN TION 4

Crossword Puzzle No. 839

By FRANK W. LEWIS

ACROSS:
1 and 10 Approaching the stupid,
pushed aside by the guards? (8,7)
5 Set upon, like a sheet. (6)
10 See 1 across
11 Aries sees poorly, for an Egyptian!

Vc x
12 If a hundred-headed, might be de-
scended from 11, in one sense. (5)
13 The balance of the horse, perhaps.
(9)

14 See 24 across

16 Sounds like largess in the economy
size, in the Amazon for example. (8)

19 Something thrown in according. to
method? (2, 3,3)

22 The town of Duchess Engels. (5)

14 across, and 17 down A brave way

of following the enemy’s move-

ments! (7, 2,3, 2, 3,6

26 Franklin thought his early get-up
might be profitable, but sometimes
tripped over. (5)

28 Sort. of -ritual. following. -tea—in.
name only. (7)

29 Reduced to common standard. (7)

30 In support of cakewalks? (6)

381 Some businessmen might have lots
of them. (4,4)

DOWN: ;
1 Pogo sticks or stilts? (8)

2 Where the heavenly. company. gath-
ered? (5)

3 Does the poor indian join the min-.

4 The savings of China, perhaps.
(4, 3)

6 Mus.? Add! (38,2)

7 Elements of reference might be |

basie to back-sass. (9)

8 Somewhat like a 50-mule team to
go along with the lads! (6)

9 This could be quite a shock. (6)

15 ree the word for the poetaster.

17 See 24 across

18 One might find barges in here. (8)

20 ae might be laid by our betters.
6)

21 Do these people have pull with the
wrong seat of power? (7)

23 A shrew’s on board, and slips on the
ice. (6)

25 A small bit of land is rented this
way. (5)

27 For a base answer, ask it incor-
rectly. (5)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 838

ACROSS: 1 Double-barreled; 10 Mag-
neto; il Hammer; 12 Birdeage; 14
Doodled; 15, 9, 21 down and 23 I Shot
an. Arrow Into the Air; 17 Eases; 19
Earring; 21 Ice cream; 25 Tripoli; 26
Untwist: 27 What in the world. DOWN

1 Death rate; 2 Unarmed; 3 ib tcentoas
A. and .6. Bowlegged; By Remainders; 7
Eyewash; 8 and 24 Nonesuch; 13
Alienation; 15 Irish stew; 16 Tolerated;

RESORT

FAirbanks 5-7227
MAhopac 8-3449

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THE

NATION |

SPECIAL ISSUE: Coenihi MED, 1959

The
SHAM
of

ae
e
%9

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 14

INTRODUCTION TO THIS SPECIAL ISSUE

The Editors

NOW MORE than ever before, the Big City — growing
bigger, denser, taller — is the center of modern society.
Of all big cities, New York is the biggest — the monster
metropolis, the best-known city in the world. But for
all this it is still just another big city. It is Boston,
Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Houston.
Basically, there is nothing unique about its problems;
to some degree, its shame is the shame of every big
city. The implications are far-ranging. Is Big City a
law unto itself? Does power in the Big City concentrate
at the top in such a way that “the little people,” mean-
ing all but a handful of residents, are helpless to con-
trol the government that is of most intimate concern
to them, that has the maximum daily impact on their
Irves, and the lives of their children and neighbors? In
the Big City — every Big City, any Big City — has
the pay-off, the “fix,” become a permanent way of life?

In this issue Fred J. Cook and Gene Gleason, ex-
perienced and able reporters on a New York metropoli-
tan daily, present a wrap-up of New York politics based
on stories which one or the other or both first brought
to light or helped to develop, Throughout, they have

added fresh material; vital aspects of the Nimer case
are here revealed for the first time. The writers were
not asked to describe the glories and marvels of New

York; nor, by the same token, did we ask them to re- .

port on every aspect of the city’s shame. They were
asked to deal only with those phases of big-city politics,
of people and power in the metropolis, with which they
have dealt at first hand.

This is New York politics — Big City politics — told
dramatically, cogently, in perspective. The fitful parade
of scandalous headlines is here replaced by a carefully
organized, intelligently interpreted, skillfully presented
statement of what it is that constitutes the “shame”
of New York.

No more than Cook and Gleason are we, the editors,
convinced that the shame of New York is ineradicable.
But if the 8,000,000 residents of New York are to re-
assert their authority as freeholders of a city that is one
of the wonders of the world, they first need a clear,
broad, steady view — a view in depth — of the shame
that has befallen them. This they now have; the use
they make of it is up to them.

In This Issue ul
THE SHAME OF NEW YORK =
by FRED J. COOK and GENE GLEASON
261 @ Part 1: Monster City

George

3 i's : ’ i

y 1 eo « a

G. Kirstein, Publisher
Carey McWilliams, Iditor
Victor IT. Bernstein, Managing Wdilor

NNT

sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
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in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book

Vol. 189. No. 1 | Review Digest, Index to Labor Articles, Pubite:

ept for omis-

am . a pen Be ey Robert Wateh, Books and the Arts
a 275 @ A: Wagener: The Man Out Harold Clurman, Theatre
Front Maurice Grosser, Art
278 @ 5: Clear It With Quill M. L, Rosenthal, Poetry
284 @ 6: The Man With Ten = Lester Trimble, Music
Heads 2 Alexander Werth, Euro
291 © 7: Variations on Title 1 Comte tena ae “om
800 @ | 8: What’s $2 Million,
Anyway? _ Mary Simon, Advertisi
306 @ 9: Rackets—and Pay Offs i ee
313 '@ 10: He Never Had a Chance “The Nation, Och "7
11: Conclusion (opp. 320) ‘The Natfon published week! 7

ye 7 :

Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed —

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i
1

ing half”):

EW YORK is a sprawling, vo-
acious monster of a city. It covers
315 square miles; it is crammed with
some 8 million people. At least a
million, a full eighth of its total popu-
lation, live in packed squalor, six
‘and ten to a room, in slum tene-
‘ments whose mere existence is a
Mauseous stench on the air—tene-
ments so rat-infested that, on the
average, one hundred persons a year
are badly chewed and, so far this
year, two have been actually gnawed
to death. Symbolically, perhaps,
there are in New York more rats
than people—an estimated 9 million
of them.

__ Merely to recite such figures is to
indicate the magnitude of New
York’s problems and the essence of
‘the city itself. For in New York
e erything i is judged by magnitude.
The city’s budget has soared above
‘$2 billion annually, more than dou-
ble the size of the national budget
that evoked such a shock wave of
Protest in the days of Benjamin
Harrison. The city’s police force
an umbers nearly 24,000 men, an army
eT than the military forces of

FRED J. COOK (the “
veteran crime re-
porter on a New York metro-
politan daily, he is the author
of “The FBI” (The Nation,
October 18, 1958), which won
the New York Newspaper
Guild’s Page One Award for magazine features. He was
“co-author with former Senator Robert C. Hendrickson,
erst chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile
“Delinquency, of the book Youth im Danger; his latest
book is What Manner of Men (Morrow).

‘ 4
. , 7
Ae tose 2 5 ote

‘SHAME OF NEW YORK

Fred J. Cook and Gene Gleason

writ-

porting half”):

many Latin American countries, an
army not much smaller than the one
Robert E. Lee had after Antietam.
When one counts policemen, school
teachers, transit workers and other
municipal employees, New York’s
payrolls cover the salaries of some
220,000 workers. Even if one figures
conservatively that, on an average,
each worker has only two depen-
dents, this huge municipal payroll
means that there is a separate city
of officialdom numbering more than
600,000 people—a city much larger
than San Diego—that lives inside
the city of Park Avenue and Harlem
and the Empire State Building.
Such figures graphically illustrate
the tremendous pressures that are
generated in the crucible that is New
York. What does one person or one
life mean in a city swarming with 8
million humans and 9 million rats?
The sheer weight of the packed, con-
glomerate masses, the tremendous
size of the official bureaucracy that
has been created to rule over them,
the enormous power ded by an
officialdom feeding on $2 billion an-

_nually and controlling many times

1932” ,
RPL ieee ey 4

GENE GLEASON (the “re-
winner with
Cook (both work on the same
newspaper ) of the 1957 Page
One Award for the best local
news reporting (subject: the
wiretapping of a union head-
quarters during New York’s subway strike). Gleason
has spent most of the last three years in daily coverage
of the personalities and events involved in “The Shame
of New York.” His editors have written of him:
tough physically .. .

MONSTER OF A CITY

“He is

and mentally. No one awes him.”

that many billions in long-term deals
and business contracts—all of this
operates to dwarf the individual and
to divorce him from all control of
his fate.

The consequence is inevitable. To-
day, wherever one goes in New York,
wherever one hears protest against
injustice or fancied injustice, one
listens to a baffled public denounc-
ing a great impersonal “they. ~ Atos

“they” who are imposing new and
onerous taxes; “they” who are razing
indiscriminately an entire neighbor-
hood, the good buildings with the
bad, for some devious purpose of
their own; “they” who are harassing
the businessman or the apartment
owner or the plain, average citizen.
Sometimes, it is true, an identifica-
tion is given to this weird, impersonal
“they,” but even the identification
tends to become a group identifica-
tion—“the cops” or “City Hall” or
“the mob” or “the bosses.”

The use of the omnipresent “they
symbolizes graphically the sharp

cleavage between the disparate lives _

of New York: the lives of the con-
gested and struggling and essentially

helpless millions, and the lives of an
official and business aristocracy
Which has lost virtually all of its old
connections with the grass roots. If
it was true that, in the old Boston,
the Cabots spoke only to'the Lowells
and the Lowells spoke only to God,
it 1s even more true in today’s New
York that power speaks only to pow-
er, and no further.

The power is of many kinds and
degrees, but its varying forms have
one thing in common. It is derived
from the top, not the bottom. The
men who control the $2. billion-a-
year city government deal only with
their counterparts—with the men
who wield millions in private finance,
with the men whose fortunes con-
trol all the large media of public
opinion, with the new emperors of
Madison Avenue who, through culti-
vation of the technique of making a
rancid herring smell sweet, have be-
come the go-between in every big
deal.

This rule by power barons has
rendered sterile and useless one of
the key figures of old-line city pol-
itics, the district leader. Even in the
worst days of Tammany Hall, the
all-powerful Democratic organiza-
tion that rules Manhattan and dom-
inates city government, the political
machine had liaison with its people
through the district leader. The ma-
chine might be totally corrupt, but
it had its fingers on the pulse of
block and ward and, when the pulse
beat stepped up to angry tempo, it
heeded the warning — or ignored it
at its peril. It is hardly possible to
overemphasize the importance of
this old, basic relationship. If an
immigrant family was homeless and
starving, the district leader busied
himself to help, to sce that it got a
home and food and a job. If the
people of a ward were aroused about
a local injustice, the district leader
carried their complaints to the halls
of the mighty, and often enough
something was done to pacify his
constituents. Bad as the district
leader or the machine might be, the
people had through their local pol-
iticians a chain of communication
with their representatives in gov-
ernment; and if their leaders could
not or did not represent them prop-
erly, responsibility could be fixed
and changes made,

202

ai, FA

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-

Today this essential chain has
been broken; this vital communica-
tion has been lost.

The district leader has been shorn
of his old functions as the Lord
Bountiful and the guardian of his
people; and as he has lost this ele-
mental reason for existence, he has
been deprived of the influence his
following used to give him with the
men upstairs. No longer is he the
source of food to the starving, jobs
for the needy. Welfare is administer-
ed by one of those great, impersonal
city agencies directed from the top
at City Hall. The finding of jobs.
is the function of the employment
bureau. The services that cater to
the most fundamental needs of the
people now filter down from the top.
One cannot understand what is hap-
pening in today’s New York unless
one understands the significance of
this change.

Significant Change

Let’s listen to some of the men who
have been closest to the current ad-
ministration of Mayor Robert F.
Wagener. All agree with this analysis
of the eclipse of the district leader,
and all agree that it represents a
drastic change in the functioning
mechanics of democracy. William
Peer, former executive secretary to
Mayor Wagner, puts it this way:
“The district leader has no power.
He can’t produce. The old-fashioned
political boss filled the gap between
what the little guy could do for him-
self and what society could do for
him. Now, if you’re locked up, you
go to the Legal Aid. If you need
food, you go to Welfare. The leader
has a hard time trying to do some-
thing for someone.”

Peer recalls a significant conversa-
tion he had with the late James J.
Hines, long a power in the old Tam-
many and a man who was broken
and jailed by Thomas FE. Dewey in
Dewey’s racket-busting days. Hines
surprised Peer by pointing out that
the last political boss of the old
type, with close ties to his people,
was the late Vito Mareantonio, the
left-wing Congressman from East
Harlem. “That may seem strange,
but it’s true,” Peer says. While
Marcantonio. survived, the doors
of his office were open not just
to the people of his district, but to

ais

the people of the city. Everyone
with a problem camé to him seeking
help, and sometimes they got it.
Hines contended that this was the
reason Marcantonio lasted so long
as a political force, despite the un-
orthodoxy of his views; and then the
old Tammany boss went on to an-
alyze the enormous void that has
been opened up by the withering
away of the district leader. “He
pointed out to me,” Peer says, “that
things aren’t like they used to be —
that we are in ‘a period of transition
between representation of the little
guy by politicians, and by social or-
ganizations. The transition is not
complete, and the little guy is worse
off than ever.”

A similar view is expressed by
Sydney S. Baron, the Madison Ave-
nue public-relations man. Baron has
played a major behind-the-scenes
role in masterminding the campaigns
of Mayor Wagner, and he practical-
ly alone is responsible for seeing that
the current Tammany boss, Carmine
G. De Sapio, presents a “new-style,”
appealing, image to the public. An
expert on the inner workings of the
new Tammany, Baron says: “The
district leader has been relegated to
an inferior position. The best he can
do is lend his headquarters to sup-
port Red Cross drives and soap cam-
paigns. An accomplished leader
might speak up on behalf of the need
fog a new branch of the public hi-
brary in his bailiwick. He is no
longer an effective liaison between
his people and government. He is
no longer a bridge between govern-
ment and the little guy. He has just
about lost his reason for being.”

Power at the Top

A man considered to be among
the most astute in the Wagner ad-
ministration probes a little deeper.
“Tt is the bigness of government that
has killed the district leader,” he
says. “They apparently couldn’t see
how they were losing their grip. But,
at the top, new resources, new tech-
niques, were developed. The guy that
is worse off today is the guy in the
street. The party leader now has
more power concentrated in_ his
hands, and the people are less re-
sponsible for it.”

This theme of concentration : of |

power at the top runs through every

he N ATIC 5

7 ,

S Fo > Oye
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nat a spe *
UP ane”

liscussion that one holds today with
men who know the inside of modern
politics. We pointed out to one of
hese prominent insiders that there
are still district leaders who wield
enormous influence if a fix is to be
put in or a favor curried. He agreed,
but promptly made the vital dis-
tinction. “In every case, without ex-
ception,’ he said, “their power in
Tammany Hall is a measure of their
closeness to Carmine De Sapio, not
a measure of their strength as dis-
trict leaders.”

Emphasis was added to this con-
clusion by one of the city’s veterans
‘of Tammany wars, a man who has
spent a lifetime in the game of poli-
tics and who is now bitterly at odds
with the De Sapio leadership. Scath-
ingly, he analyzed the new system
in which all of the old rules of re-
sponsibility have been reversed, in
which the channels of power grow
down, not up. “De Sapio puts in his
own leaders,” he explains. “He has
reduced the district leader to a non-
‘entity. He moves them in and out
like checkers. He hires and fires them
Ft will. He has the resources and the
rules with him. Most people don’t
“realize it, but he has more power
“concentrated in his hands than any
“man since Boss Tweed.”

Moses the Mighty

. What are the effects of this
new, administered power-from-the-
| top that reverses all the old rules of
democracy? What happens. when
the government of a great city is no
‘longer responsive to its people? As
two reporters who have watched the
changing New York scene for years,
-we have listened to the language of
the people, expressed in a variety of
Ways, in terms ranging from quiet
hopelessness to bitterness and out-
‘rage. Many of the complaints have
dealt with New York’s gigantic
_ postwar slum-clearance program. It
“is a program in which great areas
of the city are being torn down with
“municipal and federal aid, and pri-
_vate funds are being encouraged to
_ participate in the rebuilding. The
program has been administered by
Robert Moses, sometimes called “the
|| great doer” and widely regarded as
| the patron saint of the concept of
the public authority as the perfect
solution for municipal ills.

stober 31, 1959

Moses has never held elective of-
fice, but as the head of numerous
public authorities, yielding fantastic
millions in revenue, he is probably
the most powerful single man in
New York State. Under his aegis,
New York City has drafted a gi-
gantic $1.5 billion slum-clearance
program—a program administered
from the top, arranged among pri-
vate business interests, City Hall
and Moses; a program in which the
people involved have only a token
voice; a program which has been re-
peatedly criticized for the ruthless-
ness with which it has uprooted peo-
ple who cannot find adequate homes
elsewhere.

Let’s listen to a former Congress-
man who, with some of the district
leaders, had fought this power play.
He was so angry that he was practi-
cally frothing when he spoke to us.

“They are making gypsies of the
people of this city,” he sputtered.
“TJ know families that have been

aie ab

shuttled five and six times from one
area that is to be demolished to an-
other that is to be torn down six
months or a year from now. We are
spending millions to clear slums—
and we are creating new slums all
over the place. I can take you into
one area in my district where it is
nothing to find whole groups of fam-
ilies that have been moved three and
four times.

“What happens is this: the de-
velopers put up eviction notices—
everybody must get out within five
or six weeks. Those who don’t know
any better—the aged, the spinsters,
childless couples—panic and get out.
All the people who can be pushed
or scared are gotten rid of; then
they say to the rest, ‘Look, we have
another site that we’re going to de-
velop sometime in the future. We'll
locate you there. They move: in;
the people live there for a time;
then the process begins all over again.

“This isn’t in my district, but it’s
true. In the N.Y.U.-Bellevue project
on the East Side, there was a great
outcry because the neighborhood was
one where a lot of old German and
Irish families had lived all their lives,
and they objected to being uprooted
from their homes. Some of them had
pretty good housing, too, not what
you would call slum housing by a
long shot. The district captains
fought Moses bitterly on it—and
lost. And so what’s happened? All
the old families were forced out, and
the area became Puerto Rican. The
Puerto Ricans can stay only for a
time, until the developers are ready
to tear down the buildings; then
they'll be dumped somewhere else.

“This has been going on for more
than ten years’in this city, and all it
does is make more slums. This used
to be a city composed of a wide
variety of solid, established neigh-
borhoods, each with its own distine-
tive culture. One after another,
they’ve been torn up, destroyed,
scattered to the winds.”

Talk to the people caught in this
upheaval of so-called slum clearance
and you find anger, rebellion, despair.
One person we remember is a phar-
macist. He had operated his own
drug store in the same neighborhood
for nearly thirty years. Then bull-
dozers came in to raze the area, and
almost overnight, with no possibility

263

of recompense for his loss of a valu-
able business site and the good will
he had built up in thirty years of
neighborhood service, he was forced
to close his doors. He was angry at
the world—at City Hall that in ef-
fect had decreed his business extinc-
tion, at the private developers who
were carrying out the mandate with
the prospect of enormous profits for
themselves, at the city’s press which,
he felt, is now more preoccupied with
recording the public utterances of
officials than it is in crusading and
fighting the wars of the people.

City Without a Soul

The illnesses of New York are
many and they run deep. The ruth-
lessness of large-scale redevelopment,
cloaked under the laudable aim of
slum clearance, is only one of many
cankers. Wherever you turn, there
is crime. Some sections of the city
are veritable jungles, the streets un-
safe at night, the more remote sec-
tions of beautiful parks unsafe even
in the daytime. Periodically, youth-
ful gangs explode in violence that
makes sickening, sensational head-
lines. There are gang fights, mug-
gings, rapes in the schools, murders.
It is commonplace for a_ horrified
press to blame these excesses upon
the especial “depravity” of the new,
rising and degenerate generation.
But it is perhaps even more reason-
able to view them as the expressions
of a sick society—as the kind of out-
bursts that are inevitable in a city
that, in many respects, has lost its
very soul.

Again let’s listen to the voices of
men who have known New York
long and well. Let’s listen first to
the old Tammany veteran, now
persona non grata with the De
Sapio regime. Let’s allow for the bit-
terness of a man who has been
cast from the fold, but let’s remem-
ber, too, that no man in New York
has a more intimate knowledge of
the inside of politics. This is what
he says:

“Every town has its Tammany
Hall. I’m no lily, but this is the
limit. I’ve never seen it so bad in
a lifetime of politics. You ask me
what’s wrong with Tammany Hall?
The Mafia. The underworld and the
leaders they control—and a press
agentry that makes a fool of Lin-

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purist 7 AT eh
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coln’s statement that you can’t fool
all of the people all of the time.

“Tf it is not Frank Costello today,
it is whoever can make it pay for
the privilege of making book, num-
bers, pimping, selling junk or any-
thing else that 1s illegal. Today, if
a political boss arrived at his office
and found that in his absence the
Mayor, the Governor and Genovese
[Vito Genovese, often called the
kingmaker of gangdom], had phoned,
he would call Genovese back first.

“Like anywhere, the little guy in
the street wants a ticket fixed. Or
maybe he wants to get on or off a
jury. But he’s paying one helluva
price for it in the long run. Can’t
they see the fantastic and open con-
nections of politics with the mob?
It doesn’t make any difference what
the party is. [ can name you one
election in this town some years ago
where all of the top candidates were
controlled by the mob. One was own-
ed by Thomas’ (Three-Finger
Brown) Luchese; one by Costello;
one by Genovese. The mob couldn’t
lose. They had it sewed up.”

A shocking analysis? Overdrawn?
Untrue? It must be untrue, musn’t
it? You think so, perhaps, but then
an assignment takes you across the
East River to Brooklyn. A girl has
been raped in a school yard, and
your editor wants to know how such
things can happen; he wants a real,
rip-snorting, indignation story about
this new hoodlum generation.

The Unprinted Story

You get in touch with an old con-
tact. He’s a man who was once
mixed up with the mob himself, but
that was years ago. He’s happily
married now, proud of his family;
he’s been going straight for years,
running his own small business.
You’ve found out before that the in-
formation he gives you about de-
velopments in his neighborhood is
accurate; you know he knows what’s
going on. And so you begin to ask
him for the low-down on the young
hoods who are terrorizing the sec-
tion. And, suddenly, to your sur-
prise, he explodes.

“You know goddamned well you’ll
never print the real story,” he
says. “I don’t know if it’s you or
not, maybe it’s your boss, maybe
it’s everything. But you'll never

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write this stuff, not "he truth "Theres
no one with guts’ any more.

“You wanna know why the kids
get so out of hand? It’s all the rea-
sons you won’t put in your news-
paper, but that isn’t even the be-
ginning. It’s rotten from top to
bottom. Ill tell you what I think
about the kids. The schools? That’s
not the real problem.”

He switched the theme for a mo-
ment, harking back to New York’s
greatest modern, out-in-the-open
scandal—the Harry Gross bookmak-
ing investigation in Brooklyn in 1950.
Gross was a pudgy, flashily-dressed,
wisecracking, completely amoral
bookie. He ran a $20-million-a-year
business and bragged that he had
300 cops on his payroll. When Miles
McDonald, an honest and crusading
district attorney, did the unheard of
by arresting Gross and breaking up
the deal, the reverberations shook the
official fabric of New York. Mayor
William O’Dwyer suddenly resigned
and heeded the call to greater pub-
lic service as U.S. Ambassador to
Mexico. The Police Commissioner
quit; so did his two top aides; and
from the ranks, sudden retirement
applications flooded into the Police
Department. Gross agreed to turn
state’s evidence, but on the eve of
a mass cop-bribery trial, he gave his
guardians the slip and went to a
private conference with the rulers of
Eastern gangdom. The result: Gross
subsequently took the witness stand
and balked; the entire cop-bribery
case went out of the window; and
New York officialdom recovered
from its worst modern case of jitters.

Now, standing on a Brooklyn
street while jackhammers ripped up
the pavement to lay new utility lines
and overhead welders worked on the
El, the man who knows Brooklyn
from the bottom up recalled the old
Gross scandal and added:

“Who went to jail? Just Gross
and a few cops for perjury. Believe
me, the same bulls that used to pick
up my kick at the end of every
week are still making the rounds. At
best, the racket just ran in second
gear for awhile. There are some good
cops and some I owe a lot to for
just being men—but it’s the guys
at the top. The guys on the beat
just have petty stuff. It’s the cap-
tains, ane district men, on up. They ~

|B was is going on right here now. I

_ could see it.

h 5 f ~
* f ee as 2

ike as little or as mich as hey can
} ecAn operation as big as it ever

could spit on it from here. You mean

to say your paper doesn’t know that?

How many guys that work for you
_ play the horses? Well, where the hell
“do they do it? You mean to say
the cops don’t know? A blind man
The kids know it, too.
It’s all too big.

“It’s the same with the kids; they
get shook down, too. Where the hell

do you think they learned it? The

;

bulls bust you for hanging around
the corner (they know who’s got
the action) and they take you to the
station. The kid can get off for $5
or whatever he’s got. You pay as
much as you can afford, guilty or
innocent. The kids are stealing every-
thing in sight, whiskey, typewriters,
anything they can get their hands

_ on. They hit me three times in seven

months one time. These kids lived

up through it all—the gutters, fight-
ing for survival, bookies, cops that
take, parents that don’t care and
now couldn’t do anything if they did.
They probably know the difference

between right and wrong, but it

doesn’t matter. Knives, guns, wild
sex—all picked up from their eld-
ers. These, as well as lack of re-
spect, are part of the rules of their

PART 2

THE ROOTS of today’s New York
go back to the end of World War II
and William O’Dwyer. When the

war ended, a political epoch ended

with it. The age that was passing
_ had been symbolized on the national

scene by Franklin Roosevelt; it was

_ the age of the thirties, of depression,

h is departure, ear Hall s

= of political ferment, of reform. It had
‘

nation. Walker abdicated as Mayor

_ begun in New York in 1932 when
the administration of witty, fun-
loving James J. Walker collapsed in.
a series of scandals that shocked the

and departed hastily for a long so-
journ in the south of France. site

ron their course. Fusio 0

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ae - erg te aot
es > FEES a.
game now. If the rest of the city 1s
appalled when they realize this, it’s
just because they weren’t paying at-
tention. It has been here long enough
for someone to take notice of it.
Those are simple facts—but who'll
say it? Nobody has guts any more.”

Acceptance of Crime

You come away shaking your
head, but you can’t shake off the
angry passion of the man in Brook-
lyn. You know, if you can judge a
man at all and you think you can,
that he spoke from the heart; and
you know of your own knowledge
that many of the things he says are
true. You know that there never
was a time in New York when you
couldn’t get a bet down on a horse
with less difficulty than it takes to
get a cup of coffee.

_Even so, you might have been
tempted to give present-day New
York the benefit of the doubt. The
human mind likes to soothe itself
with the pleasing reflection that
things can’t be so bad after all; the
world is a pretty good place; mat-
ters often look worse than they really
are, All of the old clichés of comfort
lose their persuasiveness, however,
when one considers a sensational dou-
ble murder that happened just a
little more than a year ago.

We will deal with the murder, and

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its astonishing denouement, later on.
It is a story that no official of New
York has had the belated decency to
acknowledge. It is a story that we can
tell only because we spent weeks
tracking down every angle, spent
weeks trying to get information that
authorities had at their fingertips
hours after the crime. When the in-
vestigative work was done, when the
reportorial half of this writing team
finally confronted a_ high-ranking
detective with the evidence that had
been gathered, this official erupted
ina aaath cone threatened physical
violence. But, finally, after a hot
session of name-calling, he admitted
with a kind of strangled anger:
“Sure, we know you are right!”
The admission is one that, to us,
speaks volumes about New York.
When the rights of an eight-year-old
boy can be callously disregarded, no
defense can be offered for the so-
ciety, for the system, that allows
such things to happen. It could
happen only in a city corrupted be-
yond recall; in a city where all the
power comes from the top, where all
liaison has been lost with people and
the rights of people; in a city where
the only thing that matters is the
play for personal wealth and glory
and power. What follows is the story
of that city and the story, so far as
we can tell it, of how it got that way.

THE MEN BEHIND THE TIGER

ed one of its longest periods of black
disgrace. The Tammany Tiger usual-
ly rules the Democratic empire in
New York; rare, indeed, is the year
in which it is barred from the
Mavor’s office. But the Walker ad-
ministration scandals had been too
much, even for blasé New York. All
the reform, anti-l'ammany elements
united in the Fusion Party; and with
a cocky, colorful World War I avia-
tor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, showing
the way, Fusion took over oity Hall.
It was to rule for twelve
But by 1945, by the e
War II, Fusion and Lal

gether for so long by the magnetism
of LaGuardia and the influence of
aging Judge Samuel Seabury, the in-
vestigator who had exposed the sins
of the Walker administration, was
disintegrating into its separate ele-
ments.

The Republican leaders, possessed
of the delusion that they might some
day capture control of the city gov-

ernment, no longer wanted to co- —

operate with, liberals and anti-Tam-
many Democrats. LaGuardia, who
was soon to die of cancer, was in-
capable of running for a fourth term. —

The result was a political vacuum— ‘

ect climate for a knight on a whit

SETS Me al ah Fer
1 t

charger. And so William O’Dwyer
and the hour met.

O’Dwyer had established a head-
line reputation as a great crime cru-
sader. With care and skill, he had
manufactured a public image of him-
self in the tradition of Dewey. Elect-
ed District Attorney of Kings
County (Brooklyn) in 1940, he had
promptly entered the lists against
the forces of evil. Luck had helped
him. Shortly after he took office, an
insignificant mob punk who had
been arrested on a minor charge and
felt he had been double-crossed,
squealed out the macabre story of
Murder Inc.

This was a Brooklyn combine of
sadistic killers, cheap thugs and
brutal shakedown artists. Murder
was both their pastime and _ their
business, and for years a trail of
corpses that spread all the way from
Brooklyn to a North Jersey lime pit
had offered graphic testimony to
their efficiency. Oddly, no one in
official position had busted any ten-
dons trying to interfere. The police
tend to write off such mob killings
as the fortunate elimination of ver-
min and go through no more than
routine investigative paces. In Brook-
lyn, the result had been just what it
always is: Murder Inc. had grown
bold and lethal, and mobdom’s rule
by terror had been enhanced by the
non-interference of the law. It had
been an almost-perfect setup until
the day the aggrieved little pigeon
sang into the ears of O’Dwyer.

William O’Dwyer

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Blazoning Murder Ine. ’ c

O’Dwyer began a lively campaign
that catapulted the name of Murder
Inc. into headlines across the na-
tion. The drive looked good at the
time, but once it had spent its force,
it became more significant for things
left unaccomplished than for things
achieved. The net result was precise-
ly this: O’Dwyer sent a long line of
rank-and-file punks to the electric
chair in Sing Sing, but (to use an
expressive bit of New Yorkese) not
a single one of their masters, none
of the top hierarchy of Murder Inc.,
“ever got hoited.”

O’Dwyer always gave the impres-
sion that he was about to lay the
masters of murder by the heels, but
he never did. In one sequence that
would have been appreciated by
Gilbert and Sullivan, he even pro-
claimed that he had “a perfect mur-
der case” against Albert Anastasia,
the boss of the murder mob, the Lord
High Executioner of gangdom. Head-
lines proclaimed that the fighting
prosecutor was out to get the killer
of killers; an alarm was sent out for
Anastasia. All the time, later evi-
dence indicated, Anastasia was en-
joying life in his North Jersey man-
sion just across the Hudson River
from New York. Some nights he even
crossed into the city, where he was
so badly wanted, to enjoy life with
his friends.

How Anastasia must have laughed
at the headlines! For O’Dwyer never
inconvenienced him by any proce-
dure so crude as an arrest and a
grilling. He never rushed his “perfect
murder case” before a grand jury to
get an indictment. Instead, he
dawdled just beyond the threshold
of the throne room occupied by the
Lord High Executioner; and, in this
strategic pause, a key witness, Abe
Reles, the most important of the
“singing” mobsters, went to his death
out a high window of the Half-Moon
Hotel in Coney Island, almost un-
der the eyes of O’Dwyer’s guards.
O’Dwyer later explained to the Ke-
fauver Committee that Reles was a
practical joker, a real cutup, and
that, no doubt about it, he had
slipped and fallen to his death while
trying to climb out of the window
just to play a trick on his custodians.
The Reles that O’Dwyer described

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is different from the Reles mo

other persons seem -to have known,

and to this day a hard core of cynics

contends that Reles would never
have gone out of that window volun-
tarily.

While the furore over the Reles
mystery clouded the last steps of
the great O’Dwyer crusade against
Murder Inc., it didn’t stop the mete-
oric rise of the crusader. Capitalizing
on the overwhelming hero image
created by the headlines, O’ Dwyer
ran for mayor against LaGuardia
in 1941 and almost won. The mar-

gin was so close that most politicians —

knew the setback was only tempor-
ary — that O'Dwyer could look with
confidence to the future.

Building for that future, O’ Dwyer
now turned his back upon the Mur-
der Inc. business and joined the war-

time army, swiftly rising to the rank

of Brigadier General. While he was
lending his talents to the winning
of the war, in the Brooklyn he had
left behind him the “perfect murder
case” against Anastasia was col-
lapsing, completely and farcically.
The police “wanted” cards on the
Lord High Executioner vanished
right out of the police files. Even
now, today, nobody knows how it was
done. The nearest thing to an ex-
planation came from James J. Moran,
O’Dwyer’s long-time chief clerk and
Man Friday. Moran, now serving
a long prison term for running a
shakedown racket, acknowledged in
one crime probe that it was just
possible he might have ordered the
deed. Whether he did or not, it is
clear that somebody took care of
Anastasia, for there was nothing in
the New York police files to show
that the most feared killer in the
underworld had ever been wanted for
anything — even a parking ticket.

The Heroic Prosecutor

Looking back on O’Dwyer’s
achievements now, with the perspec-
tive that time gives, a man who has
been intimate for years with the in-
ner workings of New York politics
comments sarcastically on the great
Murder Inc. crusade:

“All that happened was that the
mob threw him some of the cow-

boys to take the heat off the big- —

shots.”

In any event, the dramatic Mur-

a
tee

der Inc. build-up had given O’Dwyer
a name that would be long re-
membered, and while he added to his
public stature through military serv-
ice, he laid the groundwork for 1945
in conferences with the boys back
home. The Kefauver Committee dis-
closed that one of the first of these
conferences was held in December,
1942. The date is significant. It was
less than six months after O’Dwyer
had stopped fighting crime and join-
ed the military, and the conference
brought together the much-publi-
cized foe of the legions of darkness
and the man who led the legions,
Frank Costello.

Fiction writers and authors of
Grade B Hollywood scenarios have
exercised their talents for years on
variations of the plot in which the
sinister underworld boss controls the
local political machine and dominates
police and courts and justice. Per-
haps the melodramatics of the Grade
B thriller help to keep Americans
from believing the real thing when
they see it; but Frank Costello,
make no mistake about it, was the
real thing.

Meet Mr. Costello

_ He was a Don of the Mafia, the
ruler of the then-dominant Eastern
wing of the national crime syndicate
and, above all, the undercover boss
of Tammany Hall. Even though the
LaGuardia administration had held
power for some nine years at the
time of this 1942 conference, Costel-
lo and the syndicate still rode high.
LaGuardia frequently denounced the
rulers of the New York mob as “tin-
horns,” a term expressive of his per-
sonal contempt, but hardly a service
to the truth. For these were “tin-
horns” who had made fantastic mil-
lions in Prohibition bootlegging; had
pyramided these millions with still
more and equally fantastic millions
in big-time syndicate gambling; had
used the amalgamated millions to
run a wide variety of rackets, to buy
into legitimate businesses, to pur-
chase political power and influence
and protection. Frank Costello was
the living proof of an adage of
modern, cynical America — that, if
you have enough money, no matter
how you got it, you can do almost
anything.

Skeptics who find it difficult to

October 31, 1959

believe that gangdom exercises such
tremendous political power might
have been convinced could they have
seen the men who assembled in
Costello’s luxurious penthouse apart-
ment to meet O’Dwyer. Present
were: Representative Michael J.
Kennedy, then leader of Tammany
Hall; Bert Stand, long-time secretary
of Tammany under different lead-
ers; Surrogate Anthony B. Savarese,
a Queens County Republican with
important Tammany connections;
and Irving Sherman, a garment-
district mystery man who knew all
the best racketeers personally and
was once described by FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover as “one of the most
prominent criminals in the country.”

O’Dwyer’s version of this interest-
ing gathering, as given later to the
Kefauver Committee, was that he
had been investigating a war-frauds
case, had gone to Costello to see if
he could get information about an
underworld character, and that when
he had walked into the racketeer’s
apartment, surprise! there were all
these fine people waiting to meet
him. O’Dwyer described himself as
having been quite overcome — but
not so overcome, he insisted, as_to
forget himself and talk solitics. FR
no, he talked about the war-frauds
case, found out Costello couldn’t
help him — and left.

It was, of course, just a coincidence
that the men whom O’Dwyer met in
Costello’s apartment in 1942 were
precisely the men who could play a
big hand in giving him the mayor-
alty nomination in 1945. It was just
a coincidence that, after this and
subsequent meetings with Costello,
Tammany Hall endorsed O’Dwyer.
Just a coincidence that racket figure
Irving Sherman became, as O’Dwyer
admitted, a real buddy, getting
O’Dwyer beautiful suites in wartime-
cramped Washington hotels and
eventually putting “the bite on the
boys” to raise money for O’?Dwyer’s
1945 campaign. Everything was, of
course, just a chain of coincidences,
but they were the kind of coinci-
dences that had the habit of hap-
pening in the 1940s when Frank
Costello pulled the hidden strings
that activated Tammany Hall.

Usually, the master gangster’s ma-
nipulation of his political puppets
was a secret thing, but occasionally

Frank Costello

the hand showed. In 1943, less than
a year alter O’Dwyer’s as yet un-
known meeting with Costello in the
latter’s apartment, District Attorney
Frank S. Hogan caused another of
those fast-appearing, fast-disappear-
ing New York sensations when he
released the details of a startling con-
versation his sleuths had picked up
while listening in on a legal wiretap
on Costello’s phone. Thomas A.
Aurelio had just received the coveted
Democratic nomination for the state
supreme court; the Republicans also
had endorsed him. Aurelio was doubt-
less well qualified and later became,
as is generally recognized, a good
jurist; but Hogan’s detectives had
overheard him telephoning Costello
his effustve thanks for the nomina-
tion. After the two men had ex-
changed pleasantries, Costello told
Aurelio, with the smugness of an
emperor in his tones: “When I tell
you something is in the bag, you can
rest assured.”

The Grateful Jurist

And Aurelio replied: “Right now
I want to assure you of my loyalty
for all you have done. It’s undying.”

This excessive gratitude of a man
who was about to sit on one of the
state’s highest courts to the No. 1
gangster in the nation shocked even
shock-proof New York for a time,
but both the shock and the memory
eventually passed. Now, when the
Aurelio incident is recalled, it is some-
times sloughed off as an isolated
miscue of no particular significance.
Often the mistake is made of assum-

267

ing that the publicity and exposure
weakened Costello’s power; that,
while he may have had great influ-
ence in Tammany Hall in the early
forties, his reign was of relatively
short duration. Actually, there is
abundant evidence to indicate that
Costello was the dominant, behind-
the-scenes power in ‘Tammany dur-
ing the entire decade of the 1940s,
and that his grip on the political ma-
chine was not broken until the Ke-
fauver Committee exposed his nerv-
ously -twitching fingers and his rasp-
ing voice to a startled American
public in the nationally televised
crime hearings of 1951.

The only real effect that the Au-
relio furore in 1943 appears to have
had was that it caused some face-
saving changes. Kennedy, the Tam-
many leader who had been present
at the O’Dwyer conference, departed
in a 1944 tussle for the leadership.
Edward Loughlin succeeded him,
but Clarence Neal was the real pow-
er behind Loughlin — and Neal and
Costello were close friends. How
close was vividly demonstrated in
testimony before the New York State
Crime Commission in 1952.

Costello’s Puppets

At that time, Danny Neustein, a
district leader on the lower East
Side, testified that he had bucked
Loughlin in the leadership fight in
1944. When Loughlin won, Neustein
said, he had to retire. Significantly,
in view of the pattern of power-from-
the-top politics that exists today,
Neustein got the word that he was
through not from the people of his
district whom, presumably, he rep-
resented, but from the leadership.
The bad news was conveyed to him
by his own local captains, who told
him they had received this ultimatum
from Neal: quit Neustein or lose
your city jobs. One of the captains,
Neustein said, told him frankly that
“the boss didn’t want me any more.”

“Who was the boss?” Neustein
was asked.

“The boss presumably was Frank
Costello,” he answered.

After O’Dwyer became Mayor,
trampling over the faintly twitching
corpse of Fusion, he made frequent
noises about cleaning up Tammany
Hall, and he tried on occasion to
capture the leadership with one of

ji i .
F ¥ , 5 J

iver fie 1 AN
aaa 4 . ,

his own stooges. But he was never
successful. Costello retained his
iron grip. In 1947 and 1948, Hugo
I’. Rogers was the Tammany leader,
and in its report the Kefauver Com-
mittee noted that, during this pe-
riod, “Costello again rode very high.”
The racketeer was on exceptionally
friendly terms with Rogers; he was
intimate with Francis X. Mancuso,
the leading figure behind Rogers;
and moreover, according to the Ke-
fauver probers, “four members of the
Tammany steering committee were
all very good friends of Costello... .”

The racketeer who wielded such
heavy influence in the top echelons
of Tammany could and did select
candidates at will. The Aurelio nomi-
nation was not an isolated incident;
it was just the one that happened
to get headline publicity. What
Costello did for Aurelio, he did for
others. An example — one that has
all the overtones of his remark to
Aurelio, “When I tell you something
is in the bag, you can rest assured”
— is recounted by John Ferris, a
veteran Associated Press reporter
now with the New York World-
Telegram and Sun. One of the news-

paperman’s more vivid memories °

from a lifetime of top-level reporting
deals with the autocratic manner in
which Costello selected a Congres-
sional candidate for a Staten Island
district in the late 1940s. The story
was told to Ferris by a Catholic
priest, after the Kefauver Committee
had caused a sensation with its ex-
posure of Costello’s influence. The
priest, at the time, was stationed at
a mission in lower Manhattan. One
day a wealthy Manhattan business-
man whom he knew, and who lived
on Staten Island, came to him and
said that he had been thinking, now
that he had made his mark in busi-
ness, that he would like to run for
Congress. Did the priest know how
it could be done, whom he, should
see? The priest told him that he
didn’t know anything about the in-
side workings of ‘politics, but he did
know a couple of persons around
City Hall, and would tell them that
the businessman was interested.
True to his word, and not having
the slightest idea where all this was
going to lead, the priest mentioned
to his City Hall acquaintances that
the Manhattan businessman wanted

a Ware, tb Ne ane ay ame ee

to run for Cuneta Sometime aftor- ‘
wards, he received:a telephone call
from one of New York’s high-priced
public-relations outfits. Could he
bring his prospective candidate to
a conference at the Copacabana, one
of New York’s more farnous East
Side night clubs? The priest could—
and did.

At the appointed hour, he and
his candidate walked into the Copa-
cabana; waiting to receive them were
the public-relations man — and
Frank Costello. The boss racketeer,
garbed and groomed like a conserva-
tive millionaire, at once began to.
question the affluent businessman
about his political ambitions.

His Word Was Law

Parenthetically, it should be
pointed out that Tammany Hall is
simply the Democratic organization
in Manhattan and that Manhattan
is just one of New York’s five bor-
oughs. Richmond County, which em-
braces Staten Island, was technical-
ly outside of Costello’s jurisdiction,
but at the Copacabana meeting this
fact did not bother Costello.

After some discussion, he brought
the conference to a close, remarking
that, since it was summertime, he
siippaosed the businessman would be
taking a vacation and would like to

_get his political future settled before

he left. The businessman acknowl-
edged that such, indeed, was the
case.

“Well, don’t worry about it,” Cos-
tello told him. “Go ahead and take
your vacation. I can tell you now:
you will be the candidate.”

That was all there was to it. The
businessman received the nomina-
tion. The district in which he was
running was one that the Democrats
‘rarely carried, which may have had
something to do with the ease with
which he was selected, and he was
defeated by the Republican candi-
date in the general election in No-
vember. But the significant fact re-
mains that, as in the Aurelio case,
Costello’s word was law. What he
said would happen did happen.

Just as graphic and even more
important for the present day were
the events of 1949. Kefauver was
not even a faint cloud on the horizon
at the time, and everything indicates
that Costello’s power was still su-

’ The é' INA TION

sions. Hago ta ‘aitich criti-
cized rule of Tammany Hall was
wearing thin, and William O’Dwyer’s
> term as Mayor was expiring. The
question of leadership, both inside
‘Tammany and inside City Hall, had
to be decided.

O’Dwyer’s About-Face

The decision that was most in the
open and most acutely concerned the
public involved the identity of the
Mayor of New York for the next
four years. O’Dwyer let it be known
that he had had enough; he wanted
to retire. His wish was no secret. It
_ was well-aired in the newspapers at
the time, and there was much specu-
lation about who would succeed him.
The straightest inside political
formation indicated that the Demo-
crats almost certainly would settle
on District Attorney Hogan. A quiet
man with a reputation as a highly
efficient prosecutor, Hogan had been
a protégé of Dewey, and as such
when he had run for District At-
torney, he always had been sup-

aT ES ar ana eige

VOTE

a a

CARMINE DE SAPIO is two men,
one the complete antithesis of the
_ other. He is, as the record shows, a
_ tough and ruthless political boss; he
1s at the same time a _ professional
lecturer who can out-egghead the
_eggheads in a college classroom on
the theme of a politician’s responsi-
_ bilities and the greater public good.
- When he becomes excited, he is still
a “dese and dose” type from Green-
_wich Village; but when he is being
his cultured and cultivated self, he
speaks a precise and faultless Bue.
lish that would do credit to Groton,
Harvard and the Village literati. He
is a man who dresses now like a Man
of Distinction—and one who is not
many years removed from the loud,
sporting type. He is a political boss
who vows his detestation of the

has purified and reformed

; eee: a
era tog uy

“p

rackets, who insists loudly and long .
its favorite whipping —

Democrats. He was in fe ideal posi-
tion, for a politician, of a man beloved
by everybody. So far had affairs
progressed that Hogan’s designation
appeared to be a certainty; but just
when it seemed most certain, the
political picture did a complete flip-
flop almost overnight. O’Dwyer an-
nounced that he wasn’t going to re-
tire after all; yielding to public
pressure, he was going to run again.

The mystery of the about-face was
never satisfactorily explained at the
time, but political insiders now give
what seems like a plausible version.
What happened, they say, was simply
this: deep down in the web of Tam-
many politics, Frank Costello de-
cided he would rather have O’ Dwyer
in City Hall than Hogan. From the
mob’s standpoint, Hogan was a risky
proposition, while O’Dwyer, after
four years, was a known quantity.
So Costello simply got on the tele-
phone and spread the word that
O’Dwyer was going to have to run
again for the good of the party.
Whether O’Dwyer knew the basis

Ti parr; THE TWO FACES OF DE SAPIO

Tammany—and he is a man who,
all the way up to the pinnacle, had
clearly visible racket ties.

These devastating contrasts in the
personality of Carmine Gerard De
Sapio have baffled the best political
pundits. Unable to make up their
minds about which of the De Sapios
they see is the real one, they have
called him “one of the most enigmatic
and puzzling figures in American
politics”; a “new-type” political boss;
and, in an admiring Harper’s article,
“The Smile on the Face of the Tiger.”
Here is a discreet type of journalistic
approach that has resulted in verita-
ble bales of favorable publicity for the
man who now runs Tammany Hall
and dominates the inner workings
of New York City government. Even
though the city’s press
ingly Republican and

be so hard to understand. If you do

sn surge of popularity isn’t
clear, but he yielded to the draft as
politicians always do. He ran a sec-
ond time and was elected.

It is against this background of
long-continued, pivotal Costello in-
fluence in the affairs of Tammany
that one has to assess the second
change in leadership that was made
in this same year of 1949, That sec-
ond decision involved the selection
of a new boss for Tammany Hall,
and the verdict that was rendered
then underlies much of what is hap-
pening in New York today. For out
of the morass of a Costello-dominated
Tammany popped the man who still
rules the Hall, the man who for
nearly a decade has been widely
credited with painting a new face on
the Tiger. He is Carmine G. De
Sapio, the most powerful politician |
in New York State and one of the m
most powerful in the nation — a 4
man who, if anything is certain in Oe
politics, will undoubtedly have some- a
thing to say about the selection of A
the Democratic Presidential candi- 2
date in 1960. a

pages reveal little more than a not
very well-concealed wish to flay De
Sapio—and almost complete frustra-
tion as to how best to apply the lash.

Image and Reality

Yet, if you are one who does not
believe in the possibility of the com-
plete metamorphosis of the fully
matured human personality, the rid-
dle of Carmine De Sapio may not

not believe that a man can live into
his forties following a certain path,
and then suddenly become a com-
pletely different man following a
completely different path, you may
well conclude that the original Car.
mine De Sapio js the real Carmine
De Sapio and that much of the con- _
fusion about the true nature of the
man is the work of one of the bastard
arts of our age, the skill of Madison -

Avenue in making false images look
real.

De Sapio was born 51 years ago
in lower Greenwich Village, an area
that was then about 95 per cent Irish
and 5 per cent Italian (almost the
exact reverse of today). This start
in life asa member of a despised
minority appears to have had a pro-
found effect upon the political boss.
He still winces, still gets angry, at
the memory of the way the derisive
term “Wop” was flung at him as a
boy. An underdog, he began to run
hard early, and he has run hard all
his life. His parents had established
a stable for dray horses in the rear
of their first-floor apartment home,
and they conducted their own haul-
age business. As a boy, De Sapio
helped out cleaning the stables and
currying the horses. From his earliest
youth, he worked tirelessly; many
trmes, he was out on the docks at
3 A.M. hustling hauling jobs. The
traits that developed from such ex-
periences form one of the true and un-
deviating strands in the personality
of the complex and confusing man
of today. As a boy, he worked long
hours, made no intimate friends; as
the boss of Tammany Hall, he keeps
a killing work schedule that often
sees him on the go eighteen hours
a day, and no man, unless it is his
press agent, Sydney Baron, can
really be said to know him.

Politics fascinated De Sapio as a
young man. He began to hang around
the local Tammany club. He ran
errands, chauffeured, made himself
useful in getting out the vote. He
was rewarded with a job as secre-
tary to a municipal judge, and with
this he began his climb. In 1939, he
founded his cwn Tamawa Club and
made his bid for district leadership.
When he won, Tammany refused
him recognition; the old Irish bosses
of the machine weren’t willing to
take an upstart young Italian into
their inner circle. In protest, De
Sapio actually picketed the Hall, and
with the drive and determination
that is characteristic of him, he kept
running for the leadership of his dis-
trict every chance he got. He won
again in 1941—and was rejected; won
a third time in 1943—and finally
was seated on the Tammany execu-
tive committee. Just six short years
later, just six years past the dividing

270

| 4 i‘ ye 4
line between rejection and accept-
ance, he ruled the entire works.

How did this miracle come to pass? '

It is a murky story, and the truth
is of many complexions, depending
on the viewpoint of the narrator.
Just one thing appears clear. The
period of the 1940s, when De Sapio
was first seated on the Tammany
executive committee and rose swift-
ly to supreme power, was the very
era when Frank Costello was the be-
hind-the-scenes emperor of the Hall.
The year of De Sapio’s acceptance
into the inner circle (1943) was the
year of Costello’s complacent remark
to Aurelio about the latter’s nomi-
nation being in the bag; the year of
De Sapio’s accession to leadership
(he took command on July 20, 1949)
was the year that Costello was pull-
ing the strings for a second mayor-
alty term for William O’Dwyer. It
was the year also in which Costello
committed his supreme audacity by
flaunting his long-hidden power in
public, summoning the elite of of-
ficial New York to a glossy-coated,
fund-raising charity affair, at which
he was the host, in the Copacabana
night club. Judges, legislators, po-
litical leaders of all complexions were
the guests of Costello on that Jan-
uary night in 1949, and among the
gathering was that rising young po-
litical star, soon to be named leader
of Tammany—Carmine De Sapio.

Links to Rackets

De Sapio’s links to Costello and
other racket figures were probed by
the Kefauver Committee in 1951
and the State Crime Commission in
1952.. Kefauver’s probers decided
that, during the Tammany regime
of Hugo Rogers, De Sapio’s prede-
cessor, Costello had four “very good
friends” on the Tammany executive
committee—and De Sapio was one of
them. Costello himself told the com-
mittee that De Sapio had been a
good friend of years’ standing. Sim-
ilarly, before the State Crime Com-
mission, another eminent underworld
czar, Thomas (Three-Finger Brown)
Luchese, testified that he had met
De Sapio “many times” and had
been “to dinners of his club.” The
Kefauver group, in evaluating its
evidence more than two years after
De Sapio came to power, concluded
that “Costello’s influence continues

oP a
yt

Md -

nye ated +o re aa ey ae
... strong in the councils of the
Democratic Party of New York
County. . . . The pattern of crime
and politics is well established in
New York County.”

Such evidence about the genesis
of De Sapio’s power seems conclu-
sive. Joseph and Stewart Alsop in a
Saturday Evening Post profile put
it this way: “Obviously, in the ’40s,
De Sapio was indeed ‘no reformer.’
He was no enemy of Costello. He
could not have been, for he could
hardly have become leader over Cos-
tello’s opposition. Costello may very
well have given him a leg up.”

The next question that arises is
whether De Sapio became a changed
man once he had completed his climb
and seized the power he had so long
coveted. And here the evidence seems
equally conclusive that, at the out-
set of his reign in any event, he re-
tained his earlier associations.

This was shown most clearly in
the aftermath of the debacle with
which De Sapio began his political
masterminding. O’Dwyer had served
less than a year of his second term
when his administration was shaken
by the first rumblings of the Harry
Gross bookmaking scandal in Brook-
lyn. The smell of that $20 million-a-
year ring with its reeking pay-offs
was worse than that of the pig sties
on the New Jersey meadows, and no
man knew where it all might end.
Ed Flynn, the Bronx Democratic
boss, a powerful figure in national
politics, hustled to Washington and
conferred with Harry Truman. Soon
afterwards, O’Dwyer became a diplo-
mat and went off to Mexico as U.S.
Ambassador, and almost at once, a
scramble developed to see who should
fill the empty seat in City Hall.

The First Pitfall

Vincent R. Impellitteri, who had
been president of the City Council,
was the interim Mayor and, quite
naturally, he wanted to retain the
title. But De Sapio and Flynn turned
thumbs down on him and backed
Ferdinand Pecora, a former judge
and long-time party wheelhorse. In
one of the most vituperative cam-
paigns in years, the incredible hap-
pened. Impellitteri, pictured to the
public as little and courageous
“Impy,” a mighty David wrestling
with hulking Goliaths, defied the

The Nation |
)

\ hs
“roy *

organiz: ion, captured the popular
imagination and won.

The disaster almost unhorsed De
Sapio. A new leader who leads to
defeat in his first big test is not
popular with his cohorts, and De
Sapio teetered on the brink, retain-
ing his grip only by a_ precarious
one or two votes in the Tammany
executive committee. In this crisis,
the faithful came to the support of
their besieged leader; and since it is
in times like this that real colors
are shown, real interests and powers
revealed, it becomes intensely in-
teresting to note just who the faith-
ful were.

Inducements to Loyalty

A few days after the election that
had been so calamitous for De Sapio,
on Noy. 10, 1950, a luncheon meet-
ing was held in the Hotel Statler to
pledge support to the boss. Host at
the meeting was Larry Knohl, a con-
victed embezzler and long-time asso-
ciate of Costello. The invitations had
been sent out by Sammy Kantor, a
district leader close to both De Sapio
and Costello. While no tape record-
ers were available to preserve Knohl’s
remarks for posterity, the State
Crime Commission
elicited testimony that this pal of
Costello had pledged financial sup-
port to any leaders who suffered be-
cause of their loyalty to De Sapio.

This demonstration may be fair-
ly considered to have exposed some
of the roots of De Sapio’s power.
But it wasn’t the only indication.
Even more startling and significant
was the story of what happened to
former Judge Francis X. Mancuso, a
district leader who had broken with
the machine to support Impellitteri
and who had refused pointedly to
attend the Statler hail-to-the-chief
rally.

Testifying before the State Crime
Commission, Mancuso said that, a
few days after he turned down the
Statler invitation, he received a visit
from two of Harlem’s best-known
gangsters in active business, Joe
(Joe Stretch) Stracci and Joey Rao.
They told him (“ordered” might be
a better word) to step down as dis-
trict leader. Mancuso refused. That
same afternoon, a meeting of Man-
cuso’s captains was called. Stretch
and Rao handed out their ultimatum,

_ October 31, 1959

subsequently

Ss ete oD Lie, ihe ra cPe 1 er ae

and the captains voted to depose
Mancuso. District Attorney Hogan,
in later denouncing this procedure,
said that the mere presence of
Stretch and Rao had the same ef-
fect “as if they leveled a gun at
the captains.” Hogan called this “a
shocking example of unsavory char-
acters helping to influence a political
decision.”

Even this was not the end of the
story. Shortly after Mancuso had

_ Aa.

Carmine De Sapio

been politically guillotined, De Sapio
came along, received the pledge of
full support from the intimidated
captains—and thanked them for
their loyalty.

Selective Memory

When questioned in later and more
lofty years about such incidents, De
Sapio protested ignorance. He knew
nothing about the loyalty luncheon
at the Statler, had no part in plan-
ning it; it was a complete surprise
to him—as much of a surprise as it
had been to William O’Dwyer when
he walked into Frank Costello’s
apartment on a war-frauds case and
found a select coterie of influential
politicians waiting to receive him. As
for the Joe Stretch-Joey Rao busi-
ness—well, De Sapio says, it came
about this way: He just happened
to be in the neighborhood visiting
an old friend and faithful party

worker on the day Mancuso was ~
deposed; his old friend introduced
Stracci (who just happened to be
in the old friend’s house) as “a-Mr.
Stracci, not Joe Stretch.” De Sapio
insisted, “I didn’t recognize the
name.”

It is against this kind of back-
ground that one has to assess the
sincerity of the “new-type” Carmine
De Sapio who gives guest lectures
in the best colleges about personal
honesty and political integrity. He
is passionate and convincing on the
theme, if you listen to him without
any knowledge or reference to the
past. Listen to him talking to a Time
interviewer:

T don’t want to get sentimental or
dramatize this thing, but I want to
tell you—I swear to God that if the
day ever comes when those guys or
their kind [Costello & Co.] have any
hold over me whatever, I’m going
to get out so quickly it will make
your head swim. The thing you have
to remember is that an awful lot of
people are depending on me—on my
political integrity—for their political
futures, their jobs—everything. I
couldn’t possibly afford to get mixed
up with mobsters or hoods, and be-
lieve me I don’t intend to—ever.

As De Sapio constantly points out,
a powerful pclitical leader goes to a
lot of places, meets a lot of people.
He can’t possibly control the compo-
sition of every gathering; it is ab-
solutely impossible for him to guard
against the chance that, somewhere,
sometime, somehow, a shady char-
acter will be brought forward under
seemingly fair auspices to shake his
hand. This, obviously, is a bit of
truth, and De Sapio stresses it with
such sincerity that he has convinced
many astute observers. It is only
when you stop and think, only when
you realize that you are talking to
a man who has exhibited two com-
pletely different personalities, that
you wonder.

The two profiles of Carmine De
Sapio show most clearly in the sim-
ple things—and their astonishing
contrast. They show in his speech
and his careful grooming. As the
Alsops noted:

When you first meet him, De Sapio |
talks “Manhattan-cultivated” — the
special, easily identifiable language of —
many other New Yorkers who have ©

ee ee

climbed from unfashionable sidewalka + ‘
to the streets of the mighty. The

grammar almost has the precision of
a foreign language well learned. Every
syllable is clearly pronounced, even
some syllables that it is unusual to
pronounce at all, . .. When he uses
his second way of talking, he sounds,
if not like a front man for gangsters,
at least like a man who has associated
with gangsters—which De Sapio in-
dubitably has done. Outlanders would
call his second way of talking Brook-
lynese. Actually it is pure New York-
ese, the language of the sidewalks

of New York. ...

Clothes and the Man

Equally intriguing is the transfor-

‘mation that De Sapio has undergone

in his physical appearance. He is a
tall man, 6 feet 1, with a large head,
big hands, black wavy hair delicate-
ly streaked with gray at the temples
and weak eyes perpetually hidden
behind large, dark-tinted glasses.
The imposing physique is set off by
flawless attire. De Sapio wears the
expensive dark suits of a banker, ties
conservatively striped, a fine linen
handkerchief poking from his breast
pocket. He wears the clothes of af-
fluence as if to the manner born,
and it has been generally overlooked
that the well-groomed De Sapio of
today is not the same De Sapio who
lived for forty-one years before he
became the boss of Tammany Hall.
For a picture of that other De Sapio,
one turns to 2 man who has been on
the inside in the current administra-
tion and who is certainly no enemy
of the boss.

“You don’t know the Carmine I
first met in the late ’40s just before
he became the leader,” this man says.
“TI remember seeing him dressed in
a lime-green summer suit, with black
and white shoes and a straw hat
with a red and white striped, band.
He was a perfect mirror of his back-
ground.”

Another politician, a bitter foe of
De Sapio, recalls the same picture
in more acid terms. “He was a cross
between a hairdresser and a_ floor-
walker,” he says, with contempt.

Obviously, a face-lifting job has
been done on De Sapio. The man

the public sees today is a man di-

vorced from his entire past—a man
who dresses differently, talks differ-

ently and projects a steady image of |

272

pique the curiosity of a dullard, and
one looks instinctively for the Sven-
gali who wrought it. And when one
does, one comes inevitably upon a
character as fascinating in his way
as De Sapio—Sydney Stuart Baron,
the prototype of an important new
figure in American public life, the
political public-relations man.
Baron, like De Sapio, came up the
hard way. His father was a cobbler
in the poor Brownsville section of
Brooklyn. As a boy, Baron sold
newspapers on the street, worked
long hours in neighborhood stores
and, in summer, picked berries up-
state for $1 a day. Now he wears silk
shirts and $150 suits, and presides
over a Madison Avenue public-rela-
tions office that is straight out of
Hollywood. His private lair is done
in gray, with silken draperies, com-
fortable sofas, carpets that are ankle-
deep. Muzak pipes in softly to soothe
the nerves. A seven-foot electronic
cabinet controls the dulcet tones of
the music, gives Baron telephonic
connections with his staff, adjusts
the glow of the office lights. Richly-
stained mahogany panels slide back
in one wall to expose a sparkling,
well-stocked bar, a large television
set, a small library. Some modern
art work adorns the wall, and there
is on it just one photograph—a large
autographed picture of De Sapio.

Baron of the Avenue

The one-time boy from Browns-
ville who presides over this scene of
amazing plush is a driven man, a
Madison Avenue Sammy Glick. Like
De Sapio, he is possessed by an in-
ner demon that keeps him always
running, but unlike De Sapio, he
has almost ruined his health in the
process. Not yet forty, Baron has
been in hospitals repeatedly for
ulcers, and he is the victim of drives
and tensions that often give him the
appearance, despite his _ relative
youth and not unhandsome features,
of a seriously ill man. In conversa-
tion, he sometimes suggests a man
who has sealed the heights of his
heart’s desire, who has arrived at a
summit of power and money and in-
fluence that he could hardly glimpse
as a boy in Brownsville—and now
finds the summit strangely lacking.

political foe This is a change to ; er,
a would j in which no man dares turn”

his back to a friend. Baron has ar-
rived in this world, he has built a
business that grosses more than $1
million a year, and he sometimes
seems like a lonely man who needs
one thing more than any other—a
friend to whom he might dare turn
his back. His compulsive need for
friendship crops up in almost every
interview. Although he knows a
newspaperman does not think as he
does and does not believe in what
he represents, he exhibits an almost
pathological eagerness to be liked,

to be admired as a person regardless

of what he represents, to have even
an inimical interviewer for a friend.
Baron will break into a discussion
in the oddest places and go off on
a patter like this: “Be my friend.
We could become close... .
You'll find ’m no more a prostitute
than you. In fact, I know what
I’m doing. ou need friends... . I’m
the only guy in town who would hire
you; you don’t know how much
public-relations people are afraid of
you, they don’t know what you'll do
next. .. . Let’s be friends. . . . Come
on, there’s no reason when this is
over why we can’t be friends. . . .”
With another man _ wielding
Baron’s power, you might get the
feeling that he was offering you a
bribe to go easy, but the 1 impression
Baron gives is of a man answering
some inner compulsion of his own;
of a man seeking something that he
has not yet captured in its perfect
essence; of a man who really means,
or at least believes at the moment
that he means, exactly what he says.

Hitching to a Star

When you turn from Baron, the
man, to Baron, the success story,
you had better be prepared for a
ride on a jet-propelled escalator, for
Baron has catapulted from the ranks
ol the working stiffs to the precincts
of the wealthy in just five years. To
hear him tell it, this meteoric rise
is the result solely of long and hon-
est endeavor. “L work twice as hard
as most people,” he likes to say.
“That’s all there is to it.” But even
Baron has to admit that, though he
had spent a lifetime running hard,
he was still on a treadmill going

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The collaboration of De Sapio and
Baron began only after Baron had
committed a drastic political about-
face. After he first became interested
in politics in 1938, Baron hired him-
self out as a speech writer to poli-
ticians of every shade of opinion. He
changed sides some seven or eight
times in the next dozen years. He
propagandized for Republicans, for
Democrats, for independents; and in
the special mayoralty election of
1950, he had given the impression
of a man taking impious joy in beat-
ing out the brains of the new boss
of Tammany Hall in the cause of
that not-so-stalwart independent,
“Impy” Impellitteri.

The whole campaign centered on
the issue of a gangster-ridden Tam-
many. The memory of Harry Gross’s
pay-offs in Brooklyn was fresh in the
minds of the electorate, and Impel-
litteri’s speech writers, of whom
Baron was the foremost, put into his
mouth words like these:

Tf Pecora is elected, Frank Costello
will be your Mayor. But the voice
will be that of Pecora. Carmine De
Sapio, the Tammany leader, and
others allied with him in this cam-
paign take their orders from Frank
Costello, directly or indirectly.

The 1959 Madison Avenue Sydney
Baron is horrified at the suggestion
that he ever wrote such things. He
devoted his talents solely to prepar-
ing “constructive” speeches for Impy,
he says—a contention that convicts
him for having had a sinecure, since
‘the constructive approach was vir-
tually absent from this campaign.
Maybe, however, he wasn’t so con-
structive as he likes to pretend to-
day, for as you talk to him, as he
tells of his great rapprochement with
De Sapio in the aftermath of victory,
he admits that, at first, he didn’t
want to meet the Tammany boss,
estimating that De Sapio’s reaction
wouldn’t be very favorable.

De Sapio’s friends, however, kept
talking to him, telling him that he
had Carmine “all wrong.” And so,
not very Jong after the 1950 elec-
tion, the two men met socially at a
cocktail party at the home of mutual
friends. As Baron tells it now, he and
si Carmine, two hard runnets, liked

er 31, 1959

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two hours, and when the lk ended,
the great decision of Baron’s life
had been reached—he was Carmine’s
man.

Enter “The Bishop”

Baron had been rewarded for his
services in Impellitteri’s campaign
with an $8,500-a-year deputy com-
missionership in the city’s Depart-
ment of Marine and Aviation. Not
long after he reached his understand-

Sydney S. Baron

ing with De Sapio, he left city service
and established his own public-rela-
tions business on lower Broadway.
His main account was press agent
for Tammany Hall; he could count
on only about $150 a week. The first
years were rough, for De Sapio and
Tammany couldn’t free-wheel at City
Hall with Impellitteri there. But De
Sapio knew and Baron knew that
Impellitteri had disillusioned a-public
that had cast him in the role of a
modern Galahad. They could wait.
And while they waited, they could
try to put a new face on the Tiger.

One immediately observable re-
sult was the emergence of the new
De Sapio from the pas of the
old. His followers beg
“The Bishop,” in r

oe or

afer tT

%
even eile a political-science course
one night a week at New York Uni-
versity—and De Sapio, too, now
sought such respectable forums for
his message. It was a perfect public-
relations switch. The popular con-
ception of a political boss is usually
a caricature—a gross and heavy-
bellied creature who rolls a big cigar
in thick lips, dwells in a dim inner

cavern of the clubhouse and pulls off

nefarious deals far from the public
eye. De Sapio, with Baron helping
to guide him, became the exact re-
verse of the caricature. He spent
some 16 to 18 hours a day going
everywhere, talking to any group
that would listen, his theme as pop-
ular as the theme of motherhood—
good government.

Was it all just a public-relations
gimmick? Listen to De Sapio being
serious with Time:

After Pecora, I felt something
drastic had to be done to disprove
the public impression of me and my
organization. As time went on, I
could only see that, unless we put
our house in order, the Democratic
Party in New York would have no
value as a party at all. I watched
very carefully for the right places to
push for or against the right pro-
gram.

Listen to Baron being noble with
The New York Post:

Perhaps I was something of a cata-
lyst, but I can’t claim credit. This
isn’t false modesty. I regard myself
as lucky for having met him [De
Sapio]. His greatness lies in the fact
that he will not sacrifice morality to
political expediency. [A dramatic
pause]. He would rather lose an elec-
tion than compromise his principles.

The Great Leap

It is obvious that the old Sydney ~
Baron and
Sapio had pooled their talents. The —
political coalition that resulted is the
basis of Tammany success today
With De Sapio lecturing like an egg-
head, the old and the new were
welded "in! aH unbeatable combi 12
tion—the old being the unsc r
political machine et nich
Sapio had been allied I his Ii :
new, the p

erful voting elem

the new Carmine De ©

ed how to woo with his patter. When
these extremes of the political spec-
trum united in the mayoralty elec-
tion of 1953, Carmine De Sapio
crashed through to his first resound-
ing political success.

In the aftermath of that victory,
Sydney Stuart Baron moved from
lower Broadway to the heart of Mad-
ison Avenue. He made the leap as
blithely as Peter Pan. In less than
two years, he had the names of nine-
teen of the choicest accounts in New
York lined up in rows like prize
scalps on a bronze plaque inside his
door. The list included such cor-
porate giants as the Aluminum Com-
pany of America, Anheuser-Busch,
the New York Central Railroad and
Tishman Realty and Construction
Co. Many of these firms retain huge
public-relations staffs of their own.
Why did they need to hire an out-
side consultant? And why, if they
did, did it occur to so many of them
to rush to the new Madison Avenue
firm of Sydney S. Baron?

The answer may be found, per-
haps, in the startled reaction of one
public-relations man who woke up
one morning to the horrified realiza-
tion that his prize corporate client
had just gone and put itself on the
Baron list. In great alarm, figuring
that he had lost the account, he tele-
phoned the president of the firm
and almost keeled over in relief when
he was told: “Oh, don’t worry about
it. You’re still our public-relations
man. We just need Baron to rep-
resent us at City Hall.”

Supernumerary Publicist

Baron becomes incensed at any
suggestion that his services are some-
times retained more for influence
than publicity. “Do you think Alcoa
wants to be represented by a fixer?”
he snapped at us once. On another
occasion, he insisted to The New
York Post: “I never got 10 cents
worth of business directly or indirect-
Jy through my association with Tam-
many Hall, and I challenge anyone
to dispute that.” He has difficulty
explaining, however, how he man-
aged to transform himself so swiftly
—and this after years of beating his
-brains out in the public-relations
field—from the barefoot boy of low-
er Broadway to the status of pro-
prietor of a block-long Cadillac, with

special license plate spellit

SYD. The irreconcilables in the sit-
uation are too much even for Baron,
who can reconcile almost anything,
and on one occasion he admitted to
us: “I have no doubts that my po-
litical ties have helped me in busi-
ness.” But, he hastily added, if any
of his clients thought they were buy-
ing special favors through him, they
were mistaken. If their cause was
just, he insisted, they could have
walked down to City Hall, so newly
purified by De Sapio, and they could
have gotten just as much for them-
selves as he could get for them.

What Is He Selling?

There are skeptics in New York,
however, who refuse to believe it’s
all that simple. They point out that
many capable public-relations men
would consider themselves lucky to
have just one of Baron’s big-name
accounts. And they see significance
in the fact that, despite the size of
some of his corporate clients, the
testimonials that Baron flaunts most
prominently on his office walls are
political—the kind of photographic
and documentary evidence that em-
phasizes his closeness to De Sapio
and Tammany.

About the size of the harvest that
Baron annually reaps there can be
no doubt. It was disclosed some years
ago that Baron had obtained a gun
permit from the Police Department
because, the department said, “he
often was engaged in the transpor-
tation of large sums of money.”
Baron, when asked about this, was
surprised. He said he just kept a gun
at home to protect his family.

Whether Baron transports large
sums of money or not, there can be
no question that today he has large
sums of money at his fingertips. He
acknowledges in his more prideful
moments that he considers himself
well-fixed for life. One of his regular
accounts, he says, pays him $180,000
annually. And sometimes there are
windfalls, as in 1957 when Baron
ran an investigation to exonerate
the brutal Trujillo dictatorship in
the Dominican Republic of the kid-
naping of Columbia instructor Dr.
Jesus de Galindez—a service for
which he collected some $640,000.
This, of course, included the fees of

high-priced lawyers, investigators’

without saying that a fine, fat slab
of the Trujillo hog was left over for —
Baron. All in all, Baron can look
forward most years now to a gross
take somewhere in the neighborhood
of $1 million—not bad for a poor
boy from Brownsville.

When one puts together all the
elements of the De Sapio-Baron saga,
one cannot help recalling an astute
observation made by one of the in-
siders of New York politics, a man
who is no enemy of the current re-
gime. In discussing the vanished in-
fluence of the district leader, this
political expert went further and
pointed out that the new world of
influence revolves about two poles—
the all-powerful boss wielding politi-
cal power and the all-powerful cor-
poration executive wielding financial
power. It is a world of smooth nego-
tiation, involving inevitably the slick
corporation lawyer and the slick
Madison Avenue public-relations
man.

Elaborating on this new species of
power and its manifestations, this
veteran of the New York political
world said: “It’s all at the top. It’s
all done through Carmine now. It’s
done at the corporation level, and —
with the banks. That’s Carmine’s
trouble. He makes promises to the
people and to the leaders, but he
doesn’t produce. The favors come in
at the top and go out at the top.”

It has been that way since the
mayoralty election of 1953, when
De Sapio, with the aid of the dying
Ed Flynn, picked the right horse—
Robert F. Wagner, Jr., the bearer
of a famous name in New York poli-
tics. Wagner’s father, long-time Sen-
ator from New York, had authored
the Wagner Labor Relations Act
and had created an image much re-
vered by liberals; the son had been
shoved steadily up the rungs of the
political ladder by the machine and,
best of all, had a personal reputa-
tion that made it impossible for any-
one to hurl rocks at him. The com-
bination made the younger Robert
KF. Wagner Mayor of New York with
De Sapio’s blessing, and the same
combination—some men _ close to
New York politics are willing to bet
on it—may yet carry him to the
Democratic Vice Presidential nomi-
nation in 1960.

| ' T he NatION

. § ef

PART 4

ROBERT F. WAGNER dropped
the “Junior” from his name shortly
after his father died and just before
he took office on January 1, 1954,
as New York’s 102nd Mayor. The
departure of “Junior” did not mean,
however, that the Mayor had es-
caped from the paternal shadow in
which he has lived all his life. That
shadow put him where he is today.
And in many respects it made him
the kind of man, the kind of poli-
tician, that he is.

Wagner’s rise to eminence was
shadowed by disparagements like
the one ascribed to former Mayor
William O’Dwyer in 1946. Seeing
Wagner approach, O’Dwyer remark-
ed acidly: “Here comes young Bob
Wagner, wearing his father’s pants.”
Ironically, before many years had
passed, O’Dwyer was to be only too
glad to avail himself of those ca-
pacious pants in seeking a second
term in City Hall, and still later,
the same paternal jeans made Wag-
ner Mayor. Subsequently, it would
seem, he had a chance to be his own
man, free of the inherited prestige
and its shadows, but it must be said
that he did not seize the opportunity
with vigor. He continued—and still
continues—to give the impression of
a man following by rote a path chart-
ed for him by the one who went
before. He never tires of citing his
father’s political homilies, as if they
contained the essence of all political
wisdom. If they did, there would be,
of course, no argument; but, unfor-
tunately, the sayings on which the
Mayor seems to put the greatest
stress are those that represent, at
best, only negative virtues. A bit of
the father’s wisdom that the Mayor
frequently cites is to the effect that
often the best way to handle a prob-
lem is to do nothing; you’d be sur-
prised, he says, how frequently to-
day’s crisis fades away tomorrow.
~ “When in doubt, don’t,” the Mayor
often quotes his father as having
said. :

But the motto which the Mayor

i October 31, 1959

—

WAGNER: THE MAN OUT FRONT

Robert F. Wagner

uses to justify inaction may have
been better suited to the more de-
liberate role of legislator that his
father filled than to the chief execu-
tive of a city whose crushing prob-
lems demand swift, vigorous and de-
cisive action. These positive traits
that New York so desperately needs
are the very ones that are most lack-
ing in its Mayor.

An Illustrious Company

Robert F. Wagner, Jr. grew up in
the shadow of his illustrious father’s
career and in the climate of the old
Tammany that, despite its sins, pro-
duced some cutstanding men. Al
Smith was one; the elder Robert F.
Wagner, another. The senior Wagner
began his political career speaking
in a local Tammany club; he soon
demonstrated that he had a flair and
was sent along up the ladder, first
to the state assembly, then to the

state senate. In Albany, he began
writing liberal legislation on the state
scale before the New Deal had been
born on the national. In 1926, he
was elected to the U. S. Senate for
the first of four terms that he was
to serve, and in the early days of
Franklin Roosevelt, he became the
author of the Wagner Act, one of the
architects of Social Security, and an
active champion of civil rights.
This was a liberal record that could
not fail to become a heritage of in-
estimable value to his son in the
overwhelmingly Democratic, heavily
liberal purlieus of New York City.
Young Bob Wagner, born in 1910
and left motherless as a boy, was
weaned on his father’s politics. He
was a page boy in the state legisla-
ture when he was nine; he was his
father’s inseparable companion in
campaign tours all around New York
State; and to this life-long back-

275

~~ eS Oe <a ee

ground in politics, he probably owes
the fact that he is even today better
known to the electorate in predom-
inantly Republican upstate New
York than any other Democrat. The
combination of his name and his
father’s contacts determined his ca-
reer. Hardly had he emerged from
Yale Law School in 1937 before he
was informed that Tammany would
be delighted to run him for the
state assembly from Yorkville.
Young Bob was delighted to accept;
he ran and won.

His career in the legislature was
unmarked by distinction, but then
World War II cut it short. Young
Wagner obtained an Army Air Corps
commission and spent 1942 making
speeches in defense plants; then he
was sent to Europe, where he served
two and a half years handling judge
advocate duties and planning bomb-
ing raids. He returned home in 1945,
a Lieutenant Colonel with six bat-
tle stars and a deafness in his left
ear caused by a bomb blast in Eng-
land.

Grooming a Winner

William O’Dwyer may have been
nastily caustic about the young man
who was wearing his father’s pants,
but William O’Dwyer was no fool
as a politician. Both he and the
bosses in Costello-dominated Tam-
many recognized a political asset
when they saw one, and Robert F.
Wagner, Jr. was a political asset of
the first water. He had that famous
name and all it implied; he was a
Catholic, which helps in heavily-
Catholic New York City; and he
had, besides, the quality that-is per-
haps a politician’s greatest asset—
an affability that attracts voters.
O’Dwyer and Tammany couldn’t
pass all this up; almost at once, they
began to bring young Wagner along
step by step on a road of setups,
nursing him like a tank-town fighter.

O’Dwyer named him to the City
Tax Commission and soon moved
him up to the chairmanship. Wag-
ner had hardly gotten the seat warm
when O’Dwyer gave him another
boost, appointing him to head the
city Department of Housing and
Buildings. This is one of the peren-

nial hot spots in city government.

The department, throughout the
years, has been shaken by recurrent

scandals, usually involving inspec-
tors on the make. All of the evidence
then and since indicates that the
department was as rotten under
Wagner as at any other time; some
of the scandals since exposed extend
back to the period when he was its
Commissioner. But, in all fairness,
it must be said that Wagner hardly
ever stayed in one office long enough
to get the feel of it or, had he been
so minded, to accomplish reforms.
He was on a fast-moving escalator.
Again, he had hardly warmed the
chair in housing before O’Dwyer had
a better one ready for him—chair-
man of the City Planning Commis-
sion.
Brilliant Future

This rapid succession of step-up
jobs was the tip-off, to those who
know politics, that Robert F. Wag-
ner, Jr. was being groomed for larger
and more rewarding tasks. His ac-
complishments were practically nil
(under the circumstances, they
could hardly have been otherwise),
but the proper public image had been
created—the image of a man swift-
ly rising to prominence by knocking
off one top job after another. A
calculated impression was left with
the public that here was a man who
really had something on the ball.

The entire buildup took place in
the first four years of the reign of
O’Dwyer. When 1949 came around
—and ‘with it the necessity for
O’Dwyer to run again—the man
who had sneered at young Bob Wag-
ner “wearing his father’s pants” look-
ed about him for the possibilities of
political support and saw that those
pants could help. “Young Bob” was
picked to run for Manhattan
Borough President. “What a political
book end for O'Dwyer!” one old-line
Tammany politician exclaimed.

Helped by the Wagner name,
O’Dwyer swept back into City Hall,
and young Bob, having passed his
first test as a vote-getter with flying
colors, became Manhattan Borough
President. Now this office tradition-
ally has been the breeding ground of
New York scandals; it is the hiding
place for district leaders and their
lieutenants, the feeding trough where
the political faithful batten off the
public purse in jobs that are sine-
cures. When Wagner took over the

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he had inherited one-of the prize
stables for party wheelhorses. What
he did about it is significant.

There was a mild public. outcry,
at the outset, about the Tammany
hangers-on in the office; Wagner
said he didn’t care about job-holders’
affiliations with Tammany as long as
they did their jobs. The outcry be-
came a little more pointed. It was
charged that some of the Borough
President’s hired hands had been
close pals of Frank Costello. Wagner
became a little more concerned, then
decided to deal with this problem on
a high plane. The accused, he said,
must be given a chance to defend
themselves if they so desired, and he
named a Republican lawyer who had
been long active in the Citizens Un-
ion to conduct an inquiry. The re-
sult was a farce. The office-holders re-
fused to be investigated; they chal-
lenged the legality of the whole pro-
cedure in the courts — and won. The
net result was zero, but the manner
in which zero had been achieved was
significant and symbolic of the future.
Wagner, who had the power, who
could have investigated himself and
acted himself, had by-passed the is-
sue.

Setting the Pattern

The result, obviously, did not dis-
please Tammany, and in 1953, when
the law of self-survival dictated that
Carmine De Sapio pick a winner for
the mayoralty on his second try, he
and Ed Flynn settled on the man
who had been brought along and
groomed for the spot — young Bob
Wagner. Some of those who sat in on
the political discussions that led to
the selection of Wagner admit today
that it was a choice dictated by neg-
ativism, and they startle you by
projecting the method into the future
and on to the national scene. For
they insist that the same reasoning
that placed Robert F. Wagner in
City Hall in 1954 may very well de-
termine the identity of the next oc-
cupant of the White House on Elec-
tion Day, 1960,

One of the insiders who had inti-
mate contact with the negotiations
that gave Wagner his party’s blessing
puts the picture this way:

“Now it is government by public
relations. Government is so large it

The Nation

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office in 1950, he quickly found that

4 ” 1a 7

costs millions to. cach” the peaple.
Not only campaigns, but govern-

ment, are run by PR men. The men

at the head of government are all
glamorized candidates, glamorized
officials. The taxpayers’ money that
they spend, whatever else it does,
adds to their glamour. What is sought
today is a man who is absolutely in-
corruptible—with no reference what-
ever to his competence. The thinking
is that the barefoot boy might be

- tempted, but an ignorant millionaire
is all right. He won’t steal. The fact
that he might lose billions because
he is stupid is never considered. The
emphasis is on the incorruptible, not
the competent.”

Probably no statement could be a
severer indictment of modern Amer-
ican society. When a basic virtue
like honesty is popularly regarded to
be so rare that only a millionaire can
afford it, we have fallen to sad estate.
Of course, not all candidates are mil-
lionaires, probably because there
simply are not enough millionaires
interested in politics to go around;
but, as this political expert points
out, the prominence of Massachu-
setts’ Senator John F. Kennedy and
New York’s Governor Nelson A.

_ Rockefeller, two of the front-runners
for the Presidency in 1960, is a symp-
tom of the feeling of the times.

Role of the Press

Others who sat in on the Wagner
pre-nomination conferences — stress
much the same viewpoint, with dif-

" ferent shades of emphasis. One of

~ them exhibits a bitterness toward the
press. He is a man who recognizes
that the press has a job to do, but
wishes perhaps that it didn’t. In any
event, he claims that journalistic em-
phasis on racket ties has driven a lot
of good men out of politics and has
made it virtually impossible for the
machine to run a faithful, long-time
party worker, regardless of the fact
that he might be the best available
administrator.

“Now when they sit down to pick
a candidate they have to be careful,”
t this helper in the picking process says
p bitterly. “The guy has to be com-
. pletely above reproach. They have to
_ pick a man who can win — a man

rere

POTS

the newspapers can’t ruin. It has

_ nothing to do with his qualifications.

0 tobe 31, ‘1959

n 7 py
a .

Ln 1
weal men in office Tve sat in on

these problems rer
The papers are responsible for putting gen solved; few are an}

~¥ Bet a,

these things. . .

A third expert leans to the public-
relations view. “The prime criterion
in considering a candidate,” he says,
“is simply: Can he win?” In assessing
this all-important angle, he adds,
emphasis is placed on the public-re-
lations image that can be created. It
is important that the candidate be
one who can never be shown to have
sat down at the same table with
Frank Costello. It is important that
he should never have made any big
public mistakes. It isn’t vital
for him to have demonstrated cour-
age and ability as an administrator;
it is vital that he should never have
been caught in an error while ad-
ministrating. The inevitable end to
this line of logic, this man concedes,
is that the man who has done the
least is the man who is the most
available — for the simple reason
that, if you don’t act, you can’t err,
and if you don’t err, you can’t be at-
tacked for erring.

In an age when all the emphasis is
on negative virtues that can be made
to appear positive under the alchemy
of public relations, Robert F. Wagner
was the ideal candidate for the
Mayor of New York. Nobody could
ever say that he had sat at the wrong
table with the wrong man. If he had
not done much in the public jobs
that he had held, he had at least
done nothing conspicuously wrong;
he had kept his nose clean and him-
self out of trouble. And besides he
had that name and the liberal tradi-
tion handed down by his father for
PR men to work on. He was a shoo-in.

The Beginning Was the End

When he took over the reins of
government in City Hall, Robert
Wagner faced a horde of complex
problems. The Police Department
was undermanned; juvenile crime
was on the rise; parks were unsafe
after dark; schools were overcrowded,
teachers underpaid; traffic was chaot-
ic; middle-income families could find
no place to live and were being drawn
into the suburbs; the city budget was
threatening to go ae ot the strato-
sphere.

Five years later, in, ‘the midst of
Mayor Wagner’s se cond term, , all of

tion. sone of the Mors tee try a &

to defend him. But even the best—
defense usually ends in an admis-
sion. For example:

“Wagner’s first two years in office
were his best,” one man said. “He
worked and he accomplished more
then than he ever has since. He set
the wheels in motion. It looked good.
It was a good beginning—and then
that was the end.”

Ballooning Budget

This “end” that has led nowhere $
has been accomplished by the prodig-
ious expenditure of millions of dol-
lars and the ballooning of the city
budget from the $1.6 billion annually .
that Mayor Wagner inherited to
more than $2 billion today. Along =
the way, such things as these have
happened:

{| Several thousand men have been
added to the Police Department, but
there are innumerable signs that big-
time rackets still flourish in New
York and that the department itself
is eaten with corruption.

§, Millions of dollars have been
spent to clear away slums, but these
projects, heavily underwritten by
the taxpayers, have been so manipu-
lated in top-level power deals that,
in many instances, only the wealthy
can afford them and middle-income
housing is still in such short supply
that this vital class continues to be
driven from the city.

{| Additional millions have been
spent to build public schools and
improve teacher salaries, but the
teachers protest that the salaries are
still too low and now the Mayor is
asking approval of a plan by which
the city could issue $500 million
worth of bonds to build more schools
— a scheme that was advanced be-
fore the Board of Education had had
time to complete a hasty survey to
show what it would do with the
money. f

§] And all the time scandals have
piled upon scandals. Two City
Councilmen were forced to estan be-
cause they were involved in what i:
politely called “conflict-of-inte
cases — in other words, using
official positions to feather their |
vate pockets. The buildings de Da
ment has been rocked by p ;
charges; the city’s Bureau of Re
Estate was riddled with pecula

AES

amounting to hundreds of thousands

of dollars; the Slum Clearance Com-
mittee has been exposed time and
again for sanctioning deals that mean
private fortunes, but which cannot
possibly be defended in the public
interest.

The Wagner administration sits
out each scandal; in time, each fades
from the headlines and is quietly in-
terred. No one who matters ever gets
“hoited,” no official of any rank ever
goes to jail — one indication per-
haps that there is one law for the
rank-and-file citizenry and another
for sensitively placed cogs in that $2
billion-a-year municipal bureaucracy.

Next Step Upward

What impression does all this leave
among the men who serve and have
served with the Mayor in city gov-
ernment, among the men who know
him best?

One who has been closest to him
] puts it this way: “You might almost
¥ say he governs by passive resistance.
He figures that, if you don’t make a
snap decision, most things will take
care of themselves.”

Yet, through it all, perhaps by the
long-lasting magic of his name, the
Mayor still retains his valuable pub-

EVEN BEFORE Robert F. Wagner
was elected Mayor, he was commit-
ted by his political aides and back-
stage managers to a high-level deal
for power that was to give his ad-
ministration one of its blackest
marks. The deal led directly to a
shocking case of labor-spying through
the bugging of the Motormen’s Ben-
evolent Association’s offices. Official
agencies of the city, the Transit Au-
thority and the city police, did the
spying; all the power of the city gov-
ernment was thrown against small
unions in favor of the big; solemn
_ official promises were broken; and
in the end, threats and intimidation

PART 5

e -

. y e \
o t all J
'

lic-relations image. None of the sins
of the administration over which he
has presided have splattered on him
personally. Most critics regard him
as honorable and feel that his worst
weakness as an executive comes from
a likable trait in the man — a
dread of stepping on toes, a dread
of hurting anyone’s feelings. These
personal qualities, the mantle of
liberalism. he inherited and _ still
wears, his wide state acquaintance,
all enable public-relations men to
sell him as the best Democratic vote-
getter in New York State.

This is the basis on which the De
Sapio state machine will try to put
Wagner over as the 1960 Democratic
Vice Presidential nominee. The effort,
long rumored, became official in late
August when the Democratic State
Committee announced that, while
it had made no commitment for the
top spot, it expected the entire New
York delegation to next year’s con-
vention to back Wagner as the run-
ning-mate. Well in advance of the
official announcement, the move was
being discussed as a coming certainty
in political circles. One intimate of
the Mayor, in discussing his future,
pointed out that Wagner’s “last re-
sort” would be a third term in City

The Wagner administration, even
before it took office, had made an
informal arrangement with one of the
most controversial and _ probably
least-loved labor leaders in New
York — Michael J. Quill, president
of the Transport Workers Union
and, in 1953, the head of the New
York C.1,0O. Council. Quill, a swag-
gering, loud, bully-ragging type of
labor leader, had kept New York
officialdom on tenterhooks for years.
Periodically, he blustered and threat-
ened, alternately scheduling and call-
ing off city-wide subway strikes in a
war of nerves that at times exasper-
ated the public and intimidated the
incumbents in City Hall. Quill’s
T.W.U. was by far the largest, nu-

Act,
‘

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‘ae a

* iy _ bd
ae re Ad) wre, ba oO

Hall. He needs out, and what nicer

“out” than the Vice Presidency?
While this may not be the best
possible reason for picking a Vice
Presidential candidate, don’t laugh
off the possibility, political insiders
say. They reason that very probably
Senator Kennedy, despite his demon-

‘strated popularity at the polls, will

not be able to capture the nomina-
tion. The likelihood then is that the
Presidential. candidate will come from
the Midwest or the Far West. If this
happens — and it could very well
happen in a horse trade for New
York’s huge bloc of convention votes
— Mayor Wagner would then be put
forward as the ideal running-mate,
the vote-getter whose popularity
would be indispensable to the ticket
in carrying the pivotal Empire State.

In an age of press agentry, it could
happen that way, and many politi-
cally astute New Yorkers are con-
vinced that it will. But it could hard-
ly happen in the kind of world
that we usually like to picture our
world to be — a world in which ac-
complishment is the true criterion.
By any such standard, Mayor Wag-
ner would be left far behind; for, to
put it bluntly, his New York is in a
many-hued mess.

CLEAR IT WITH QUILL

merically, among bus and subway
workers; it gave him great power;
and he had enhanced this power by
becoming head of the city C.LO.
Council.

Quill’s power was the only thing
that mattered in the summer of
1953, when the De Sapio-Flynn
forces, backing Wagner, began to
seek labor support for the primary
battle against Mayor Impellitteri. A
secret, back-door deal was negotiated
with the T.W.U. head; Quill would
throw the support of his Transport
Workers Union and the city C.LO
behind Wagner; in return, when
Wagner took over in City Hall, the
T.W.U. would be given exclusive
bargaining rights covering all of the

The Nation”

35,000 employees in the city transit
system.

Once this agreement was struck,
the C.1.O. became an important
source of Wagner campaign cash,
and the result of the collaboration
was what both sides had anticipated.
Wagner crushed Impellitteri in the
primary and swept easily into City
Hall in November.

Almost as soon as the new Mayor
took office, his administration acted
to implement the secret pledge it
had given Quill. Joseph E. O’Grady,
a close Wagner ally and the city’s

' first Labor Commissioner, drafted

an agreement putting all transit
workers into Quill’s hands. The work-
ers weren’t asked; they had nothing
to say about their fate. Leaders of
the independent craft unions pro-
tested that they did not want to be
represented by Quill; they couldn’t

. get so much as a hearing from the

Transit Authority or City Hall. If
this is not serfdom imposed from the
top, it will do until a better example
comes along.

Throughout the early years of the
Wagner administration, the craft
unions — their membership included
the elite of the transit system, skilled
technicians and repairmen, motor-

October 31, 1959

why

Mike Quill

men on the subways — chafed in
vain under Quill’s rule. In mid-1955,
the city negotiated a new contract
with Quill, a flat 17-cent-an-hour
package deal in which the more
skilled men of the transit system
were treated no better than the un-
skilled. Dissatisfaction mounted
among the craft workers; they be-
gan to talk of the possibility of
striking, as Quill himself had often
talked in the past; and under this
kind of pressure, they finally suc-
ceeded — in early June, 1956 — in
arranging for something that previ-
ously had been denied them — a
conference with Nelson Seitel, an-
other Wagner aide who had succeed-
ed O’Grady as Labor Commissioner.

The Pliant Mayor

As soon as Quill heard what was
afoot, he rallied a group of T.W.U.
and C.L0. officials to put pressure
on the Mayor. The group stormed
down to City Hall and demanded
that the conference Seitel had sched-
uled with the craft unions be can-
celed. Mayor Wagner listened — and
bowed.

Some of the reporters who cov-
ered the City Hall press conference
in which Wagner publicly and ab-

jectly capitulated will never forget
it. Thomas Furey, of the New York
World-Telegram and Sun, later
wrote that the Mayor “spoke as
though he might have been brain-
washed.” What happened now at this
press conference was enough to
create some fundamental doubts
about that “nice-man” front which
the Mayor projects. For what he did
certainly wasn’t nice. He rebuked
Seitel for having agreed even to
meet with the craft unions. He told
reporters that Seitel had made “an
honest error.” He flatly promised
T.W.U. and C.LO. officials that no
such “honest error” would be repeat-
ed in the future. The craft unions
were never to be given a chance to
sit down at a table with city offi-
cials and state their case; the hon-
orable, pro-labor Mayor had firmly
barred the door.

The reaction of the crafts came
swiftly. On June 14, 1956, the Motor-
men’s Benevolent Association pulled
a one-day strike. The walkout of
the motormen created an almost
complete snafu on the city’s sub-
ways; the one-day demonstration
proved graphically that Quill, de-
spite the numerical superiority of
his T.W.U., couldn’t run the sub-
ways single-handed without the co-
operation of the crafts. Having made
their point, the motormen resumed
their efforts to negotiate with the
Transit Authority and City Hall.

Again they got a complete cold
shoulder, and the rebuff increased
their bitterness. As time passed, they
began to consider more seriously
the possibility of another subway
strike, not just a one-day demon-
stration but a bitter-end struggle to
make the city’s officials listen. With
real trouble brewing, the crafts final-
ly found another man in the city
administration who seemed to think
that they should be given at least a
hearing. This man was William Peer,
Mayor Wagner’s executive secretary

and public-relations man. He began —

to meet with the craft union leaders,

Porcupine Quill
Once more, an enraged Mike Quill

went storming down to City Hall.

With him went Joseph E. O'Grady,
the former Labor Commisisoner who

had been appointed to the Transit —

‘

story said:

at the upsurgence of the Motormen’s

Benevolent Association and_ other

subway splinter groups, called at

City Hall today and brought Mayor

Wagner around to his way of think-
ing.

As a result of Mr. Quill’s meeting

i with the Mayor, the city agreed not

to talk to the M.B.A. any more. This

;
| Michael J. Quill, still boiling mad
!

was made clear after the meeting by
the Mayor’s executive secretary, Wil-
i liam R. Peer, who for the past week
| has been attacked by Quill and the
; Transport Workers Union because
| ¥ he talked to the M.B.A. officers.
-

Barred from discussing their prob-
lems with the Transit Authority or
City Hall, outlawed by a system in
which the big political boss dealt
with the big labor boss and the devil
took the small fry, the motormen
were driven finally to the step that,
as the entire sequence would seem
to indicate, they took only with the
greatest reluctance. They called an
all-out, city-wide strike for Dec. 9,
1957. When they did, all of the awe-
some, tremendous power generated
by that $2 billion-a-year municipal
b bureaucracy went into action against
Bs them.
if The Transit Authority and the
: city, working in tandem, moved to
crush the motormen as they had
never moved against Mike Quill. An
injunction was obtained, forbidding
the strike. When the motormen went
ahead with their plans despite this,
their president, Theodore Loos, and
their strike leaders were arrested,
given cursory hearings in a_ hotel
lobby by a judge roused from sleep,
and packed off to jail for contempt
of court.

Subway Riders’ Reaction

The sentencing hearing, brief as it
_ was, exposed for the first time the
extent to which municipal authority
was willing to go in crushing a labor
organization with which it would not
even talk. For the prosecution’s evi-
_ dence consisted largely of the testi-

eo oe RAT I “TO Fn
" Ath c f 1

Y y = eee ere

mony of detectives who had been cas’

employed to spy on the union. Two
separate methods of espionage had
been used. In one case, the hall in
which the union was meeting had
been wired for sound, and Transit
detectives in a car outside had taken
down everything that was said on
recording devices. At the final pre-
strike meeting of the union, the one
that led to the jailing of Loos, a
Transit Authority detective had been
hidden in a closet, where he had
taken down verbatim notes. This
disclosure of official spying on union
meetings caused a ripple in the press,
but the ripple was nothing com-
pared to the storm that was to come.

The Motormen’s Benevolent Asso-
ciation, left without leaders by the
jailing of its top officers, found new
leaders and called the strike anyway.
The Transit Authority, helped by
Quill, went all out to break the
M.B.A. It pressed emergency motor-
men into service, used clerical per-
sonnel in all kinds of jobs, put up
cots for its strikebreakers to sleep
in station houses, paid them bonuses
for staying on the job and round-the-
clock overtime, and hired special
caterers to feed them. By such de-
vices, it managed to keep the sub-
ways running, but on badly crippled,
hit-and-miss schedules.

In such circumstances, the public
reaction is almost always predictable.
The public does not like to be in-
convenienced, and it almost invari-
ably resents a union that makes it
walk or take a taxi. It had resented
Quill many times in the past. But
this strike was different. The issues
quite evidently had registered, and
the reaction, rare in this city’s his-
tory, was widespread public sym-
pathy for the strikers.

Perhaps one of the reasons was
that the public likes an underdog,
and this was an underdog strike if
ever there was one. When Loos, the
M.B.A. president, was jailed, Frank
A. Zelano became the leader of the
strikers. Zelano had been the execu-
tive secretary of the union. A widow-
er, he had struggled to keep a home
together in a small Brooklyn apart-
ment and to fill the roles of both
mother and father for his two young
daughters. His take-home pay was
only $67 a week; he had virtually no

to fall back upon; and the
M.B.A., a struggling union striking
in defiance of both big-tnion and big-
political power, had no rich emer-
gency fund with which to carry
along its membership. Knowing that
even the getting of sufficient food
might pose a problem if he went on
strike, Zelano discussed the decision
that he had to make with his daugh-
ters. Loyally, they told him to do
what he thought was right, and Ze-
lano did. He went out with his union,
and he led the leaderless strikers.

His story and the story of other
earnest men in his union got into
the press, and again a unique thing
happened. The public, even though
it was being inconvenienced by the
strike, responded to the David-and-
Goliath aspects of the struggle, and
unsolicited cash donations began to
come in to Zelano and the M.B.A. to
keep them going.

Gallant Rebels

It was approximately-at this point
that the writers of this article, work-
ing together as a reporting team on
the story, began to get close to Ze-
lano and some of his followers. Cov-
ering the strike day-by-day, we be-
gan to appreciate the tremendous
odds that the strikers faced, and we
admit to a feeling of sympathy for
the gallantry with which they faced
them. One of our first shocks came
when we learned that, even in their
own headquarters—even at Zelano’s
own desk—there was no privacy.
The New York Police Department
had taken the unusual step of sta-
tioning detectives from the Special
Services Squad virtually at Zelano’s
elbow. The ' detectives worked in
shifts twenty-four hours a day, and
Zelano and the strikers could not
make a move or express a thought
out loud free of this constant sur-
veillance.

Sensing what was _ happening,
Gene Gleason, the reporting half of
our team, tried to warn Zelano. We
were both convinced that, if city
detectives had been planted right in
his office, other and less obvious
means of espionage were being em-
ployed, and we suggested to Zelano
that he check his telephone for a
tap and his office for hidden micro-
phones. Zelano, too decent a man
for what he was up against, insisted

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that we must be imagining things.

Conviction came to Zelano abrupt-
ly, rudely. Late on a cold, snowy
winter night, Dec. 11-12, 1957, he
went into a delicatessen downstairs
from union headquarters for a cup
of coffee. He was sitting at the
counter when he overheard a couple
of men, obviously detectives, dis-
cussing in intimate detail a telephone
conversation he had just held over
his private phone in his union of-
fice. When he heard that, Zelano
knew at last that the officialdom his
union had defied had put into use
all of the eavesdropping devices of
this modern electronic age.

Where Did the Wire Go?

Zelano left the delicatessen and
hurried upstairs to his office. He
searched it thoroughly. And, taped
to the underside of a radiator near
his desk, he found what he was look-
ing for—a hidden microphone. A
tiny wire led from the microphone
out a window and across rooftops,
vanishing into the snowy night.

Shocked and angered, Zelano did
two things swiftly. He telephoned a
protest to the Police Department,
and he telephoned Gene Gleason,
saying: “You were right. I just found
a bug in the office.”

Gleason was on the scene in a
few minutes. When he arrived, the
tableau would have been ludicrous,
except that this was hardly a laugh-
ing matter. Police were standing
around and looking at the micro-
phone Zelano had discovered. Their
faces wore the look of men who had
just been introduced to a zombie.
“Well, what do you know about
that?” they seemed to say.

Except for this mild expression of
official surprise, the police seemed
frozen into immobility. Nobody was
trying to find out where the wire
from the microphone led. Gleason
suggested that it was important to
trace the line quickly to see who
might be at the listening end be-
cause, only if the listener were found
at his post, could it be ascertained
beyond doubt who had done the
bugging. None of the detectives who
were on the job disputed his thesis,
but none of them made a move to
follow it up. So Gleason clambered

out into the night himself and

Octoder 31, 1959

tracked the wire over a couple of
nearby icy roofs; but the footing was
too treacherous even for him and he
had to give it up.

What he couldn’t get out of his
mind, however, was the complete
apathy of the cops. They were so
disinterested that Gleason was con-
vinced they either knew where the
wire went, or didn’t want to find out.
Smelling a rat, he returned to the
scene at midday and found the
police calmly rolling up the listen-
ing-in wire, plodding along toward
the room where the recording equip-
ment had been installed. By now
—nearly twelve hours after the dis-
covery of the bug—there had been
plenty of time for warning, and it
would have been one of the miracles
of the ages if an eavesdropper had
been found. Naturally, none was—
and naturally, since none was, it was
impossible to prove who had been
responsible for the bugging.

A Litthe Man Talks

Suspicions were rampant, but for
an entire week nobody could justify
them. The Police Department an-
nounced that it was “investigating.”
Every day, when reporters asked
at headquarters, they were told that
the department was still “investigat-
ing” — and that it still had no an-
swers. By the time seven days had
passed, with no news to keep the is-
sue alive, the bugging incident had
almost faded out of sight, just as most
New York scandals fade in a miasma
of vague investigation and inaction.

There is one thing, however, that
even a $2 billion-a-year bureaucracy
cannot quite control—the human
spirit, the human desire for fair play.
Time and again, when the behind-
the-scenes maneuverings of the mas-

AND

ters of New York begin to smell like
a two-ton truckload of rotten eggs,
we have found that there are little
people, working far down in the cata-
combs of the bureaucratic monster,
who simply can’t stomach the stench
any more. When they reach their
limit of tolerance, they have to un-
burden themselves, and if you’ve
been doing the kind of reporting that
makes them believe you’re honest
and interested, they come to you.
One of them came to us now.

He supplied us with names, de-
tails, specific facts. He told us that
the Transit Authority had installed
its electronic eavesdropper in April,
shortly after the M.B.A. had rented
its headquarters. The line had been
monitored constantly for months;
for months, every word that had been
uttered by M.B.A. officials had been
recorded by Transit Authority de-
tectives, working in cooperation with
the city police! Our informant even
supplied us with names of the detec-
tives who had been on the wiretap
detail; we checked out his informa-
tion—then broke the story.

The eight-column headline of Dec.
19, 1957, in which we accused the
Transit Authority of spying on one
of its own unions, caused the roof to
vibrate at City Hall. Mayor Wagner
was in a mecting of the Board of
Estimate when Peer, his secretary,
rushed in with the newspaper. The
Mayor, visibly disturbed, told Peer
to demand an explanation from the
Transit Authority. Peer telephoned
O’Grady, the Mayor’s personal ap-
pointee and the labor expert on the
authority board, and O’Grady, amaz-
ingly, told him: “No comment.”
Even more amazing than this re-
fusal to be frank with the Mayor
who had appointed him was

| O’Grady’s continued adherence to a
| patter of pious pretense that had
. already lasted for an entire week.
| “The Police Department is investi-
| gating, and we will get a report from
; the Police Department,” he said.

Deceit All Around

me The press of the city, quite cor-
' rectly, took “no comment” in these

circumstances to be tantamount to
a confession of guilt. Pressure was

: put on a squirming officialdom from
; all sides. The first crack in the of-
4) ficial dike came the next day, Dec.
‘ 20, when Police Commissioner
Stephen P. Kennedy acknowledged

that police had known about the
bugging all the time. Mayor Wagner,
confronted with this admission by

| his police executive, stormed the
i: way a nice guy should. The bugging,
‘ he said, was “reprehensible,” and
et he added: “I’m going to get to the
bi bottom of this.”

Asked if he felt Commissioner
Kennedy had deceived him, the
Mayor said: “The Police Commis-
f sioner should have informed me.”
f Asked why the police had pretended
BR? for seven days that they didn’t know
. anything about the bugging when
they had known all the time, the
Mayor said: “That’s a very good
question for Commissioner Kennedy
to answer.” Everybody in the city
agreed that it was a good question.
Even Deputy Commissioner Walter
Arm, Kennedy’s own public-relations
man, acknowledged that it was.
Asked why the department, for
seven days, had deceived the Mayor
and the public with “no comments”
and “we’re investigating,” Arm ad-
mitted: “Well, that’s a very tough
question to answer.”

It was so tough, in fact, that it
hasn’t been satisfactorily answered

et.

The police alibi, as it was finally
perfected, boiled down to this: the
police didn’t install the eavesdrop-
ping equipment—the Transit Au-
thority did. Anyway, the action was
“legally justified” because the
strikers might have been contem-
- plating violence, and the bug was
necessary to help the police put down
crime and protect the public. Fur-
_ thermore, said the police righteously,
_ they had had no direct personal con-
tact with the whole business until

“OY ES tp Area

i 2 1 ei
“ 4 . oe lie Pp
oe v4 : a :
RED re e) PI

fr ? oe
Sete ea

the strike actually: wav Gallahe einen

it was true, they had installed a city
detective in the receiving room to
monitor information—just to protect
the public, you understand; and it
was true that, in this protective ca-
pacity, a city detective actually had
been on duty at the other end of the
wire when Zelano discovered the bug.

For sheer travesty, it is difficult
to see how anything could top this
sequence—except the sequence of
travesties that was to follow.

The semblance of official righteous-
ness and anger quickly faded. Mayor
Wagner, who had authorized Peer
in those first hours of unmasking to
tell the press, “I am mad as hell,”
didn’t stay “mad as hell” very long.
Asked later the same day whether
he would demand O’Grady’s resig-
nation, since O’Grady was his own
appointee and, as the Transit Au-
thority’s labor boss, was the man di-
rectly responsible, the Mayor hedged
indecisively. “I don’t indict a man
for something he says in the way of
no comment,” he said. He added that
he planned “to talk” to O’Grady.
He went on to point out that he
himself would never do the thing
that had been done. “I don’t believe
in that type of operation. I would
not use it. I would not approve it,”
the Mayor said. The effect was of
a man presenting two irreconcilable
images. The Mayor spoke the right
words, but in speaking them he re-
vealed his predilection never to act
—and so to countenance the deed
that he would never himself com-
mit, but which nevertheless had been
done.

Probe at Snails’ Pace

The attitude was so obvious that,
in its City Hall column of Dec. 27,
1957, just a week to the day after
the Mayor's “mad as hell” statement,
the World-Telegram and Sun pre-
dicted with complete accuracy that
no official heads would roll—that no
one would suffer for the labor-spy-
ing action that everyone was agreed
was a very heinous offense indeed.

In the shock of the first few hours
after the acknowledgment of the
Transit Authority’s guilt and the
Police Department’s guilt, Assem-
blyman Anthony P. Savarese, a
Queens County Republican, started
a legislative investigation. Savarese

K soc hit rr, ve

is the son of Re arene 750 hae

met William O’Dwyer in Frank Cant
tello’s apartment and, like his father,
he has some associations with Tam-
many figures. One of the more ob-
vious of these connections is the fact
that he is a director of the Federa-
tion Bank and Trust Company, head-
ed by Thomas J. Shanahan, the
money man of Tammany and in
many campaigns the official Tam-
many fund-raiser.

Despite this connection, Savarese
sounded at first as if he meant busi-
ness. “A lot of people are stalling
and covering up,’ he said in an-
nouncing his probe. “I believe a
crime has been committed, a felony
in violation of the eavesdropping
law. .. . Since a felony is involved,
I went to see District Attorney
Hogan on Tuesday. He said he was
expecting a report from police with-
in a couple of days. I talked with
Hogan again today, and he was still
expecting a report in a couple of
days.”

Smothering the Fire

This snail-like snuggling up to the
facts by Hogan was typical of the
entire gingerly official approach to
revelation in the M.B.A. bugging
scandal. Savarese’s own committee,
after this angry initial blast by its
chairman, helped to smother a large
part of the fire by taking testimony
in secret. There is nothing quite so
dandy as a secret investigation to
keep the clash of testimony, the
embarrassment of trapped witnesses,
the ridiculousness of the transpar-
ently phony excuse, from registering
with the public.

Still, the probe—such as it was—
did lift the lid a few times and give
the public a peep or two at the foul
stew in the pot. One such peep was
provided by Thomas O’Rourke, chief
of the Transit Authority’s police,
who testified under oath that the
Police Department had been “part
and parcel” of the labor-spying ever
since a bug was first installed in
1955—more than two years before
the strike. A Police Department
spokesman, splitting hairs to a nice-
ty, denied the department had been

“part and parcel” of the act, but
admitted it had been “part and par-
cel” of the fruits of the act, since
it got regular reports from the

The Bane,

a . oe) bs wh) 1 ie ier

a eee 7" ee
Transit eavesdroppers about what
they had learned.

I The three Transit Authority com-
missioners in their testimony tried
to place all the responsibility for the
bugging on O’Rourke. They insisted
they hadn’t authorized the bugging,
or known of it. “In the unlikely
event that their denials are true,”
said Savarese in summarizing their
testimony, “these men stand self-
convicted of non-feasance, negligence,
incompetence or just plain stupidity.”
Self-conviction on just one of these
counts, one might have thought,
should have disqualified the com-
missioners from holding their plush
jobs; but obviously you don’t boot
out a Transit Authority chairman,
who draws down $35,000 a year, or
his two fellow commissioners, who
get $30,000 each, for such little
things as “non-feasance, negligence,
incompetence or just plain stupidity.”
Top officialdom always takes care of
its own.

"Twas a Pity

bugging had been undertaken to pro-
tect the public from possible violence
at the hands of the strikers didn’t
fare very well, not even under the
dimmed spotlight of the Savarese
committee. “Despite all these two
years of listening, no crime was re-
corded,” Savarese said. And so this
argument, the only possible legal
justification of the deed, collapsed of
its own weight. But again nothing
happened. District Attorney Hogan
studied the minutes of the Savarese
committee, the New York County
grand jury took testimony for six
sessions, then reported that it
couldn’t find any legal basis on which
to indict anyone. Everybody agreed
that the whole thing was a shame
and a pity, but a shame and a pity
don’t constitute a crime.

Perhaps not, but it seems a little
hard that, as the sequel was to show,
only the innocent should suffer and
only those who actively participate
in shady business should be reward-
ed. At the state capital, on the
: recommendation of the Savarese com-
j mittee, the Legislature passed a bill

2S EM IE

to tighten up loopholes in the wire-—

p tapping and bugging law. Governor

October 31, 1959
Sf

Even the pretense that the M.B.A..

Averell Harriman, who like Mayor _ was leaving a lunchee
Wagner owed his official prominence ers Club and extract d fc

to, Eeeaine De Safe, vented the
measure. Almost simultaneously,
however, he signed another bill per-
mitting the Transit Authority to set
up a full-scale detective division on a
par with the detective division of
the Police Department. As a result,
on May 1, 1958, only a little more
than four months after even Mayor
Wagner had professed shock at the
“reprehensible” bugging of the
M.B.A., the Transit Authority took
advantage of its new detective di-
visional setup and promoted three
of the men who had manned its labor-
spying equipment.

The Rewards of Courage

When it was pointed out to the
Authority that the three eavesdrop-
pers were being rewarded for their
activities with promotions and high-
er pay, a spokesman said: “They
were all exonerated by a grand jury.
We think all of them are good men.”

The strike of Zelano’s union ended
after nine days. The settlement that
was reached with a City Hall that
had been compelled to negotiate
seemed to guarantee the union fair
play. Mayor Wagner personally
pledged that there would be no job
discrimination against the strikers,
and he gave their leaders what seem-
ed at the time a categorical assurance
against reprisals when he said, “There
will be no summary dismissals.” No
sooner was the strike settled, how-
ever, than these assurances began to
ring with a hollow sound. Many of
the M.B.A. strikers, men with long
seniority, suddenly found themselves
switched to the worst shifts and the
dirtiest jobs. Charges were preferred
against thirteen members of the un-
ion who had been most active in the
strike, and Mayor Wagner appointed
a hearing officer to take testimony.
On the latter’s recommendation, fines
and suspensions were meted out, and
on Dec. 29, 1958, the two top strike
leaders, Zelano and A. J. Johnson,
were fired from their jobs by the
Transit Authority.

The United Transit Employees
Council, which had been formed to
represent all the anti-Quill craft un-
ions, took up the cudgels for Zelano
and Johnson. Two of its leaders
buttonholed Mayor We agner as he

eer to

sit oon eo —
U.T.E.C. and discuss the harshness
of the Zelano-Johnson firings. A con-
ference with the union was officially
scheduled for 2:30 P.M., Jan. 7, 1959,
but it was never held. Some four
months later, Mayor Wagner was
taxed about this broken personal
promise in a City Hall press con-
ference; asked when he intended to
review the firings as he had promised,
he said: “Oh, I don’t know.” And
that was that.

Or it would have been except that
there is still one more chapter of
this story that has to be told—a
chapter of violence. While city de-
tectives were spying on the M.B.A.
because the M.B.A. might be con-
templating crime, crime was being
committed—the crime of violence
and intimidation against the leaders
of the M.B.A. and their families.

In mid-November, 1957, less than
a month before the strike, two men
in a high-powered car chased Zelano
through Brooklyn streets, sideswiped
his vehicle and forced it into a light
stanchion. Zelano, fortunately, es-
caped unhurt, but this initial experi-
ence was only a warning of what
was to come.

When the strike began, the cam-
paign of violence and intimidation
stepped up in tempo. On Dec. 11,
1957, while Theodore Loos, M.B.A.
president, was in jail, his wife, Bea-
trice, received a series of five threat-
ening telephone calls from a gruff-
voiced man. In the last call, the man
warned: “If you don’t watch your-
self, you’re going to get acid thrown
in your face.” Mrs. Loos reported
the incident to police and was given
protection until she decided to leave
New York for the duration of the
strike,

Zelano Wouldn’t Quit

Mrs. Loos’s experience wasn’t an
isolated one. On the morning of Dec.
12, one of Zelano’s daughters an-
sweredstht telephone in their Brook =
lyn apartment and heard a gruff voice
say: “Do you think your fat er
being smart? He better get b
to work—or else.” On that same ¢
in Nassau County, adjacent | to
York, authorities were investig
an attack on Mrs. Peggy Buccar
whose husband, Nicholas, was exe
tive vice president of another c

iMate

284

union, the Signal Electricians Benev-
olent Association. Mrs. Buccarella,
who expected a baby in two weeks,
was walking along the street when
a Cadillac containing two men drew
up beside her. One of the men jump-
ed out, shoved her against a wall
and ripped her clothing. She was
warned, she said, that she would
“cet more if your husband doesn’t
cut it out.”

After the strike, the pressure be-
came too much for many members
of the M.B.A. Loos, released from
prison, finally abandoned the fight
and took his men into Mike Quill’s
Transport Workers Union. But
Frank Zelano wouldn’t quit. He con-
tinued his battle for independent
unionism, getting elected to the presi-
dency of the United Transit Em-
ployees Council.

Somebody, evidently, didn’t love
him for this. In early April, 1958, he
began to get a series of threatening
telephone calls, but he shrugged
them off; threats were getting to be
old hat by this time. Early on April
6, Easter Sunday morning,'he was
driving back to his home when a
large, blond man in a Buick Special
drew alongside of his car at a traffic
light. As Zelano pulled away from
the light, the burly blond man gave
chase, trying to force Zelano’s car
off the road. The union leader duck-
ed up a side street, switched off his
car lights and waited for twenty

WHEN ROBERT WAGNER be-
came Mayor of New York, he in-
herited many problems, not the least
a ten-headed man named Robert
Moses. A tall, driving figure, born
in 1888 and still a human dynamo,
Moses held ten official titles on some

of the most powerful public-authority

and planning agencies in the city
and state. During the years, he had
handled the spending of some $5 bil-

lion in public funds; he had been
almost universally praised; and he

was a man possessed to the marrow

PART 6

1 igs ede are aa

1 Ore

minutes before venturing back on
the main highway he had to follow
to get home. Almost at once, he said
afterwards, the blond man in the
Buick swished up out of the night.
This time there was no escape. Ze-
lano’s car was sideswiped, driven off
the road and smashed into a light
stanchion with demolishing impact.
Zelano was pinned behind the wheel,
unconscious for half an hour.

“What's His Hurry?”

When he was taken to a hospital,
it was found he had a compound
fracture of the right knee, cuts over
the right eye that required six
stitches, a brain concussion, shoulder
and chest injuries and a fractured
right hand. The miracle was that he
was alive. And the shocking fact was
that,, when he tried to tell police
what had happened, they didn’t seem
interested. They didn’t even want
to accept a complaint. In despera-
tion, Zelano telephoned us from his
hospital bed, and when we checked
with an assistant chief inspector in
charge of the Brooklyn Borough
Patrol, this is the answer we got:
“Why doesn’t he wait until he gets
out of the hospital and go down to
the station house? What’s the hurry?
Let him go down and make a com-
plaint where he should make it. He
has a pen and pencil.”

That’s what the inspector told us.
Of course, when Zelano’s charges

THE MAN WITH

by an unshakable conviction in the
rightness of his works and the perfec-
tion of his genius. He had a dictator’s
dislike of criticism; at the slightest op-
position, he would burst into scorch-
ing invective, earthy, picturesque,
breeches-searing. These characteris-
tics had made him known as “the
terrible-tempered Moses,” and his
venom had left its mark on every
Mayor of New York for nearly thirty
years, with the exception of Fiorello
LaGuardia, who never scared and al-
ways gave as good as he got. In

er 24 he ee Ae ea
Fat.) A tg ee Te iu

DAs al > i “ Phy. 7 Pe ae ‘ yy
Tee | Sor ae Len ana

that he had been run off the road
and almost killed by .a man “ob-
viously out to get me” hit the head-
lines, there was a flurry of investi-
gation by the police and the Brook-
lyn district attorney’s office—and,
of course, nothing ever came of it.

Some two months later, in late
June, Zelano’s union charged that
police had made an “ineffectual in-
vestigation” of the continuing threats
and attacks on independent union
leaders. Zelano disclosed that, even
as he was recovering from his acci-
dent injuries, he received a threat-
ening telegram that read: “You
didn’t get enough April 6. More
coming your way.”

Thoroughly disillusioned with New
York officialdom, Zelano and_ his
U.T.E.C. have sought redress in the
courts and have appealed to the Mc-
Clellan Senate Rackets Committee
for a hearing. In a brief filed with
the McClellan committee, Zelano’s
union made fifty-six specific allega-
tions. Among them, it charged that
“as of Jan. 12, 1959 the telephones
of the U.T.E.C. were being tapped.”
The brief didn’t indicate who might
be responsible for the tapping, but
since such an operation would be ex-
tremely difficult for any except skill-
ed detectives, the intimation was
that authorities, trying to nip crim-
inal plotters in mid-plot, no doubt,
were still keeping the independent
union under strict surveillance.

TEN HEADS

Moses’ gallery of scorched mayoralty
effigies are such capsuled, vitriolic
portraits as these: Jimmy Walker,
“half Beau. Brummel and half gut-
tersnipe”; John P. O’Brien, “a wind-
ed bull in the municipal china shop”;
John F. Hylan, “the raging Bozo of
Bushwick”; and J. V.:McKee, “a
synthetic character who never ac-
tually lived on land or sea, puffed
up by the press.” ,
Mayor Wagner, who doesn’t like

to clash head-on with any man, who

doesn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings,

: r ’

The Nation. i ,

ll OE ell i

Tk b See a
this: panjz and: um »

~ Moses was off on one of his greatest

planning sprees. If it is ever carried

out in its entirety, huge sections of

' New York will be torn down, up-
rooted and rebuilt at a cost of $1.5
billion.

The program, on which Moses had
embarked before Wagner became
Mayor, is known as Title I slum
clearance. The name derives from a
section of the National Housing Act
of 1949, and the program is the
brain-child of three Senators—the

ate Robert A. Taft, of Ohio; Allen
" J. Ellender, of Louisiana; and the
late Robert F. Wagner, of New York,
father of the Mayor. The concep-
tion was this: cities would condemn
huge slum areas and would turn these
over to private developers for what
it was estimated that the land, de-
void of buildings, would probably
cost. The difference between the
value of a slum area complete with
buildings and the same area without
__ would be met by the taxpayers, with
; the federal government paying two-
_ thirds of the so-called “write-down”
| and the municipal taxpayers one-
|

inherit red

third. This multi-million-dollar, tax-
payer-financed “write-down” would
be an inducement to private enter-
prise to invest additional millions to
erect new and modern middle-income
housing, refurbishing the faces of our
cities.

e Image and Reality

One of the first municipal plan-
ners in the nation to recognize the
tremendous potential of Title I was
Robert Moses. He saw in it the pos-
sibility for a Gargantuan remodeling
of New York, and with his custo-
mary vigor and enthusiasm, he be-
gan to rush a spate of ambitious
projects across the drawing boards.
In such a field, Moses’ word virtual-
ly was law because of his vast pres-
tige and his manifold posts.

The ten-titled Moses held just two
salaried public jobs, but some of his
unsalaried positions gave him the
power that control over millions of
dollars gives any man. Moses’ paying
posts were those of the New York
City Commissioner of Parks at $25,-
000 a year and State Power Author- —
ity chairman at $10,000 a year. In ~
his even more influential nor “paid
a aa he headed t

es her

he T ache of enaaiey ae }
a)

Robert Moses

borough Bridge and Tunnel Author-
ity, the Long Island State Park Com-
mission, the Jones Beach State Park-
way Authority and the Mayor’s
Committee on Slum Clearance. He
was in addition a member of the
City Planning Commission and City
Construction Co-ordinator. In these
last three roles, he was in a position
virtually to dictate the shape of the
city’s future.

At the time, no one challenged

the wisdom of the setup. In his long’

career, even though some $5 billion
had passed through his fingers,
Moses had never been tarred by
money scandals; he had built up a
public image of incorruptibility. He
had taken over the graft-ridden New
York City park system when La-
Guardia became Mayor; he had ex-
panded, beautified and purified it,
removing from it the stink of cor-
ruption, He had planned and built
great expressways, tunnels and
bridges; and if his domi
through public life ha
by the angry outcrie
whom he had trodd

neering path —
m

must expect as they drive with ruth-
less efficiency along the path of ac-
complishment and destiny.

Out of the Past —

This, no doubt about it, was the
almost universal attitude with re-
gard to Robert Moses when he em-
barked on his Title I slum-clearance
program. Yet, to those who looked
closely, it was evident that his ca-
reer had been studded with traces of
a megalomania that might well have —
given cause for wonder about what
would happen when, in his grandiose _
passion for rebuilding, he was given
supreme power over the homes and_
lives and livelihoods of hundreds of |
thousands of the city’s residents. For
example, back in 1925, W. Kings
Macy became embroiled with Moses
over the seizure of some Long Island
land. Macy, later a Congressman
from Long Island, declared to Th
New York Times:

Mr. Moses told me personal
his poner was such that he
sei 7

' that the state should have such

? powers in reserve for use as a last
resort, but it should not be the play-
thing of an arrogant and arbitrary-
minded man... .

Mr. Moses told me not only that
he possessed this arbitrary power,
but that he was able to control the
press of New York City, so as to
hold me up to such obloquy that I
would not be able to stand it. . .

Whether Moses controls the press
or not, the evidence is conclusive
that for years and until quite recent-
ly he had been practically immune to
journalistic criticism. The reflected
image that the public received of
him was of a man on a pedestal. His
terrible temper, his arrogance—cer-
tainly two of his most revealing traits
—became little more than the color-
ful idiosyncracies of a great man in
the generally one-sided portraits that
glowed from the pages of the largest
metropolitan newspapers and_ the
glossy mass-circulation national mag-
azines. So fixed and immutable was
this image that it persisted undim-
med despite the fact that, as Moses’
Title I program swung into action,
it created such injustices that pub-
lic outcry mounted—the outcry of
humble and frustrated people who
could find no forum for a cause that
brought them into conflict with such
an all-powerful idol.

Miracle That Never Was

Resentment was at fever heat
and was being generally ignored in
the press—when we, as newsmen,
took our first close look at Moses’
Title I slum-clearance program in
mid-1956. By that time, the great
face-lifting operation had been un-
der way for four years. Ten projects
recommended by Moses had been
dutifully approved by the city gov-
ernment. The slum areas had been
condemned at a total cost of $94,-
633,896 and they had been resold
to private interests for $24,719,534
—a difference that meant federal and
municipal taxpayers had a $70 mil-
lion stake in what was happening.
Despite this $70 million subsidy,
despite four years of effort, progress
on the ten projects, according to a
report by City Comptroller Law-
rence FE. Gerosa, had been “disap-
pointing.” Only 65 per cent of the
residential tenants in the areas to be

demolished had been Wlocated ia

new homes; only 57 per cent of the
commercial tenants had been re-
located; only 44 per cent of the slum
buildings had been torn down. And
even the $24,719,534 payment the
city was to get from private spon-
sors hadn’t all been paid in cash;
the city held purchase-money mort-
gages for $11,670,983, nearly half of
the amount, and on this paper it was
collecting only 1.6 per cent interest.

This did not seem like progress;
this did not seem like the character-
istic, perfect efficiency of the Great
Doer. And so we began to delve into
the Title I slum-clearance operation.

In the city records was a graphic
and beautiful drawing. It showed
seventeen majestic, twenty-story
apartment buildings surrounded by
beautiful landscaping, each basking
in space, open on all sides to light
and air. These marvelous new apart-
ments, according to an elaborate and
glossy brochure put out by Moses’
Slum Clearance Committee, should
be nearing completion at just this
time in a six-block section of Man-
hattan’s Upper West Side that had
been designated Manhattantown.
We couldn’t wait to see what this
entrancing vision must look like in
reality, and so we went to the area
bounded by Amsterdam Avenue and
Central Park West, by 97th and
100th Streets, to take a look for
ourselves.

Scene of Desolation

We were shocked to find, not the
gleaming and beautiful apartment
houses the brochure said should be
there, but a scene of unbelievable
desolation. Manhattantown looked
like a cross section of bombed-out
Berlin right after World War II.
Some of the tenements were still
standing, broken windows gaping
sightlessly at the sky, basement
doors yawning uncovered on the side-
walks; and surrounding them were
acres strewn with brick and mortar
and rubble where wreckers and bull-
dozers had been at work. In the
ruins, in the shells of buildings, peo-
ple still lived. They clung to apart-
ments in structures half-wrecked by
vandals, apartments that were often
without heat and sometimes without
even water; they lived on amid
ruins and rubble because in this over-

Fe eee eo LD Cap eT
crowded, housing-short, ~ price-mad
city they had nowhere. else to go.

How had this happened? How had
the glorious prospect of Title I slum
clearance degenerated into this
tawdry, revolting scene of misery
and desolation? The history of Man-
hattantown tells much about what,
for years now, has been the slowly
mounting and explosive scandal of
the $1.5 billion Title I program in
New York.

Moses and Manhattantown

The Manhattantown project, ap-
proved by Moses’ Slum Clearance
Committee, was presented to the
Board of Estimate, guardian of the
municipal purse strings, for final
ratification on Sept. 20, 1951. It was
shadowed at its inception by the
kind of secrecy that, throughout the
history of Title I, has marked the
deliberations of Moses’ committee.
The private interests that were to
get the six-block Manhattantown
site at a bargain-basement price with
the help of the taxpayers’ pocket-
books had already been selected, but
the public wasn’t told. A newspaper
account at the time reported with
an air of quiet acceptance: “The
committee ... said that a ‘firm offer’
has been received from a ‘reliable
bidder’ whose identity was not dis-
closed.”

Just a week later, on Sept. 27,
1951, the Board of Estimate ap-
proved the project. The speed and
ease with which it went through
vividly illustrated Moses’ prestige.
The plans called for seventeen tall
and proud apartment buildings capa-
ble of housing 2,720 families—some
8,840 persons—to be completed by
August, 1956. The city condemned
the six-block area for $16,261,652
and turned it over to the private
developer on Aug. 20, 1952, for $3,-
106,771. Of this amount only slight-
ly more than $1 million was paid
to the city in cash.

The law provides, of course, that
when such huge chunks of city real
estate are disposed of to private in-
terests it must be done by public
bidding. As the Moses system has
worked out in New York, however,
tentative designations are made—
while the projects are in the planning
stage—behind the closed doors of the
Slum Clearance Committee. When

The Nave

Board of Estimate, public bids are
sought. But on Moses’ projects, there
is almost invariably just one bidder
—the group that got the original,
tentative designation in private con-
ference. In the Manhattantown case,
the organization that had the inside
track was Manhattantown, Inc. Its
president was a builder named Jack
Ferman, and its cast of characters
gave off a heavy Tammany club-
house smell.

This is a reek that usually war-
rants investigation, and in investi-
gating, we were intrigued by a sec-
ond unusual angle in Moses’ Title I
operations. In every other city in
the nation,’ municipal authorities
condemned the slum areas to be re-
developed, moved out the residents
and relocated them in new homes,
then demolished the slum buildings
and turned the vacant land over to
private developers. Moses had de-
clared that such a system would not
work in New York. He could not
get firm commitments from respon-
sible builders, he said, unless the
slum sections to be redeveloped were
turned over intact, with buildings
still standing and tenants still pay-
ing rents. Just why this should be
so in New York—and nowhere else
—has never been quite clear. Federal
Housing and Home Finance Agency
officials in Washington, the federal
overseers of the program, confessed
they didn’t like the New York
method at all, that they were ap-
prehensive it would lead more to
profiteermg than to building; but
they had gone along with Moses,
they said, because they needed local
cooperation to get Title I started
and, unless Moses had his way in
New York, there would be no co-
operation.

Senatorial Probe

The fear that developers might
try to keep an old slum going for as
long as possible while they skimmed
off a fortune in rents proved amply
justified by what happened in Man-
hattantown. From the start, the
project had aroused local suspicion
and antagonism. In the fall political
campaign in 1951, candidates in the
district charged that the new de-
velopment, when completed, would
succeed only in driving away resi-

October 31, 1959

Ne kas ean a A
dents who had lived there for years
because the new apartment rentals
would be so high that only the re-
latively well-to-do could afford them.
There were hints, too, of sinister po-
litical influences behind the project
and rumblings that residents were
getting callous treatment at the
hands of the developers. City news-
papers dutifully printed a few para-
graphs, tucked away next to the
want ads, but nobody bothered to
go and look, nobody bothered to
try to talk to the people. And Man-
hattantown became just a vague
name that cropped up in the papers
now and then.

In the fall of 1954, however, the
project got a brief headline whirl.
Mayor Wagner had now been in City

Hall for almost a year; the private
developers had had control of the
Manhattantown site for more than
two years; and though nobody in
the city seemed to care what was
happening, the odor of things gone
radically wrong permeated all the
way to Washington where, on Sept.
27, the U.S. Senate Banking and
Currency Committee announced it
was going to hold a public hearing
to find out why no new homes were
being built.

The committee came to New York

for a one-day stand on Oct. 1, 1954.

The star witness at its hearing was
Samuel Caspert, secretary of Man-
hattantown and spokesman for the
corporation. Caspert was an_ in-
triguing figure. He had begun his
career, not in the construction indus-
try, but in the Tammany clubhouse.
He had been a public auctioneer,
and Mayor William O’Dwyer had
seen fit to make him a city marshal.
Now he was a power in the “re-
liable” corporation to which Moses’
committee had turned over a $16
million slum for $1 million cash.
On the witness stand, Caspert’s
memory had a way of failing him at

‘Caspert’s son-in-law’s firm had pock- _

~~” sw r * ‘> oy yee ee 5 iv
¥ 7 : - .

times, but the things he did remem-
ber proved startling enough. He dis-
closed, for example, that Manhat-
tantown, Inc., had an _ eight-year
contract for legal advice with the
law firm headed by Samuel Rosen-
man, a former judge and widely
known Democratic _ brain-truster.
Rosenman had been a_ prominent
speech writer for former Presidents
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Tru-
man, and he was a close confidant
of Governor Averell Harriman.
Manhattantown, on its eight-year
contract, had guaranteed his firm
$250,000.

To the average citizen, this looks
like a pretty fair hunk of pie, but
as Samuel Caspert was to reveal, it
was only a thin slice. One particu-
larly fascinating deal siphoned off
more than $100,000 in less than a
year, and it was wangled like this.
Caspert set up a separate corporation
headed by his son-in-law. Son-in-
law’s firm then bought from Manhat-
tantown all the gas ranges and re-
frigerators in the tenements, paying ot
Manhattantown $33,000. Then Cas- a
pert’s son-in-law rented the appli-
ances Manhattantown had just sold
him right back to Manhattantown.
The rental fees must have been i
pretty fancy, for Caspert acknowl-
edged that, in less than a year, Man-
hattantown had paid his son-in-law’s —
firm $115,326 for the privilege of |
using what had been its own ap=-
pliances. iy

Then, after this handsome profit —
had been skimmed off the accounts
of the parent corporation by son-in-
law’s firm, Manhattantown obliging-
ly bought back all the old gas ranges
and refrigerators for just what son-
in-law had paid for them in the
first place—$33,000. Manhattantown
wound up right where it started, but —

eted $115,326 in this little game,

The City Yawns

By such devices, the Senate com-
mittee declared in its report, insiders
in the Manhattantown operation
skimmed off $649,215 in the first
eighteen months of operation. __

This is a fairly sensational figure
But in New York it evoked only «
ficial yawns. On Randall’s Island
where the energetic Moses presided
over slum clearance, there was_

e
ne
aoe

sudden angry eruption, no drive to
clean house, no acknowledgment
even that the house needed clean-
ing. Down at City Hall, Mayor
Wagner and his aides acted as if
they never read the press. And the
press, having had its one-day head-
line, obviously didn’t give a hoot
either. Once more, the goings on at
| Manhattantown faded into oblivion.
As months passed, more smothered
rumblings of discontent came out of
_. the area. The _ highly-reputable
5 Women’s City Club of New York
| conducted a survey and issued a re-
j port sharply criticizing the manner
b in- which Manhateaeenen residents
were being shoved around in relo-
cation. City newspapers dutifully
printed a few paragraphs about what
the women’s club had to say. The
Metropolitan Garage Board of Trade
f charged that, where tenements had
been torn down, parking lots had
Ss been installed. It called this an “out-
a rageous abuse.” These charges were
buried and quickly forgotten. Even
though the federal and municipal
"| taxpayers had a $13 million stake
y in Manhattantown, the creation of
i parking lots instead of housing
caused no indignation.

Demands Inquiry

7 On May 29, 1956, some twenty
, 2 months after the Senate commit-
a tee had given New York officialdom
a detailed look at the kind of eggs
it was hatching, City Councilman
Robert E. Barnes, a Republican, in-
troduced a resolution demanding an
investigation of all ten Title I proj-
ects because, he said, “disturbing re-
ports” had reached him. He was the
only official who was disturbed. The
council simply shelved his resolution
and interred the whole issue in of-
ficial silence.

Only the speculators were doing
well, and how well they were doing
_ we found out from city auditors, who
had been checking the account books
that Manhattantown turned over to
them. The auditors determined that
the owners of the project, by paying
themselves fancy fees and swapping

e timate more than $1 million in the

Aa a ara ce

been destroyed. Still, ke yes rs after”

Manhattantown took possession,
only one short month before the
project was scheduled for comple-
tion, not a single building had been
started.

What happened when we dis-
closed these details in a series of
articles so prominently displayed
that they could not possibly be
ignored? Were Moses the _ para-
gon in whom the public had been
led to believe, were Mayor Wagner
the dedicated and high-minded pub-
lic servant his press agents had pic-
tured, one might have expected
prompt and vigorous action to put
right a situation so obviously and
so palpably wrong. What happened,
however, was not a clean-up but a
cover-up.

The “Boob” Reporters

Moses, in characteristic manner,
attacked. We were a pair of boobs,
he said in effect. We had indulged in
“irresponsible” reporting; the $1
million profit figure we had cited
was “fantastic.” Since Moses’ con-
tracts were so worded that a de-
veloper was entitled to pocket 10
per cent—and charge it off to the
cost of operation—before technically
he even began to show a profit, it
was possible to make out a book-
keeping argument that a man was
going virtually broke when all the
time, as a practical matter, he was
stuffing his wallet with the green.

Moses preferred the practically
broke view; little items like lush
fees and the swapping of appliances,
all of which padded the corporation’s
so-called “expenses,” were ignored.
Furthermore, Moses said, the whole
trouble at Manhattantown had: been
caused by federal officials; the blast-
ed FHA had procrastinated so much
about underwriting a loan for the
project that the poor developers
hadn’t been able to get going. They'd
been hamstrung by federal red tape;
everything was Washington’s fault
—not Moses’ fault; and it was really
a damnable outrage. Mayor Wagner
said that of course Moses was 100
per cent right.

This delicate refusal even to look
at what was going on could only
bolster suspicions that potent figures
in the big-power city government
had a stake in what was hapiagine.

“moving costs and relocate them; but

je and again, when we went into J
the Manhattantown area in mid-
1956, we heard bitter’ complaints
about “the gang down at City Hall”
that, residents felt, must be respon-
sible for the worse-than-slum treat-
ment they were getting.

Building New Slums

One man we remember especially
is the Rev. Patrick Raftery, priest
of the Holy Name Catholic Church
at 96th Street and Amsterdam Ave-
nue. Several of the clerics in the
Manhattantown area, Father Raftery
said, had tried to find out who
was “really behind” the project, who
was protecting it; but even men of
the cloth couldn’t learn anything.
The priest shook his head sadly.
There was no question, he said, that
the old slum area should have been
rebuilt, but he added firmly: “No
one can go along with the way it
has been done.” He recalled that,
when demolition started, hysterical
mothers came to him for help. They
had been given curt notices to evac-
uate within a month, and they had
no place to go. Batter the terms of
the contract with the city, the de-
velopers were supposed to find new
homes for these people, to pay their

in practice, in Manhattantown and
in other projects, the developers
profited if they could scare or force
people out, scare or force them to
pay their own moving expenses. “I
had occasion to call the project of-
fice a few times trying to help
parishioners,” Father Raftery told
us. “I was disturbed when they made
the crack to me, ‘Business is busi-
ness.’ ”

The priest swept his arm around
him. He pointed to what at one time
had been solid, substantial brown-
stone homes near the Hudson River.
Now many of these had become
rooming houses, packed with the dis-
placed Gam ancy flowing out from
the partially wrecked Manhattan-
town area. “The whole neighborhood
is deteriorating rapidly,” the priest
said, explaining that new slums were
being created where none had been.
“Family life can’t survive when
speculators move into an area.”

There is, of course, no law that
says a developer has to get an FHA
loan. Some projects have been fi-

The Nation

Ye.

\\
Wh

Lie

\\i

nanced without the FHA. It’s up
to the builder how he obtains his
financing, and presumably, when a
project is awarded, it is given to a

“reliable” outfit financially com-
petent to handle it. In addition,
Manhattantown’s developers, over

the years, had made repeated state-
ments about when they were going
to get started, but when the date
for starting came around, a new date
was always set for the future. Moses’
contention that everything was the
fault of the FHA didn’t look so good
after the FHA had approved multi-
million-dollar loans for Manhattan-
town which Manhattantown didn’t
even bother to pick up. The commit-
ments lay around the FHA regional
office in New York as unwanted as
an old dishrag. And, all the time,
up on the Manhattantown site, the
rents still poured in.

Sicking the Watchdogs

All that really happened as a re-
sult of our exposé of Manhattan-
town was that a test case was taken
into the State Supreme Court to see
whether it was legal for Manhattan-
town to operate a parking lot on
land where apartments were sup-
posed to grow. The court decided
the operation was perfectly legal;
parking fees continued to pour into
the coffers of Manhattantown; and
Moses emitted a typical crow of
victory.

Obviously, Moses and City Hall
were determined to make no changes,
conduct no_ investigation, push
through no reforms. They weren’t
even going to admit that some re-
forms might be needed. Since this
was clearly the attitude in a Tam-
many-dominated City Hall, we be-

October 31, 1959

gan to wonder whether Republicans
might be more interested.

The state at the time had a curi-
ous setup. After Averell Harriman
became Governor, the Democrats
had named their own man to the
key post of Commissioner of Inves-
tigations. It was a spot in which an
energetic investigator might cause
some disturbance by prying into the
affairs of the Republican machines
that dominate upstate New York.
Recognizing this, the Republicans,
who control the state legislature,
quickly fashioned a _ counterploy,
creating the so-called Legislative
Watchdog Committee to keep an eye
on Tammany Hall.

Naturally, we wondered whether
the watchdogs might like to bark up
the Title I tree.

In a conference with a high rep-
resentative of the committee, we
pointed out the possibilities. Here
was a program that was going to
run into billions of dollars. The con-
trol of huge, square-block chunks of
city real estate was being turned over
to private developers at fantastic
bargain-basement prices. The Man-
hattantown scandal showed how,
even at the outset, a golden stream
could be kept flowing for years by
milking rents out of tenements that
were supposed to be torn down. Even
the three-year, $1 million take that
we had culled from the city comp-
troller’s audit might not be the whole
story. The audit was based on the
accounts that Manhattantown turn-
ed over to the city; the city had no
check on actual receipts in the proj-
ect, no way of knowing whether the
records it got were completely ac-
curate. This seemed to us like meaty
material, worthy of investigation,

The first—and frank—reaction of
our Republican watchdog was sim-
ply this: “Well, I’m afraid some of
our own boys must be mixed up
[sl atte

“Sure,” we agreed. “No doubt they
are. It would be standard operating
procedure for the Tammany machine
to cut some good, influential Repub-
licans in on the pie. But still the
fact remains that Tammany controls
City Hall. It’s responsible. It will
have to take the lion’s share of the
blame for anything that goes wrong.”

Our watchdog seemed impressed.
He took some notes and promised to
look into it. A few days later, he got
in touch with us, quite excited. Com-
mittee investigators had found that
there were still so many persons liv-
ing in the Manhattantown rubble—
more than 1,500 in fact—that rent-
payers sometimes queued up in lines
a block long outside the Manhat-
tantown collection booth. The watch-
dogs were interested, but they had
a problem. They didn’t have many
investigators. Could our paper help 4
by putting some men on the story?

Well, we could and we did; but
after we had done the research, the |
watchdogs broke off a briefing ses- Wy
sion they had scheduled with us—
and that was the last we ever heard
of the watchdogs.

SS Span SSS x

BESTE Tao T

Nonpartisan Big Money

In doing some basic work for the
investigation that sputtered and
died, however, we probed far be-
neath the surface of the Manhattan-
town mess, and managed to uncoy-
er some of the political ties that
threaded through the multi-million-
dollar deal and affected the lives of
thousands of people. Our research
showed graphically that, when big
power deals with big power, big
money is the only language that —
talks to both; and when big money
talks, both Democrats and Repub-
licans are in the behind-the-scenes
pot together and no top-level power
is left on the outside to make the ©
mistake of taking up the cudgels for —
the people. ;

Robert Blaikie’s Democratic
on the Upper West Side. At the tir
Blaikie was one of the maverick

Democrats who were bucking the
De Sapio machine. He _ backed
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. for Con-
gress against the wishes of the ma-
chine; he bolted the party to sup-
port the independent mayoralty
candidacy of Impellitteri. When both
Roosevelt and Impellitteri won,
Blaikie rode high for a time.

When Caspert became active in
setting up Manhattantown, Blaikie
helped him out. Blaikie said that he
telephoned Roosevelt in Washington
and got the young Congressman to
intercede for Caspert with federal
officials. When Caspert took over
the six-block area from the city,
Blaikie handled the insurance, but
only, he says, because Caspert came
to him in desperation after four other
brokers had refused to help him. For
a time, Blaikie’s wife was employed
in the Manhattantown rent-collec-
tion office, but Blaikie insists his
only interest in the project at its
inception was to see that his district
got better housing—something he
thought it was going to get.

Many of the original investors, of-
ficers and employees of Manhattan-
town came out of Blaikie’s political
club. Although New York is the
home of some of the largest and most
reputable construction and urban re-
development firms in the nation, it
cannot be too strongly stressed that
these were precisely the kind of ex-
perts who were NOT involved in
Manhattantown, the city’s first am-
bitious Title I project. It cannot be
too strongly stressed that Manhat-
tantown was loaded from the start
with political clubhouse experts and
that, as the political tides changed,
so did Manhattantown’s coloration.

Some Good Graces

The great switch came after the
election of 1953 which saw De Sapio
win with Wagner. With De Sapio
in power, Blaikie was definitely out
of favor, and ever since, he has been
a bitter enemy of the Tammany

boss. Coincident with the change in’

the political face of things, there
were changes in Manhattantown.

_ Blaikie no longer handled the proj-
~ect’s insurance. Franklin D. Roose-
_ velt, Jr. who, according to Caspert,
’ _ served originally as attorney for the
project without pay, faded from the
_ picture and was replaced by Sam-

uel Rosenman. Roseurn 0

posed Roosevelt in the Congressional _

fight; Rosenman was a good friend
of Harriman, who was to kill off
Roosevelt’s gubernatorial _aspira-
tions; and Rosenman’s law firm
wound up with that eight-year $250,-
000 contract.

On another front, Caspert culti-
vated connections. He was a man
plagued with problems. He had come
out of the 1954 Senate hearing with
that $115,326 appliance deal draped
around his neck. He had been a
Blaikie man, and Blaikie was now
definitely the wrong horse. Caspert
needed a new public image, new
sponsorship, and he began to discuss
the possibility of forming a Title I
builders’ association. A man with
whom he discussed this was George
Grace, a brother of Thomas Grace,
then head of the regional FHA office
in New York.

Seek PR Man

In the fall of 1954, Caspert and
Grace opened negotiations with the
swank Madison Avenue public-rela-
tions firm of Carl Byoir. An execu-
tive of the Byoir outfit agreed that
Madison Avenue magic could per-
haps give Manhattantown and all of
Title I a new look, but it would cost
money. A fee of $50,000 plus ex-
penses that would probably run $50,-
000 more was mentioned. It is per-
haps indicative of the kind of money
involved in Title I that Caspert and
Grace didn’t turn down Byoir on the
spot; they merely said they’d think
it over.

The thinking led to a decision that
seems significant. Caspert and _ his
other Title I partners got a public-
relations man all right, but not Carl
Byoir. The man they got was Sydney
S. Baron.

“Much of Sam’s trouble was with
the De Sapio machine because of his
ties to Blaikie,” says a man who was
an intimate of Caspert at the time.
“He was hurting. He was on the list,
and he went to Baron.”

Baron explodes at the idea that
his political connections with De
Sapio had anything to do with his
getting the account. “Carmine didn’t
even know I represented the Title I
builders,” he says. He took on the
account practically as a public serv-
ice, Baron insists; as far as money

| , he go ont ren etainer of $1,500.
"month, he never did get raid all
of that, and he finally broke off con-
nections with the Title I builders.
Baron admits that he set up some
conferences for Title I interests with
city agencies holding regulatory pow-
ers over housing, rents and health
conditions. He admits that he per-
sonally sat in on some of these con-
ferences, but he denies emphatically
that he was exerting any political
pressure, waving any big stick.
Others take an entirely different view
of the matter.

Curious Apathy

Tenants in Title I slums some-
times shivered in heatless apartments
in frigid midwinter. They some-
times, went without water and the
most elemental services. One woman
in a Manhattantown apartment com-
plained to officials that she had had
no hot water for three months; that,
during the entire month of June,
she had had no water at all in her
apartment. Yet the health depart-
ment took no action against Title I
builders. Nor did the rent commis-
sion. Nor did other agencies. One
rent commission employee was
especially bitter in discussing the
situation with us. He pointed out
that normally, when a landlord cuts
services, rent is cut; but, in Man-
hattantown, service and maintenance
were slashed beyond the irreducible
minimum required by health stand-
ards—and still the same rents were
charged. In some instances, tenants
were transferred from a_ building
about to be demolished to another
scheduled for demolition a few
months later—and their rents were
actually hiked.

“This whole situation is a shame
and a disgrace,” the rent commis-
sion employee said. But the big men
at the top, the men of lofty vision,
kept assuring the newspapers in pub-
lic utterances that everything was
fine.

Even another exposé of ours didn’t
shake the “all’s well” attitude at
City Hall. On April 24, 1957, we
showed that, while Title I projects
were collecting millions of dollars in
rents from the slum neighborhoods,
they weren’t even paying the taxes
and interest they owed the city.
They were in arrears to the tune of

The NaTIoN.

a +,
tak

\ to wn a4 principal offender, owing
$414,360.08. This revelation, too, was
belittled at City Hall. The delinquent
taxes were just a paper matter, just
a technicality, officials said; rest
easy, they told the public, all the
taxes would be paid.

The Mayor Was “Conned”

Again the facts collided with the
pretenses. With Manhattantown not
paying its taxes, with Manhattan-
town not even picking up its FHA
commitments, with its land still not

_ cleared and the first foundation still
not dug after nearly five years of
rent-collecting, even Robert Moses’

WHEN THE multi-million-dollar

Manhattantown project collapsed

with Mayor Wagner’s unhappy “

were conned” admission, there was a

brief flurry of official broom-sweep-

ing. This achieved some curious re-
sults, but as the sequel was to show,

_ it disturbed no fundamental reali-

_ ‘ties. Robert Moses still ran the show.
Projects still reeked of political in-
fluence. And in one startling case,
an underworld taint crept into the
act.

. The new order that could not pro-
_duce a new odor began with the
blackest project of all, Manhattan-
town. The city was spared the costly
business of foreclosure when the
huge real-estate firm of Webb and
Knapp expressed an interest in the
debris-littered site and made a $1.3
million offer. The mechanics of these
negotiations provided some food for
_ thought.

a By the time Manhattantown col-

lapsed, Samuel Caspert had sold out
| his interest, and control was in the
|} hands of Jack Ferman, the builder

f who had been president of the cor-
_ poration from its inception, and Sey-
e mour Milstein, a wealthy business-

man. Webb and Knapp now offered

= to buy the stock of Ferman and Mil-

PPE ET

ITI TT ETS

| stein and to pay the city the $620,-—

000 Manhattantown owed it. — i
Octe be er 31, 1959 bad
ee ae Sea

arly gy mill lion with mM ahs ak

a ee
ade

* Shim Clearance Commiittes! inalty
came to the point where it could
countenance matters no longer. On
June 11, 1957, it recommended to
the city that foreclosure action be
started to repossess the site. By this
time, Manhattantown’s delinquent
taxes and interest, plus the interest
on its mortgage, totaled $620,000.
The scandal that Moses and Wag-
ner had kept denying for a year was
there at last for everyone to see, con-
firmed in eight-column headlines.
Mayor Wagner tried to explain
the inexplicable in a City Hall press
conference. It was probably one of
the sorriest performances of his po-
litical life. Gene Gleason was there,

7 WARIATIONS ON

What this meant, of course, was
that the original developers, who
hadn’t developed, were to be allowed
to profit from their non-performance.
Federal Title I regulations are quite
explicit that this should never be
permitted; if a sponsor defaults, he
is supposed to lose all, the project
reverting to the city.

Something for Everyone _

In the New York Title I opera-
tions of Robert Moses, such pro-
visions had been consistently ignored.
If a sponsor didn’t perform, he mere-
ly cashed in his chips by selling to
someone else, as Caspert had done
earlier at Manhattantown (and as
he was to do again in Brooklyn and
other sponsors were to do on other
projects). This was plain trafficking
at the public’s expense. Under such
a system, a favored insider who got
a project from Slum Clearance didn’t
have to perform. What he got, in
effect, was carte blanche authority
to speculate for his own profit, to
make the best deal he could for him-
self in huge square-block chunks of
city real estate that had been made
available to him at knock-down
prices by the taxpayers’ millions.

The evils inherent in suc a a sys-
tem were illustrated gra phically by
what happened next in M nhattan-

fie e,

Mos

and’ Gleason wasn’t letting the

Mayor get away from the point. He
kept pounding at the fact that we
had been writing stories about the
Manhattantown mess for eleven
months; it had all been there in
black and white for city officials to
read, and they had done nothing ex-
cept to deride the revelations. How iM
did the Mayor explain that? ;

“We were misled,” Mayor Wagner
confessed, unhappily. aM

“You mean to say you were con- ni
ned for five years?” Gleason asked.

“Well, if you want to put it that
way—yes, I guess you could say we
were conned for five years,” the
Mayor acknowledged.

TITLE 1 a

town. The original Webb and Knapp a
$1.3 million offer was approved by ‘s
Moses’ Slum Clearance Committee ‘

and recommended to the Board of

Estimate for approval. Moses’ com-

mittee deliberated in secret, of

course, as it always does; its spokes-

men argued, at the time, that it .
would not be ethical to disclose the
Webb and Knapp arrangements until
the Board of Estimate had had a
chance to study them. The press
wouldn’t buy this and pried the de-
tails out of City Hall in advance of
the board’s action. Then it developed
that Moses and his committee had
approved a contract so larded with
lush fees that even the hardened
Board of Estimate blanched.

Webb and Knapp proposed to buy
eighty-two shares of stock held by
the Ferman family for $203,500 and
fifty-four shares of Milstein stock for
$168,250. The big realty firm also
agreed to pay off $161,500 of Man- —
hattantown notes held by Ferman ~
and Milstein. In addition, Webb and —
Knapp agreed to hire Ferman, the
man who had presided over the five-_
year Manhattantown dawdle, as a
half-time consultant for five yea
at $30,000 a year—a total contr
of $150,000, not bad for half-time.
pay! This Ferman fee was not, how-
emt the or whopper. The contract

5 iu

4 ra oo mae

also called for a $75,000 legal fee for
Daniel J. Riesner, president of the
National Republican Club. The
Riesner fee was in addition to Demo-
crat Sam Rosenman’s healthy annual
retainer, but obviously in slum clear-
ance one needs a lot of lawyers and
obviously such expert talent comes
high.

So high did it come in this case,
however, that it did not look quite
right in the cold black and white of
print. In the face of public outcry,
the Board of Estimate gagged and
refused to go along with Moses. Fer-
man’s fee was eliminated, and Ries-
ner’s reward was cut in half, down
to $37,500. With these changes, the
Webb and Knapp offer was ap-
proved, and the huge realty concern
took over the Manhattantown site.

Something to Explain

One other aspect of the final set-
tlement should be noted. In addition
to the sizable payments Ferman
and Milstein received for their con-
trolling stock, they were allowed to
keep healthy holdings in the new
Webb and Knapp Manhattantown
subsidiary. Ferman retained 9 per
cent of the stock in the new corpora-
tion, and the Milstein interests kept
23 per cent—a total 32 per cent
stockholding that meant, in effect,
simply this: the developers who
hadn’t developed would be entitled
in the future to nearly one-third of
the profits arising from the Webb
and Knapp operation.

Mayor Wagner was pressed to ex-
plain all of this in City Hall press
conferences. In one of these, he made
a declaration that was to come back
to haunt him. Ferman, he said, had
been banned from doing further busi-
ness with the city Bureau of Real
_ Estate or sponsoring any more Title
I projects. Furthermore, said the
Mayor, anyone who had been con-
nected with the old Manhattantown
mess “will be out as sponsors of Title
I projects and will be scrutinized in
other matters, and I’m sure the
Board of Estimate would agree they
shouldn’t have the responsibility.”
The Mayor shied from the term
“blacklisted,” but he made it clear
that “they,” the beneficiaries of the
Manhattantown fiasco, would not be
allowed to benefit in future.

It sounded good if you: didn’t

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think, but it seemed to reporters who" ‘practical y ‘enapante C th: t: oy criti-

did that the words, even as the
Mayor uttered Gea had a hollow
ring. Weren’t Ferman and Milstein
going to benefit in the future? Asked
how he squared this indubitable fact
with his new ukase, Mayor Wagner
showed a little irritation and an-
swered a bit peevishly: “Well, I think
Webb and Knapp was lucky to get
that much interest (a 68 per cent
stockholding) in it. They have con-
trol.”

This didn’t seem quite to answer
the question. Nor did the Mayor
have any better luck when he was
asked to explain what Republican
Riesner had done to collect a $37,-
500 legal fee when Democrat Rosen-
man was already getting paid better
than $30,000 a year for his services.
The Mayor confessed he didn’t
know. He confessed, too, that he had
had a report from Charles H. Ten-
ney, his Commissioner of Investiga-
tions, dealing with conditions in
Maule scowl on his desk for more
than a year—the year, incidentally,
in which, despite our disclosures,
the Mayor had kept insisting that
everything was fine—but he didn’t
even know what the report said.
He’d have to get the report out, he’d
have to read it, he’d have to find
out about Riesner. The explanations
trailed off, and the answers never
did become clear.

The City Awakens

If Manhattantown had been the
only Title I slum clearance mess in
the city, it would have been bad
enough, but it was not. It was only
the most glaring example of what
was happening in many projects as
Robert Moses, with typical vigor,
barked down all opposition and
swept ahead on his charted path to
remake the face of New York. For a
time after Webb & Knapp began
developing Manhattantown, criti-
cism quieted down; but as new proj-
ects were started, as tenants in new
areas were bounced from their homes
—and often located in worse slums
at higher rentals—turmoil over the
program broke out anew. There was
a time (and it lasted for almost three
years) when we were virtually the
only writers in New York focusing
a critical spotlight on the program.
During this long period, we could

cal article of ours in the afternoon
would bring a featured, official de-.
nial in The New York Times in the
morning. But in the spring of 1959
the widespread rumblings over Title
I injustices became too much. Both
The New. York Post and The New
York Times launched investigations;
they came up with new disclosures;
and the press of the city, awake at
last, began to ask persistent and em-
barrassing questions.

One result was that civic groups
finally took an interest. The Citizens
Union sent Moses a series of ques-
tions. It wanted to know how proj-
ects were approved; it pointed out
that the public hadn’t even been per-
mitted to know the names of stock-
holders in Title I corporations that
were being aided by millions of dol-
lars in public funds; it asked Moses
to open his records. Moses replied
that there was no secrecy about any-
thing he did; the Slum Clearance
Committee’s records were an open
book; any officials or any responsible
group could see them at will. Re-
porters seized the opening to go
through the Slum Clearance Com-
mittee’s files, and some of the things
that popped out made headlines for
weeks. The ramifications were tre-
mendous. In an effort to simplify an
infinitely complex issue and to bring
the intricacies of New York’s colos-
sal $1.5 billion slum clearance pro-
gram into focus, we will try to give,
in project-by-project detail, some of
the significant and up-to-date-high-
lights of these disclosures.

The Coliseum

This is, in many ways, the most
significant of all of Moses’ Title I
operations. It is a project that might
be said to have been conceived by
Moses, sponsored by Moses, ap-
proved by Moses—and it wound up
in the end with some of Moses’ prin-
cipal aides set up in a fine, spanking
new business home. _ .

The Coliseum is New York’s huge,
new exhibition hall at Columbus
Circle. Technically, such structures
were not originally envisioned among
the purposes of Title I, The act was
supposed to clear slums and provide
housing. But Moses has expanded
the program in New York to pro-
vide college campuses, art and cul-

The, Nations

P i

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tural centers and even, as in the case
of the Coliseum, an exhibition hall.
To qualify for Title I funds, a hous-
ing development was included in the
Coliseum project. The contract for
the housing portion of the site went
to a firm that had been tarred al-
ready in an FHA windfall scandal,
but neither Moses nor any watchdog
in city government seemed very
much disturbed by the idea that
builders who had taken the govern-
ment once in FHA windfalls should
return to feed at the public trough
again as the beneficiaries of Title I.
Other angles of the Coliseum proj-
ect drew more attention. One point
that attracted considerable notice
was that the project was sponsored
‘by the Triborough Bridge and Tun-
nel Authority — and that Robert
Moses, who was head of the Slum
Clearance Committee that rammed
the project through despite some
doubts in Washington, was also head

of the sponsoring Authority.

The Autoist Pays the Bill

The fact caused some eyebrow-
‘raising. It was recalled that, some
lyears previously, Moses had tangled
with the Port of New York Author-
‘ity in a rivalry over who was to con-
trol New York’s airports. Moses had
“suggested in his customary acid style
that if the Port Authority “has so
much capital, it begin by cutting its
bridge and tunnel rates. . . .” Moses
had lost that battle, and now he was
doing precisely what he had criti-
cized the Port Authority for doing; he
was investing some of Triborough’s
-hoarded millions in a. huge exhibition
“hall without giving any thought to
cutting Triborough’s bridge and tun-
nel tolls, paid by the traveling pub-
lic. When he was asked about this
inconsistency, Moses simply shrug-
ged his shoulders and said he had
changed his mind.
_ The teapot tempest over Tribor-
ough and the Coliseum was enough,
however, to make the state legisla-
‘ture consider for a time the enact-
‘ment of a bill that would make the
accounts of public authorities open
o state audit. Moses fought the in-
-vasion of his Authority exchequer
with an over-my-dead-body vehe-
-mence. In the end, as usual, he had
his way. The state gave up the idea

October 31, 1959

run by the public-authority moguls,
and the Coliseum was built. What
happened next was curious.

When the land was condemned,
one of New York’s largest banking
institutions had a branch on the site.
When the Coliseum was completed,
a different bank moved into the
grand new edifice. The bank that got
the prize plum was the Federation
Bank and Trust Company. The pres-
ident of Federation was and _ is
Thomas J. Stanahan. Shanahan was
and is the top fund-raiser for Tam-
many Hall, a close friend of Carmine
De Sapio, and the vice chairman of
Robert Moses’ Slum Clearance Com-
mittee. On the board of directors of
Federation is another top Moses aide
— George FE. Spargo, secretary and
general manager at $40,000 a year of
Moses’ Triborough Authority and
the personal assistant to Moses in
Moses’ capacity as chairman of the
Slum Clearance Committee.

The net result was a vivid illustra-
tion of the tangible benefits that ac-
crue from membership in the Moses
empire. The empire, with its con-
trol of Triborough, sponsored and
built the Coliseum; two key figures
in the empire were powers in Slum
Clearance and helped to make this
possible — and then they established
their own bank in the new quarters
they had created. It was a dual rela-
tionship that seemed fraught with
the danger, at least, of conflict-of-
interest possibilities. The danger be-
came more acute when Moses, in his
reply to the Citizens Union, revealed
that Shanahan had been entrusted
with the sole authority to investigate
the financial status and _ reliability
of proposed Title I sponsors. Moses
explained that this was really a great
saving to the public because Shana-
han used Federation’s banking facil-
ities for these investigations and he
charged not a penny for the work.

This altruism began to look a little
less altruistic when The New York
Post revealed that Shanahan’s bank
actually had loaned money to a Title
I sponsor whom Shanahan, in his
role of Slum Clearance vice chairman
and financial checker-upper, had
cleared and approved for a project.

The particular project involved
was one with a past almost as redo-

, ¥ 7

of prying into the private kingdoms ~ lent as the past of Manhattantown.

It was the housing portion of the
Pratt Institute site in north-central
Brooklyn. Samuel Caspert, despite
the Manhattantown fiasco, originally
had been awarded the project. He
hadn’t performed in Brooklyn any
better than he had in Manhattan,
and had sold out to another devel-
oper who, in turn, was supplanted
subsequently by a third, the late
Herbert Greenwald of Chicago.

Greenwald had deposited money
in Shanahan’s bank, had handled
much of his banking business through
Shanahan. In addition, in June of
1957, when he got his first commit-
ment from the FHA for a $3,338,600
loan, he borrowed the money from
Shanahan’s bank. Since the FHA was
guaranteeing the loan, this was prime,
risk-free business for Shanahan and
Federation. A second and larger loan
was pending when Greenwald was
killed in a plane crash.

Voices of Dissent

When these involvements were
disclosed, Moses put his mimeograph
machines on Randall’s Island to work
and came out with an angry, down-
the-line defense of his vice chairman.
Shanahan’s role had been perfectly
proper, he argued; there had been
no conflict of interest; the money
Shanahan’s bank had made had been
grossly exaggerated in the press; and
anyway, if a man in official capacity
couldn’t run a legitimate private
business, we’d soon have nobody but
bums in government.

At this point, something unusual
happened. The voice of Moses was

no longer the voice of unanimity.
Planning Commission Chairman
James Felt, who is also on the Slum
Clearance Committee and who is ex-
pected in many quarters to be New
York’s next Mayor, declared that
Moses certainly wasn’t talking for
him. Not for me either, said J. Clar-
ence Davies, director of the Depart-
ment of Real Estate. Nor me, said
Mayor Wagner at City Hall.

Shanahan had made a “mistake,”
the Mayor said, and would be told
that his bank must never make such
loans in the future. This was all right
as far as it went, but it still left a lot
of questions unanswered: How had
Greenwald, a man from Chicago,
known enough to go straight to Fed-
eration and do his banking with
Shanahan? Had similar things hap-
pened in other cases? How many?
How often? The Mayor kept telling
reporters, as the days passed, that he
was going to talk to Shanahan, he
was going to look into everything;
but whenever he was asked if he had
talked to Shanahan, if he had gotten
answers to any of the _ thronging
questions, he kept saying not yet,
but he would, he would.

The whole ruckus served to focus
public attention for virtually the first
time on Thomas J. Shanahan, a man
whose political ties extend almost
as far back as his banking ties. Shan-
ahan got into political fund-raising
in 1941, when he drummed up con-
tributions for William O’Dwyer
against ‘LaGuardia. He raised much
money for O’Dwyer’s 1941 and 1945
campaigns. He helped Impellitteri in
1950, but after that he became the
close friend and admirer of De Sapio,
whom he regards as “the smartest
politician in town.” And so, in both
1954 and 1958, he had charge of rais-
ing the money for the campaigns of
Mayor Wagner.

Between Two Empires

All of these connections — the pol-
itical links, the banking ties, the vital
role in Slum Clearance — make
Shanahan one of the most powerful
men in New York. His relationships
are solid at the top where they count,
and he seems to link in his person the
mighty Moses multi-million-dollar
public-authority empire and the pol-
itical empire of Carmine De Sapio
and Tammany Hall. When power is

294

‘om i Je ee noe
1p ea

so concentrated, so tied together,
there is always a danger that it will
be misused, and so increasing atten-
tion has been paid to Shanahan’s
pivotal role in Title I.

One discovery seems to indicate
that the Greenwald arrangement
with Shanahan and Federation was
not unique. Correspondence found
in the Slum Clearance Committee’s
files revealed that Sidney J. Ungar,
a lawyer and slum landlord who
wanted to get a Title I development,
had offered to deposit $700,000 in
Shanahan’s bank as evidence of good
faith and financial responsibility.
Ungar, himself well-connected with
the Tammany machine as the cam-
paign manager for Manhattan Bor-
ough President Hulan Jack, has dis-
claimed any intention of trying to
influence Shanahan or the commit-
tee. He simply offered to deposit the
money to cover essential costs if the
project went through, he said, and
actually no deposit was ever made.

Powerful Magnet

Other information seems to point
in the same direction. Just as busi-
nesses seeking good relations at City
Hall seem to gravitate to Sydney S.
Baron (even though they don’t have
to), so builders seeking Title I con-
tracts seem on occasion to gravitate
to Shanahan’s Federation Bank and
Trust Company. One Title I sponsor
told us flatly: “A part of my deal
was that I had to do my banking at
Shanahan’s bank.” Another builder,
one of the most reputable in New
York, said that he had been practical-
ly assured by the Slum Clearance
Committee that he would get a cer-
tain project. At a public function one
night, a man of high repute who has
some political connections approach-
ed him, and in the course of conver-
sation, asked if he did any banking
with Shanahan. The builder said he
didn’t, and his friend suggested it
might be a good idea. The builder
didn’t take the hint — and he didn’t
get the contract. Just a coincidence?

‘The builder doesn’t think so. ““There

is no doubt in my mind that we could
have had the deal had we deposited
in the Federation bank,” he says.
One of the great unanswered ques-
tions that has come out of the Title
IT mess in New York is simply this:
How did Thomas J. Shanahan come

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to approve as a Title I sponsor a man —

who had been linked to powerful un-
derworld interests, and_ especially
how did Shanahan come to give his
approval after he had been informed
specifically that there was, to quote
his own words, “a delicate situation”
involving the sponsor?

Mid-Harlem
The project was a proposed devel-
opment in mid-Harlem, designed to
include both housing and a new

sports arena. Two groups contended |}

for this plum, but the evidence seems
clear that the idea was first broached
by Charles Buchanan, former owner
of the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem
and husband of New York Assembly-
woman Bessie Buchanan. One of
Moses’ justifications for designating
a particular sponsor in advance of
the event — those “tentative” Moses
designations that invariably become
positive — uses the rationale of fair
play in this manner: a man who gets
a good idea should be rewarded for
his ingenuity by getting the project.
In the mid-Harlem case, however,
not even the husband of an Assembly-
woman could win the nod of Slum
Clearance for his own idea; instead,
the vital “tentative” designation
went to Louis I. Pokrass, a man who
had been linked in Kefauver Com-
mittee testimony to such underworld
powers as Frank Costello, Meyer
Lansky and Joe Adonis.

Pokrass has vigorously denied any
underworld taint in the piling up of
his multi-million-dollar fortune. But
Costello told the: Kefauver Commit-
tee that Pokrass was his partner in
a television-equipment company.
Costello said Meyer Lansky had an
interest in the same company, and
Lansky later testified that Joe

Adonis did, too. Even more explicit |

was the testimony of Virgil W. Peter-
son, director of the Chicago Crime
Commission. He tied Pokrass in with
Costello, Adonis, Bugsy Siegel, Lon-
gie Zwillman and others as members
of “one of the most powerful [boot-
legging] gangs operating in New
York and the East Coast” during the
Prohibition era of the early 30s.
When Pokrass decided to go after
a Title I project in 1956, he got an
eminent legal spokesman to represent
him. The attorney was John J. Ben-
nett, a former State Attorney Gen-

The Nat ON '

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Leen A ae *

i Fe

eral, former Democratic candidate
for governor and a former member
of the Slum Clearance Committee.
Meanwhile, Buchanan — the orig-
inator of the mid-Harlem project —
wasn’t even aware of what was going
on. According to his story the idea
for the project came to him
after Moses had built the Col-
iseum; if Title I could be used for
an exhibition hall, he reasoned, it
could also be used to put up a sports
palace. So, he says, he went person-
ally to Moses, explained his brain-
storm and received Moses’ blessing
upon it. Moses sent one of his aides
with Buchanan to pick out the mid-
Harlem area they would condemn;
Moses recommended the architect
whom Buchanan should consult; and
Buchanan and the businessmen as-
sociated with him were given to un-
derstand that the only thing delay-
ing their project was a temporary
shortage of federal funds. “Then one
morning we picked up the paper and
found that Jack Bennett’s group had
our project,’ Buchanan says, de-
scribing the hour of disillusionment.

“Delicate Situation”

Buchanan protested; Moses’ man
Lebwohl said, oh, they hadn’t known
Buchanan was still interested, but
maybe everything could be worked
out, maybe both groups could get
together in one nice, big, happy cor-
poration. A meeting was scheduled
with Shanahan to explore this pos-
sibility. At this meeting, the at-
torney for Buchanan’s group, Irving
Parker, took the Slum Clearance
vice chairman aside and told him
that, because of Pokrass’ background,
the Buchanan group wouldn’t have
anything to do with him. A personal
memorandum from Shanahan, found
in the Slum Clearance Committee’s
files, confirmed Buchanan’s recollec-
tion on this point. Dated Feb. 24,
1957, the memorandum described
‘Shanahan’s meeting with the two
groups at 3 P.M. that day. Its per-
tinent paragraph read: “In a con-

versation with the writer, Mr. Irving.

Parker stated that his group felt
that they could not join with the
Bennett group because of a delicate
situation involving Mr. Irving Pok-
rass, ...” (Pokrass’ middle name is
Irving, and he is often called Irving
by his intimates. )

October 31, 1959

Despite this revealing memoran-
dum, Shanahan and Moses both
voted just a month later to recon-
firm the tentative approval their
committee had already given Pokrass.

When, two years later, the Pok-
rass case was dragged out into the
light of day via newspaper headlines,
there came the usual flurry of ques-
tions and explanations that did not
explain. James Felt and other mem-
bers of the Slum Clearance Commit-
tee said they had never seen the
Shanahan memorandum. Lebwohl,
who is Moses’ counsel in Triborough
and Moses’ director of Slum Clear-
ance, said he was sure nobody had
known about Pokrass’ past when the
committee voted to cut Pokrass in
on several million dollars of the
taxpayers’ money. Lebwohl couldn’t
say what Shanahan had in mind
when he wrote about “a delicate
situation,” and Shanahan—although
Mayor Wagner had said all Slum
Clearance officials should answer
questions by the press — simply
was never available to the press to
answer questions. Anyway, the
Moses view was that the whole thing
was another tempest in a teapot.
The Pokrass designation had been
only “tentative,” the investigation
of Pokrass had never been completed,
and in addition the mid-Harlem
project had been scuttled for lack
of funds.

Mayor Wagner, under pressure
from newsmen, was unhappy. He
_acknowledged that he didn’t think
a man like Pokrass should ever be
given a Title I project involving the
taxpayers’ millions. He said he was
“dissatisfied with the fact that any
kind of a designation” was made
to Pokrass “without a complete
check into the sponsor’s background.”

Dun and Bradstreet “Secret”

This offiical hocus-pocus seemed
designed to create the public im-
pression that it was very difficult in-
deed to learn anything about Louis
Pokrass. Actually, even if Shanahan
hadn’t been forewarned about “a
delicate situation,” any kind of rudi-
mentary check on Louis Pokrass —
even a five-minute telephone call —
would have revealed exactly what
was buried in Pokrass’ background.
Dun & Bradstreet, the credit agency
a businessman usually calls first, had

a complete run-down on the man.
The report mentioned the Kefauver
testimony involving him, as well as
his own disclaimer. This was infor-
mation that certainly should have
been available at the turn of a tele-
phone dial to Shanahan’s Federation
Bank and Trust Company and to
Shanahan himself as vice chairman
of the Slum Clearance Committee.

Mayor Wagner, after dawdling
for weeks, finally announced in mid-
August that he had accepted Moses’
explanation of the affair. “We’re sure
everyone acted in good faith,” he
said. His explanation ignored the
fact that Shanahan had written
about “a delicate situation” and gave
no hint of what Shanahan had in
mind when using the phrase. “No
investigation of Pokrass was made
because no federal money was avail-
able for the project,’ the Mayor
said. “I’m satisfied that on Pokrass
there was no collusion and no wrong-
doing. . . .”

Washington Square Village

The variations on the things that
have gone wrong in the New York
administration of Title I slum clear-
ance under Robert Moses, the man
who supposedly is the epitome of
efficiency, are infinite and amazing.
Often, it would seem, even the most
elementary kind of horse sense would
have prevented some of the mistakes
and injustices perpetrated; but Rob-
ert Moses is not the man to listen
to horse sense, particularly when it
is not his own. One of the most
graphic examples of what can happen
to human beings when a dedicated
lover of concrete like Moses begins
to tear down everything in sight so
that he can rebuild on a grander
scale occurred in the Washington
Square development.

The business area south of the his-
toric square was the heart of the
hat industry in New York. It was
the home of about 1,000 small busi-
nesses. It wasn’t especially pretty and
many of the buildings were old;
but it was a business section, a
manufacturing area, not a residen=

tial zone. Only 132 families lived in —

the entire nine-block area on which
Moses cast covetous, slum-clearance
eyes. You can go almost anywhere
in steaming, stinking East and West

Harlem and find sweltering human-
ity crammed into miserable tene-
ments — four, six and sometimes
ten persons to a single room. Such
areas, it would seem, literally cried
for the administration of the Moses
bulldozers.

But Moses turned his back on Har-
lem and decided to tear apart the
business section south of Washing-
ton Square. Federal officials in Wash-
ington were patently startled. This
was the first time in the nation that
Title I had been applied to wiping
out small businesses. Federal offi-
cials conceded that this wasn’t the
purpose of the Title I act at all. On
the other hand, the act didn’t specif-
ically forbid it. The Washington
Square businessmen carried their
fight to Congress. Congressional
hearings were held, testimony taken,
and the investigating committee de-
cided (shades of the transit-bugging
investigation come to mind _ here)
that it was a shame and a pity, it
shouldn’t happen — but it was legal.
Moses had his way.

The project included New York
University as a beneficiary of the
taxpayers’ largess. The university
was to get a three-block strip along
Washington Square to improve its

‘facilities, but the larger section, a

six-block area south of the Square,
went to a private corporation known
as Washington Square Village.
What can only be described as an
outright perversion of the intent of

Title I was involved in the condem-

nation of land for the university
campus. On the southeast side of
Washington Square stood a seven-
teen-story, well-kept and comfortable

ma) ah =

apartment house. It had been erected _
in 1930; it had spacious, high-ceil--

inged rooms; and its large, airy
apartments, rent-controlled, rented
at prices that could hardly be match-
ed elsewhere in New York. Its ten-
ants — public-relations men, ac-
countants, editors, lawyers — con-
sidered themselves among the lucki-
est of the great city’s residents un-
til Moses came along with his blanket
condemnation, decreeing that they
would have to get out because their
home was to be torn down as a slum.

Tenants’ Reaction

The tenants of the Washington
Square apartment house have
money, intelligence and ability; and
they fought bitterly against an ac-
tion that, on its face, represented
a monumental injustice in over-
crowded, apartment-starved New
York. But even people like these get
nowhere when big power talks. As
always, Moses had his way; the fine
apartment building was condemned;
the tenants were ordered to get out.

Typical of the reactions of the
evicted were those of a man who
was so steaming he couldn’t mention
Moses’ name without cursing. “I’ve
got to get out of New York,” he told
us. “The hell of it is, I don’t want to
move. I was born and brought up
in New York. I love the city. I don’t
want to move out to the suburbs
and have to commute every day,
but I’ve got to. My apartment here
cost me $176 a month, but do you
know what we would have to pay
to get anything anywhere near like
it in the city today? The cheapest
you can do it for is about $400 a
month. I know. My wife and I have
looked everywhere. We have a
family, we have to have some room,
and we just can’t afford it here. So
I’m buying a home up in Rye.”

When New York, under the guise
of slum clearance and the better
life, drives from its borders dedicated
New Yorkers like this, it would seem
that the time has come to put an end
to the decades-long cult of abject
worship for the Great Doer, Even
the mantle of Robert Moses cannot
hide the fact that much that has been
happening in New York can be justi-
fied by just one standard — it is
good for the boys at the top, the
boys who can make money out of it.

‘The kind of money involved. s

demonstrated exquisitely in the
changing pattern of development in
Washington Square Village. When
the project was approved — at an
estimated cost of $14 million to the
federal taxpayers, $7 million to the
city’s — the developers were sup-
posed to erect nine apartment houses,
with rentals of $48 a room per month.
Moses himself put out a glossy bro-
chure; and he explained in person
to the Mayor and the Board of Esti-
mate just how fine this, one of his
most controversial projects, was real-
ly going to be.

Let Them Have Penthouses

Once he had received the approval
he wanted, what happened? Well,
the sponsors who were getting the
benefit of all those taxpayers’ mil-
lions blithely changed their plans.
Instead of nine apartment buildings,
they decided to erect three. And
the three were to be plushest of the
plush — some seventeen stories high,
modernistic, with colored tile faces
and little balconies projecting in
front of the fanciest apartments.
Crowning all were penthouses —
sixteen penthouses to a building, a
total of forty-eight, renting at prices
of $8,000 a year. One even rents now
for $9,000.

Is this slum clearance? Is this the
kind of housing taxpayers’ millions
should be spent for? The questions
have been often asked, never an-
swered. All that Moses’ man Leb-
wohl, the Slum Clearance director,
has to say about it is, well, it’s up.
to the sponsor. After a sponsor gets
a project, he can change his plans,
he can do anything he wants, Leb-
wohl says. He doesn’t have to live
up to the promise of those $48-a-
room rentals put out in the glossy
brochure for public consumption,
Lebwohl acknowledges, in_ essence,
that such brochures are just a pub-
licity gimmick; and he acknowledges,
moreover, that he couldn’t care less.
“Our business is to get slums
cleared,” he says. “We have no con-
trol over the redeveloper after he
acquires the land... . It was never
intended that the new housing would
accommodate site tenants,”

A Moses maneuver that kicked up
a climactic tempest was his demand

The Nat (0

a My Ya, /

<<.
7

~~
that the city slash a 120-foot wide,
mall-divided expressway through
tiny Washington Square Park, the
treasured oasis of Greenwich Villag-
ers. Historic Washington Square
Arch was in the way, but Moses
agreed to save the arch by routing
his expressway around it. When this
assurance still didn’t quiet the ire
of the Villagers, Moses told them
emphatically that they had no
choice because the private sponsors
of Washington Square Village “were
formally, officially and reliably prom-
ised, under the Slum Clearance
Act, a Fifth Avenue Address.”
This Fifth Avenue address could
be achieved by the 120-foot express-
way Moses wanted. The expressway
would link the south end of Fifth
Avenue north of the Square with
West Broadway on the south, and
West Broadway would then become
Fifth Avenue South, a distinguished
address suited to the penthouse
trade,

Battle of the Park

Greenwich Villagers, however, were
incensed at the idea that their park
should be sacrificed on the altar of
private real-estate speculation, and
they raised a public storm. Peti-
tions of protest were circulated and
signed. Municipal planning experts
like Lewis Mumford joined the fight.
Eminent public figures like Mrs.
Eleanor Roosevelt voiced their op-
position at a public hearing. The
combined pressures finally brought
Carmine De Sapio, a native Green-
wich Villager, into the battle against
Moses’ expressway — and Moses
lost.

Even with all the eminent figures
ranged on the side of the Green-
wich Villagers, the battle had been
a near thing. While it ended in one
of those rare victories the common
man achieves today in New York,
it had served to demonstrate the
enormity of the powers arrayed
against him. Inevitably, in the course
of the battle, a persistent, oft-asked,
never completely answered question
rose once more: who holds the vital
financial interests in the Washing-
ton Square Village corporation?

The two most prominent figures
are Morton S. Wolf, owner of the
apartment building to the north of
the park at One Fifth Avenue, and

October 31, 1959

Paul Tishman, a general contractor.
Both men have high Tammany con-
nections, and both, until quite re-
cently at least, were honorary deputy
commissioners, entitled to drive
about town with special shields on
their cars. Wolf especially has been
known as a close Greenwich Village
friend and associate of De Sapio,
and in the last mayoralty campaign,
De Sapio established his campaign
headquarters in Wolf’s One Fifth
Avenue.

Wolf and Tishman represented the
visible portion of the ownership of
Washington Square Village, but for
years the identity of their associates
was a deep secret. Tishman, at one
time in early 1958, flatly refused to
name them. “We don’t give out that
information,” he told us. The Slum
Clearance Committee said at the
same time that it had only old 1954
records and even they were incom-
plete. When such secrecy prevails, it
is only logical to assume there must
be a reason for it. Yet when the Slum
Clearance Committee, prodded by
the Citizens Union, opened its rec-
ords this summer, the list of Wash-
ington Square stockholders didn’t
seem to reveal much. Most of the
names on the list seemed innocuous
enough, although some blocks of
stock were listed in the name of
brokers like Lehman Brothers, pre-
sumably for clients. And just who
these clients are, no one knows.

The persistence with which polit-
ical ties shuttle through the Title I
mess has led some to suspect that
Carmine De Sapio himself must have
an interest in what goes on. But De
Sapio told us in as categorical a de-
nial as you can get: “I have never
directly or indirectly in any shape,
manner or form had anything what-
soever to do with any Title I project
at any time.” Even as De Sapio was
making this statement in early sum-
mer, one of the burning issues in
New York involved another Title I
deal that had been tracked into the
legal lair of one of the mightiest per-
sonalities in the Tammany over
which he presides.

Soundview
The case involved the proposed
Soundview project in the South
Bronx. Once again, as in Washing-
ton Square, the area was no slum;

and once again, as in Washington
Square, it is more suited than the
noisome slums of Harlem for real-
estate speculation. The Soundview
tract consisted of ninety-two acres,
with frontage on Clason Point, where
the Bronx and East rivers merge.
This premium, water-front site now
houses the neat, well-tended bunga-
lows of 254 families. The homes are
on leased land, and state rent-con-
trol restrictions have prevented the
owners from evicting the bungalow
tenants. They could be evicted, how-
ever, by Title I condemnation, and
if they were, the water-front land
would have enormous potential
value.

Moses’ Slum Clearance Commit-
tee had a project scheduled for the
site when Representative Paul A.
Fino, a Bronx Republican, lashed
out at the scheme in Washington,
declaring that Soundview had “not
only the odor, but also the smell of
a windfall.” The land, Fino declared,
was registered in the name of a dum-
my owner; it had been bought for
$500,000 and marked up to $1 mil-
lion for the purpose of Title I dis-
posal; and this, the Congressman
charged, constituted a $500,000
windfall from which important “pol-
itical insiders” in New York would
benefit.

Tracking down deeds, we found
that the bulk of the Soundview
land was registered in the name of
Miss Helen Nugent, an employee in
the law office of Monroe Goldwater.
Goldwater had been the law partner
of the late Ed Flynn, all-powerful
Democratic boss in the Bronx, and
he has remained one of the potent
figures in De Sapio-ruled Tammany.

‘ ' Rel J my eat x nt de
Wy cs A
‘ .

He had served as the campaign man-
ager for Mayor Wagner, and in Au-
j gust, 1958, had presided over the
controversial Democratic State Con-
vention in Buffalo at which De Sapio
rammed through his own state ticket

in an exhibition of bossism that
opened wide the portals of the
Albany State House to Nelson A.
Rockefeller.

Ge sett Se Sg ie

Not only was Monroe Goldwater
politically connected, he was also
Title I-connected. He had been at-
torney for Morton Wolf in the pent-
house development of Washington
Square. His son, Richard M. Gold-
water, an associate in his office,
represented the sponsor of one Title
I project and was counsel for two
other groups trying to get Title I
sites.

Against this background, Monroe
Goldwater explained his relationship
with Soundview. He declared em-
phatically that he had “no financial
interest in the property, never have
had and never expect to have.” He
had been paid some $3,500 for his
legal services, he said, and he might
get more in the future — perhaps
$7,500 or $10,000 or $12,000, some-
thing like that — when the Sound-
view property was finally sold. He
insisted there were “no secrets” about
the project and absolutely no polit-
ical influence involved. He identi-
fied the real owners of the property
as a group of lawyers, real-estate
investors and businessmen, and the
“dummy” registration of the land in
the name of his office helper had
been resorted to simply as a con-
venience. Such “dummy” registra-
tions, he pointed out, were a com-
mon device.

Mayor Wagner at City Hall called
Fino’s charges ridiculous. Monroe
Goldwater, his former campaign
manager, is a fine man, the Mayor
said, and it simply wasn’t true that
any “political insiders” were going
to make a windfall out of Sound-
view. In fact, the Mayor authorized
a deputy to tell the press, the Sound-
view project was as good as dead.
It had been up before the Board of
Estimate, and the board hadn’t liked
the looks of that $500,000 markup
in land value. The Mayor was posi-
tive that the board wouldn’t think
any better of it now.

298

Taking the Mayor at his

residents in’ the bungalow colony —

danced in the streets that night —
a celebration that, as the sequel was
to show, was decidedly premature.
For, though Mayor Wagner had be-
gun to announce, in his City Hall

press conferences, that “I am the’

Mayor,” there is now rather abun-
dant evidence that the statement
isn’t to be taken as literally as the
late Frank Hague’s “I am the law.”
The project may have been dead in
the mind of Robert (I am the May-
or) Wagner, but it definitely wasn’t
dead in the mind of Robert (the
Great Doer) Moses. A few weeks
after the Mayor had announced
Soundview’s demise, Moses gave
out a list of eight projects for which
he wanted the City Planning Com-
mission to put up $10 million for
advanced planning. The list includ-
ed Soundview. Moses was questioned
at once: Wasn’t Soundview, on the
Mayor’s own admission, supposed to
be dead? The reply: “You can bet
your life it’s alive.”

N.Y.U.-Bellevue

One of the mysteries of slum
clearance in New York is the com-
parative ease with which sponsors
with no large construction firms be-
hind them have been able to get
projects that are denied to reputable
builders. Samuel Caspert, for exam-
ple, had no trouble getting two large
projects from which he reaped the
rents and then decamped. In the New
York University-Bellevue project,
an inconspicuous mystery man
named David Moss came out of
nowhere to get what reputable build-
ers couldn’t get—a Slum Clearance
Committee blessing.

While the press never could lo-
cate David Moss to talk to, it was
learned that he had been a time-
keeper and, for some twenty years,
an ordinary hired hand for an old-
line firm known as Industrial En-
gineering Company. He listed him-
self as a vice president of the en-
gineering company when he set out
to get a Title I project. Indicative
of the fact that his own resources
were perhaps a little skimpy, he
rounded up a group of ninety-three

stockholders to form his sponsoring

firm, University Center, Inc. Among

roa Ret ae 7 ° . r ro,
word, these stockholders, incidentally, was |

a) ie
q

»
UJ
i

Walter J. Schneider, the personal ac-
countant for Sydney S. Baron.

Slum Clearance Committee records
show that Moss’s group was “tenta-
tively” selected as the sponsor for
the East Side project (the area lies
between 30th and 33rd Streets and
First and Second Avenues in Man-
hattan) sometime in March, 1953.
The manner in which the “tentative”
designation became final appears to
be of some significance.

The Slum Clearance Committee
called for public bids on Dec. 7. It
gave bidders just seven days to act.
This time limitation was tantamount
to a freeze-out. “Who could possibly
come up with a bid on a multi-mil-
lion-dollar project in seven days?”
one builder asked. Nevertheless, one
highly. reputable New York contrac-
tor attempted it. He was James H.
Scheuer, head of City and Suburban
Homes, Inc., and he offered $8.05 a
foot for the tract—a bid that figured
out to $411,000 more over-all than
the $7.05 a foot the Moss group was
offering. But the Slum Clearance
Committee turned down Scheuer
and accepted Moss because, it said,
Scheuer had been twenty-four hours
late getting his bid in.

Needed: a Builder

Even more startling than this bald
and rather cavalier rejection of the
higher bidder was the manner in
which the Moss bid had been filed.
The bid was submitted on a short
typewritten page of paper—and the
bid price hadn’t even been typed in.
Instead, a blank space had been left,
and the bid had been filled in sub-
sequently in ink. Just when this
inking-in was done, nobody seems to
know now. Even a Slum Clearance
Committee spokesman admitted that
this was “strange” and that the Moss
bid, quite probably, was the only one
that had ever been received in that
way.

Just as strange as the mechanics
of the bidding was what happened
next. Moss didn’t get right to work
to develop his project. Instead, as —
several contractors have told us, he
ran around town trying to peddle it
to a builder who could build. Ironi- .
cally, within some twenty-four hours
after Moss got the project, it was —
offered to James H. Scheuer, the man —

The Nana
| |

ras

n’t Bee able to 0 Bites:
with ic. Slum Clearance Committee.

In the end, it took Moss and his
_ associates nearly three years to ne-
gotiate a deal. In the meantime, the
process that had worked out so well
for Caspert at Manhattantown and
at the Pratt Institute project in
Brooklyn was repeated as rentals
from the condemned N.Y.U.-Belle-
vue site poured into the coffers of
University Center, Inc. The rents
flowed so well that Moss and his
cronies devoted themselves to the
pleasurable task of carving up some
$2 million in receipts. At least five
federal audits on file in New York
and Washington show just how and
to what extent they benefited:

|The attorney for the Moss group,
David Haimes, invested $1,250 in
University Center and drew out $35,-
021 in legal fees.

Schneider and his partner at the
time, Solomon Klausner, were en-
gaged by their own corporation to
do an “independent” audit of their
own firm’s books—and were paid
_ $43,000.

{The sponsors paid themselves
_ $38,000 in salaries.

_. The sponsors formed their own

wholly owned subsidiary, Unibell

_ Realty Corp., and paid it $109,000

_ in management fees to manage their
own site.

{The sponsors placed $94,000
worth of insurance with one of their
own and parceled out among them-
selves large chunks of money for

coal, fuel oil, plumbing and mainte-
penance work.

Federal auditors questioned the
| aaa of many of these charges, but
none of the Eoney ever was re-

_ covered.

Free Ride — With Profit
- And in the end Moss and his fel-

low investors, having enjoyed a free
_ ride that lasted for nearly three long
a. got out with their original
_ money back, plus interest. Webb &
ni Knapp took over the scandal-scarred
. B
a and renamed it Kips Bay.

How much the long, free ride was
worth to the original investors may

eral auditors refused to allow as
legitimate expenses the imi pree

sum of $593,180.46.

October 31, 1959

o
eh nw

io ori ‘
Li i ee

be gleaned from the fact that fed-—

Such 1 is the scandal-tainted history 2

re ee) aye

. mr 4 ; SR ane a
of Title I in New York. This ac-
count, detailed as it is in some re-
spects, touches only on some high
spots. Beyond its scope lie broad and
vital areas that have not been probed
and cannot be probed unless some
investigator like the late Samuel Sea-
bury comes into New York with the
will to do a job. Certainly, no such
investigator animated by any such
desire appears at the present time
on the local horizon.

What we have discussed here is
only the visible surface of the ice-
berg. What lies beneath is still con-
cealed from mnewspapermen_ who,
after all, have no powers of subpoena
and investigation, Yet one cannot
poke even casually into the Title I
morass in New York without uncov-
ering trails that some investigator,
somewhere, should be interested in.
Here are our suggestions for trails
worth following:

Promising Paths

B. Double-bookkeeping. Employees
of official agencies in intimate con-
tact with tenement conditions say
that, figured ultra-conservatively, a
slum area should return a net profit
of 20 per cent a year on its true
value. Slums are among the most
profitable real-estate investments in
the world; a 40 per cent return is
not unheard of; and in Title I, de-
velopers were permitted to abandon
virtually all normal maintenance and
upkeep while still collecting the same
old rents. Even so, leaning over back-
wards to be conservative, a 20 per
cent net profit annually would mean
that a slum area valued at $5 mil-
lion should yield its rent-collectors
$1 million in clear revenue. Since no
official agency has any check on
basic receipts, but merely accepts a
firm’s own accounts as presented for
audit, such an analysis would sug-
gest the possibility of double-book-

_keeping and a take for insiders far

more astronomical than has some-
times appeared on the record. City
housing experts agree that a 20 per
cent annual profit is a most con-

" servative estimate and that double-

bookkeeping would be “almost stand-
ard operating procedure.”

2. Hidden partnerships. ine build-
er who has seen Title I from the in-
side declares flatly in, nae

political figures in New | ork have

held secret interests in some projects.
So, too, he insists, have some of
Moses’ own subordinates. “In each
one of these projects, all the stock
is cut up,” he said. “Each one has
his piece. Remember, the clear take
on these projects will run to an abso-
lute minimum of $250,000 a year, so
there’s enough to go around. If the
stock could ever be traced, it would
open everyone’s eyes.”

3. Under-the-table pay-offs. Ten-
ants sometimes charge that bribes
were accepted to let them stay on
for a few months longer in buildings
from which they were supposed to
be evicted. Even more grave are the
rumbles that emanate from the con-
tracting world about the sums de-
manded, sometimes in the guise of
“legitimate” fees, to guarantee an
eager sponsor the project that he
wants.

Perhaps one would discount these
possibilities if so much had not al-
ready appeared above the surface, if
New York officialdom had not given
the definite impression that it is
either afraid or does not want to look
into what has been happening.

The Mayor’s “Formula”

Even in the aftermath of this sum-
mer’s succession of disclosures, the
official approach to a Title I cleanilp
has been the approach of the lame
and the halt. Mayor Wagner kept
insisting “IT am the Mayor” and kept
saying he would straighten every-
thing out. But days and weeks went
by—so many days and so many
weeks that the refrain became mo-
notonous and no longer news—and
the Mayor still hadn’t gone to the
mat with Moses or with Shanahan.
Finally, what was labeled as a show-
down session was scheduled before
the Board of Estimate in City Hall.
Moses and Shanahan went in glow-
ering and glum, refusing to talk to
reporters; they came out happy as
two kids with lollipops, smiling and
joking and posing for their pictures.

Mr. (I am the Mayor) Wagner f
had laid down some rules, he told the
press. He was going to see to it that sy
the Slum Clearance Committee was 4
less of a Triborough Authority op- —
eration; henceforth it would have a —
paid staff, working full time for it
alone, he said. This seemed to indi-

cate that Slum Clearance Director

Lebwohl, Triborough’s counsel, and
Moses’ special assistant, Spargo, ‘Tri-
borough’s director, would have to go.
Moses snorted and said they'd stay.
They stayed.

The Wagner formula for straight-
ening things out boiled down to the
appointment of a personal watchdog
to sit in on Slum Clearance Commit-
tee sessions and the naming of three
new members to the committee. The
re-formed group gathered for its first
meeting—and_ deliberated _ behind
closed doors. Even the Mayor’s per-
sonal watchdog was kept cooling his
heels outside the conference cham-
ber. Lebwohl himself chased report-
ers away from the room adjacent to
the room in which the meeting was
being held; he said bluntly that the
committee had no intention of put-
ting up with reporters at its delib-

PART 8

IN NEW YORK CITY, one scandal
leads to another. We were knee-deep
in the jungle of Title I when some
of the disclosures we were making
inspired one of the lowly hired hands
in the city’s $2 billion bureaucracy
to get in touch with us. This was
in the summer of 1957, and our in-
formant, calling from a pay telephone
booth, said that a lot of things were
happening in the city’s Bureau of
Real Estate that he thought we
should know about. He didn’t want
to come near our newspaper office;
he didn’t want even to use his right
name in talking to us; he didn’t
want anybody to see him meeting
us. We got around these limitations
on communication by arranging a
rendezvous well outside the likely
eye-range of any member of City
Hall’s officialdom.

Several times during the next few
months, our new informant tele-
phoned us, met us, fed us tidbits of
information. None of his contribu-
tions was very startling, but in early
March, 1958, the pattern abruptly
changed. Our new contact delivered
a tip that popped the lid off a scan-
dal involving so much money that,

300

« : 7 : 7 | on
eration, The result: the re-formed
committee, at its first meeting, desig-
nated as the sponsor for a Title I
project a builder who previously had
had to refund more than $700,000 °
to the federal government in an FHA
windfall scandal—a builder, inciden-
tally, who is represented by Sydney
S. Baron.

Who Will Investigate?

To many New York civic groups,
this did not seem like progress. Many
responsible organizations charged
that Mayor Wagner’s handling of the
situation constituted a virtual white-
wash. Demands were heard that
Moses should be fired. The Citizens
Union called for a full-scale Congres-
sional investigation. Despite the im-
pressive critical chorus, the prospects
for any top-to-bottom houseclean-

"ad ‘ ‘een aw. A
thd iv ree a
=v oT ae ee ha

ae?

Gn wee, taf Lae ee
ing appear slim. For who is going to

investigate? Will Congress, con-
trolled by Democrats, invade Tam-
many-dominated New York? Will
the New York State Republicans?
After all, Governor Rockefeller on
two occasions recently praised Moses
in the highest terms and hailed him
as an exemplary public servant. And,
after all, as our former Republican
watchdog friend commented three
years ago, “some of our own boys
are in it,”

Yet the reek of scandal continues
to seep out of Title I slum-clearance
operations in New York. It has al-
ready polluted the air for years. Some
veteran reporters conclude that the
full truth, could it ever be known,
might make this the greatest scandal
in New York’s scandal-studded his-

tory.

WHAT’S $2 MILLION, ANYWAY?

even yet, many of its ramifications
remain a mystery.

What our secret source told us
was that a major money-scandal was
breaking in the badly tainted Bureau
of Real Estate, and so far no word
of it had leaked out to the public.
Seymour Wilson, the chief account-
ant of the bureau, had been looting
the till, siphoning off money from
special petty cash accounts that were
under his sole jurisdiction. The loss,
our friend estimated, would amount
to about $100,000. It was already
being probed by Investigations Com-
missioner Charles H. Tenney, and
District Attorney Hogan had been
notified. On March 4, Wilson had
resigned, giving “ill health” as a
reason, and since that time, he had
disappeared. No one, presumably,
knew where he was.

Forearmed, we sought an audience
with the director of the Bureau of
Real Estate, Perey Gale, Jr., one of
the most debonair and interesting
figures in the city’s political life. His
trademark was a boutonniere; he was
known as a genial man who made a
good golfing companion; and his rise
to prominence had been aided by a

twist on the time-tested formula of
marrying the boss’s daughter: he had
married the boss’s secretary.

The boss in this case was Carmine
De Sapio, and the secretary was
Julia McArdle. She had been the
office helper of Ed Flynn when he
was Democratic national committee-
man, and after De Sapio took over,
she became an indispensable fixture
in the operating mechanics of Tam-
many Hall. Political insiders credit
Mrs. Gale with expert knowledge of
the ins and outs of politics. Efficient,
with long know-how in the political
wilds, she is believed to possess far
more influence around Democratic
headquarters in the Hotel Biltmore
than is customary even for a much-
trusted secretary.

Key City Job

When her husband was appointed
head of the Bureau of Real Estate
on May 27, 1954, her boss, Carmine
De Sapio, made it clear that Gale
had been his personal choice for the
post. Most of Gale’s adult working
life had been spent with the fed-
eral government’s Reconstruction Fi-
nance Corp. He went to work for the

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the New York City loan office in
1947, and resigned in 1951 to spend
the next three years as vice presi-
dent of a realty firm. From this spot,
he catapulted with De Sapio’s bless-
ing into the boss-man’s chair in the
vitally situated city agency that con-
trols millions of dollars worth of tax-
sale and water-front lands, and ad-
ministers millions of dollars worth
of city properties.

Even before our informant had
tipped us to money shortages in the
bureau, there had been indications
that all might not be too well. One
of the strongest hints had come in
late December, when State Attorney
General Louis J. Lefkowitz pounced
upon the books of the Nassau Man-
agement Company and forced it to
stop selling stock to the public. Nas-
sau. Management collapsed into
bankruptcy—a potential $5 million
disaster for innocent investors who
had put large chunks of their life-
savings into the much-ballyhooed
and impressively sponsored syndica-
tion.

Oe
me ma n ”

How to Make Miracles

The story of Nassau is typical of
_ present-day New York. Three City
Housing Authority employees, work-
ers in the municipal vineyard at
salaries of $8,000 to $10,000 annual-
ly, had set up the company with
shoestring capital. Almost imme-
diately, Nassau Management became
a favorite of the Bureau of Real
Estate. For a time, all relocations of
tenants being evicted from project
sites in the city were divided between
Nassau and just one other firm;
Nassau had a complete monopoly on
all relocation work in Manhattan. It
collected some $2.25 million from the
Bureau of Real Estate for its services.
By stock sales to the public and
various financing devices, it launch-
ed into a multi-million-dollar motel-
building scheme in Washington and
bought the Concourse Plaza Hotel
in the Bronx. Yet, according to At-
torney General Lefkowitz, Nassau
_ “was insolvent from the day it was
_ formed”; it was, in fact, a fraudulent,
fly-by-night outfit when it signed its
first contract with the city in 1953.

Once again one asks the question
to which no investigator in New —

pork seems eager to supply the an-

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svertiiow are such ees aed ;

Well, our own study of Nassau’s
legerdemain showed that it snuggled
up to a lot of prominent officials
and used a number of influential
names in its promotion. On one
glossy brochure it flaunted five en-
dorsements of its virtues, including
those of William S. Lebwohl, Moses’
director of Slum Clearance, and Sam-
uel Brooks, Lebwohl’s assistant.
Lebwohl himself held $10,000 worth
of Nassau stock, and his brother had
an additional $5,000 stock interest.

Nassau certainly lived with the
right people. It picked up the tab
for $50-a-plate Tammany dinners at
which it corraled at its table such
men as Lebwohl and Benjamin
Cymrot (later suspended as execu-
tive officer of the Bureau of Real
Estate). Nassau’s promoters were so
highly regarded in political circles,
in fact, that, on the day after At-
torney General Lefkowitz closed
down the operation, the firm’s presi-
dent, Milton Saslow, was invited by
the Democratic State Committee to
serve as vice chairman of the an-
nual party dinner in the Waldorf-
Astoria Hotel.

Some of these tie-ins between
Nassau and the Bureau of Real Es-
tate had become obvious when we
set out to interview Percy Gale. Sal-
vatore Campanella, Gale’s secretary
and a man who bragged that he was
close to Carmine De Sapio, tried to
bar the door, demanding to know
what we wanted of his boss. We
finally bulldozed our way past him
and into the presence of the man
with the boutonniere.

Confronted with specific details
about the Seymour Wilson shortages,
Gale admitted that investigators had
“taken certain records” from. his of-

fice, but he insisted that he knew

“absolutely nothing about what their
efforts involve.” Badgered still fur-
ther, he acknowledged that Seymour
Wilson had resigned, citing ill health
as a reason, and then he added
(significantly, it seemed to us), “We
can’t find him.”

We took this as adequate confir-
mation of our story, and a few hours
later we broke it. Mayor Wagner
admitted that it was true. He said
city accountants had fi
age of $49,000 in two
ministered by Wilson; 1

eee at

into ie heed had hee Gee by
Wilson and deposited in a joint ac-
count of his wife and himself. This
had been going on for two years. In
some of these transactions, the
Mayor said, forgery was involved,
and because it was, the city expected
to get its money back by suing the
banks.

Opening the Lid Wider

While the peculations of the chief 9
accountant made a sensational head- as
line, the story would have been little zs
more than a one-day wonder if it
hadn’t served to lift the lid on a vast ike
pot of corruption—on chicaneries pe
that had gone on for years and that one
had cost the taxpayers of New York,
quite literally, millions of dollars. et)

Within twenty-four hours after the
Wilson scandal broke, Mayor Wag- a
ner acknowledged that much more ae
than the light-fingered activity of ‘
one accountant was involved. He

said there were indications of relo-
cation frauds in which payments had i
been made to move tenants not even
living in the areas being vacated; q
there were land-fill pay-offs in which ;
bureau personnel had been bribed to
permit unauthorized dumping on ey
city land; and excessive rentals ap-
parently had been paid to favored
real-estate concerns for buildings
leased by the city.

Hardly were these admissions on
the record when the split personality
of the Wagner administration became
evident. Its energies were turned to
the task of minimizing a scandal of
obvious magnitude. The pitch was
simple. Some things hadn’t been
handled quite right, it was true; but
then perfection is humanly unattain-
able and all errors would be correct-
ed promptly. The Mayor announced
that Gale would be given a $12,000-
a-year deputy to help “straighten
things out”; but, in almost the same
breath, he denied that the appoint- |
ment of a deputy was any reflection
on Gale’s abilities or that it marked |
any diminution of his powers. “We
felt it would be good to get a man —
in there,” the Mayor said. But he
insisted: “I think Percy Gale is a
good public servant.”

We have learned since thatoes
the very day the Mayor was handin ing
Gale this accolade, the decision had
been taken at a City Hall strategy ig

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conference that Gale must go. A
source on the inside of these arrange-
ments declares that Carmine De
Sapio. was consulted, agreed with
the decision, but asked: “Give me a
couple of days to make some arrange-
ments.”

De Sapio, of course, got his couple
of days, and in this waiting period,
both the magnitude of the scandal
and the split personality of the
Wagner administration became even
more evident. Reporters at City Hall
were tipped off that Investigations
Commissioner Tenney’s agents had
found the bureau so graft-riddled
that the losses to the taxpayers
would run into hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars. William Peer, Mayor
Wagner’s secretary, was asked about
this, checked the tip personally with
Tenney, paled’ at what he was told,
then turned to reporters and said:
“Gee, you got good information.”
Yet hardly were the headlines with
this “good information” on the street
before the Mayor’s office was deny-
ing it. It absolutely was not true,
the office said, that there was any
scandal running into hundreds of
thousands of dollars in the Bureau
of Real Estate.

Gale Blows: Out

Things now moved swiftly; indeed,
this became one of the fastest-paced
news weeks in the city’s recent his-
tory. Seymour Wilson, missing on
Monday, was located late Wednes-
day at a sanitarium in the Bronx.
Arrested, charged with grand lar-
ceny, he was brought to the district
attorney’s office, protesting that he
thought he had stolen only some
$7,000. Prosecuting officials said at
the outset that it was going to be
difficult to find out just how much
could really be pinned on Wilson

because he had destroyed essential
checks and records.

The Wilson arrest made Thurs-
day’s headlines, and on Friday,
Percy Gale, Jr., who had been “a
good public servant” to Mayor Wag-
ner only three days before, suddenly
resigned his $17,500-a-year post. We
first learned that something was
brewing in early morning when we
got a breathless telephone call telling
us that Gale had shown up at his
office at an unprecedented hour, that
he was cleaning out his desk and
that he was sending his chauffeur
away laden with voluminous corre-
spondence. By the time we got to
Gale’s office, the chauffeur was gone,
and Gale was sitting calmly behind
his desk, jaunty and boutonniered
as usual. He appeared surprised at
our surprise to find him on the job
so early. He was just hard at work
as usual, he assured us. Documents?
Absolutely not. He positively had
not sent any papers out of the office.
He didn’t know where we had heard
that, but it was perfectly ridiculous.

Barely two hours later, his resigna-
tion was announced at City Hall, and
at the same time it was disclosed
that James Felt (shades of the Wag-
ner build-up come to mind here)
was being brought in as a temporary
trouble-shooter to straighten out the
tangled affairs of the bureau.

Gale’s bland denial that he had
sent any documents out of his office
the day he quit became more curious
when Jack Glass, his chauffeur, was
questioned subsequently by aides of
Attorney General Lefkowitz. For
Glass admitted that he had taken
a large folder of papers from Gale’s
office to the uptown law office of
Monroe Goldwater. Gale, questioned
about this, said Goldwater was his
personal attorney. The papers he

“se ere ee. CUR

had sent out of his office were just —

personal papers. ;

The Wagner administration now
began an out-in-the-open battle to
whitewash itself. On Monday, May
5, 1958, Mayor Wagner, putting him-
self explicitly and irretrievably on
the record, declared in a_ public
speech that “only one instance of
culpable guilt” (Seymour Wilson)
had been uncovered and that “the
amount, although highly advertised
as running into six figures, was ac-
tually rather small.” The Mayor
made this statement despite the fact
that we had disclosed, weeks pre-
viously, that for nearly two years
he had had on his desk critical re-
ports from his Comptroller’s office
and the Investigations Commission-
er exposing the seriousness of the
situation in the bureau. We had tried
to get these reports made public. The
Mayor had ducked. He had said the
Board of Estimate would have to
decide; and finally, his office had
said that the board—on a day when
it hadn’t met at all—had decided
the secret should be kept from the
public.

Padding the Bills

The ridiculousness of the situation
finally became too much for Comp-
troller Lawrence FE. Gerosa. Defying
the Mayor and the Board of Esti-
mate, Gerosa announced that he was
going to make his long-smothered re-
port public. The report proved be-
yond doubt that the Mayor had
been fantastically inaccurate, to say
the least, when he had described the
Bureau of Real Estate mess as a
“rather small” scandal.

Gerosa emphasized that the ac-
counts of the Bureau of Real Estate
were a law unto themselves, not sub-
ject to regular check by his office.
But in 1956, on his own authority,
he had run a spot check on just one
of the lesser accounts of the bureau,
involving maintenance work done by
private firms; and he had found that
bills were being so consistently and
outrageously padded that on this ac-
count alone, the bureau—and_ the
city taxpayers who had to foot the
bill—had been gypped to the tune
of $200,000 a year. Gerosa’s auditors
had knocked down the padded bills
and recovered this amount for the
one year covered by their audit; but

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the significant point was that this
kind of looting had been going on for
years and that, despite Gerosa’s
audit, nothing had been done to
stop it.

The brazenness of the bill-padding
and looting had been fantastic. Take,
for example, the case of “old 4167.”
This was the way auditors referred
to vouchers submitted by one main-
tenance and repair firm employed by
some of the management companies
handling city property. Every time
this firm shut off gas and electricity
on an apartment from which a ten-
ant was being evicted, it submitted
the same bill—$41.67. Other firms
usually charged $12 or $15 for such
cut-offs, but this one particular out-
fit had its one inflexible figure, and
if there were ten cut-offs to be made
in one apartment building on the
same day, the city was stuck with a
tab for $416.70.

Another contractor with high con-
nections in Tammany received five
orders to demolish foundation walls.
He let out the work to a subcontrac-

_tor, who billed him $875 for actually

doing the job. Then the Tammany-
‘connected businessman, who had
‘done nothing except shuffle papers,
billed the city $2,133.35 for $875
worth of work—and was paid.

Still another contractor repaired
a chimney. Gerosa’s auditors found
that he had charged $408.73 for a
$58.93 job.

These are just random examples
of the overcharging—overcharging
that sometimes ran nearly ten times
the proper price—that had gone on
constantly in accounts running into
millions of dollars. This was munici-
“pal thievery on a colossal scale.

“They are the worst abuses un-

covered in city government in fifty
_years,” one of Gerosa’s aides said at
Bihe time. Gerosa’s auditors estimated
_ that the taxpayers’ pocketbooks had
_ been looted to the tune of at least $2
_ million.

Public Incredulity

_ The public received the estimate
aie the incredulity with which it
sometimes reacts to a_ sensational
_ headline. The average man has dif-
- ficulty. envisioning what a pile $2
million actually is, and he finds it
hard to grasp the intricacies of high-
_ level corporate swindling. The skep-

eee 102

’

Li's ree

ticism was strengthened when that
nice fellow, the Mayor, promptly
scoffed at the whole idea. On May
9, 1958—just twenty-four hours after
we had headlined Gerosa’s estimate
of a $2 million swindle—Mayor Wag-
ner ridiculed the charge: “At this
time, I don’t believe it is a major
scandal,” he said.

He made this assertion despite the
fact that he had in his possession a
one-month-old report from his own
Investigations Commissioner which
charged, in effect, that the looting
was an “inside” job, organized and
directed from within the bureau—
and not merely trickery by a few
dishonest contractors.

Investigations Commissioner Ten-
ney’s report has not been officially
released to this day, but we man-
aged to get a copy. Tenney had stud-
ied the accounts for the $1,094,019
the Bureau of Real Estate had paid
out in 1957 to management com-
panies for repairs and maintenance
work on city property. He found that
bills had been consistently padded
from 33 to 50 per cent. This much
supported the earlier Gerosa find-
ings, but Tenney went farther. The
great bulk of the work being done
for the city, Tenney reported, had
been parceled out by the bureau to
a select group of six favored con-
tractors. Management companies re-
ported that they had had no choice
in selecting contractors; they knew
that the city was being gypped regu-
larly as much as 50 per cent on every
bit of work done, but they had re-
ceived their orders from the bureau
—they had been told which con-
tractors to hire!

Salvatore Campanella, Gale’s sec-
retary, who had resigned after his
boss departed, testified before Ten-
ney that he regularly telephoned the
management companies and gave
them the names of the contractors
they were to use. “It was not my
own initiative to call anybody to
tell them who to use and who not to
use,” he said. He insisted that he
had acted always on the direct
orders of the former directors of the
bureau, William M. Ellard and
Percy Gale, Jr. Ellard promptly de-
nied and ridiculed the charge, but
Gale was silent—and nowhere to be

found. ‘

Tenney’s report cited the testi-

— ™ Sa ee ee Py

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mony of Andrew J. Kennedy, a
Bronx real-estate man who had died
under mysterious circumstances in
a midtown hotel during the scandal.
Before his death, Kennedy had testi-
fied that he felt helpless to use any
contractors except those on the bu-
reau’s favored list. He approved their
padded bills, he said, because he felt
helpless to do anything else; be-
cause, quite simply, this was the
system and this the way it worked.

Gag By Terror

His testimony was supported by
his own employees and by the testi-
mony of other management agents
and their employees. They disclosed
that sometimes the favored contrac-
tors did work that had never been
ordered, barging into a building on
their own initiative, tinkering with
this and that, and submitting a
grossly inflated bill for their unre-
quested services. Whether the work
was needed or not, they always got
paid.

Our disclosure of the details of this
hushed-up Tenney report marked
the virtual death of the Bureau of
Real Estate scandal. A city adminis-
tration whose Mayor was denying
in public statements the one ines-
capable conclusion to be drawn from
the reports on his desk—that he had
on his hands a major scandal run-
ning into millions of dollars—now
went all-out in an effort to clamp
down the lid and prevent further
damaging disclosures. Efforts had
been made previously to prevent the
leakage of information, but now the
heat was really on. City officials
with whom we had been able to talk
previously flew into rages at the
sight of us—and later let us know,
privately, that they had had to put
on an act either because spies had
been planted at their elbows or be-
cause they felt their offices were
bugged, their telephones tapped. The
reporting half of this team some-
times found strange men trailing
after him when he made his rounds
of the municipal offices; and the lit-
tle guys in the scandal-packed bu-
reau—the men who had fed us with
tips—asked us never to try to get
in touch with them again, even at
their homes at midnight. They all
felt that their phones were tapped,
that they were being watched.

+5 Pa cee eee

One assumes that such widespread
fear had some justification for its
existence. It seems unlikely that so
many different persons would have
simultaneously felt terrorized by
non-existent pressures. One thing is
certain: the one Tenney report we
managed to get and publish (there
were several others that have not yet
seen the light of day) was the last
item of significance regarding the
Bureau of Real Estate scandal to
reach the public. After that one
damning report got out, the munici-
pal Iron Curtain went up, and we
confess we could not dent it.

The whole issue now vanished
into the office of District Attorney
Frank S. Hogan and into the im-
penetrable fog of grand jury secrecy.
Tenney’s reports were forwarded to
Hogan; so were those of Attorney
General Lefkowitz. The grand jury
listened to testimony spaced out
over many months. Today, eighteen
months later, the grand jury is still
in session, and not much really has
come out of it in the interval.

Seymour Wilson, of course, was
indicted. The chief accountant whose
peculations had touched off the
scandal was accused of stealing
slightly more than $30,000, though
the city’s loss indubitably was $49,-
000. Almost immediately after the
indictment, Wilson calmly walked
into General Sessions Court before
Judge Charles Marks and pleaded
guilty. Here was certainly a key
figure in the probe. Here was a man
who undoubtedly, in his position as
chief accountant, knew specific de-
tails about the money swindles that
went on inside the bureau. Such a
man, if he could be induced to turn
state’s evidence, would be invaluable
to the prosecution. But the tenor of
the proceedings indicated right from
the start that Wilson wasn’t being
subjected to any great pressure to
tell his story. Never has an admitted
municipal thief been treated with
much greater courtesy.

Series of Postponements

On July 22, 1958, when Wilson ap-
peared before Judge Marks, two un-
identified men in the courtroom
stepped up before the bench and
held a long whispered conference with
the judge. Judge Marks then de-
ferred sentence for three months be-

304

“ 1 NS ae
cause, he said, there wa
bility of restitution. Curious to find
out who the strangers were, the re-
porting half of this team approached
them outside of court and was sur-
prised when they flatly refused to
identify themselves. Later it devel-
oped the pair were a couple of the
city’s assistant corporation counsels
whose efforts, in effect, had won a
three-month stay of sentence for
the man the city was supposed to
be prosecuting.

On Oct. 16, the new sentencing
date, Judge Marks postponed sen-
tence for another two weeks. On Oct.
30, outside the courtroom where
Wilson was to come up again for
sentence, the reporting half of this
team collided with Louis Yavner,
Wilson’s influential Democratic coun-
sel, and Assistant District Attorney
Jerome Kidder, who had charge of
the case. Gene Gleason accused Kid-
der specifically of dragging his feet
and said it was obvious Wilson was
receiving lenient treatment. “T’ll bet
you now that he never serves a day
in jail and that no other official of
the Bureau of Real Estate itself is
ever indicted in this case!” Gleason
shouted. Kidder shouted back, red-
faced and angry.

When court convened, Yavner and
Kidder approached the bench and
held another whispered consultation
with Judge Marks. The judge then
opened proceedings by denouncing
the account we had printed July 22
about his “whispered consultation”
with the two assistant corporation
counsels. Obviously quite angry, the
judge insisted that full and fair jus-
tice would be meted out in his court-
room, and that he wouldn’t stand
for any insinuations from anyone to
the contrary.

Having delivered this lecture, he
got to the sentencing, and suddenly
the whole business fell apart. The
judge discovered that he hadn’t re-
ceived the Probation Department’s
report on the defendant who had
pleaded guilty five months earlier.
Kidder, the prosecutor, was quite
taken aback; he thought the Cor-
poration Counsel’s office had sent
the report to the judge. The Cor-
poration Counsel’s office thought
Kidder had, Obviously, it was im-
possible to sentence Seymour Wilson
this day. And so the case was post-

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poned Acai other long postpone-_
ment, this time until Dec. 3, 1958.

When that date came around, Wil-
son still didn’t get sentenced. Judge
Marks explained that the city was
selling Wilson’s Long Island home,
in which there was a few thousand
dollars equity, and he wanted to see
how much restitution was made be-
fore he decided on Wilson’s penalty.
When Wilson came before the court
for the final time on Jan. 13, 1959,
almost eight months to the day
after he had pleaded guilty, the city
reported it had recovered $13,600 of
its $49,000 loss, and with this infor-
mation Judge Marks acted.

The Final Sentence

He gave Wilson a ten-year sus-
pended sentence, explaining that
Wilson was working and would pay
back $15 a week on the money he
had stolen.

Jerome Kidder, the prosecutor,
protested the light sentence. “Every
day people are sentenced to jail in
these courts for stealing much less
than he did,” he told the court. But
Judge Marks, who in November had
given similar suspended sentences to
thirteen men accused by the district
attorney’s office of being the top-
policy operators in the city, stood by
his decision.

Seymour Wilson walked out of
court a free man, not having spent
a day in jail. Even so, his punish-
ment is the most severe inflicted yet
for what Gerosa’s office had called
the worst municipal abuses in fifty
years. After all, even though his pay-
ments won’t cover the interest on
the money he stole, Wilson does have
to pay that $15 a week. Nobody else
has been nicked for even that much.
For example, on the other fronts of
the realty scandals:

§/Milton Saslow and Abe Korman,
officers of the bankrupt Nassau Man-
agement Company, were indicted on
June 5, 1958, for misappropriating
$242,785 from a trust fund earmark-
ed for the construction of a Wash-
ington motel. More than sixteen
months after the indictment, they
still hadn’t been brought to trial.

Two of the management com-
panies involved in the bill-padding
have been indicted for fraud and
bribery. They applied to Judge
Marks last November to examine

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the grand jury minutes to sce if

a ieere es =

their indictment was justified; as of
this writing, there has still been no
decision.

A kickback indictment was level-
ed against two high-ranking em-
ployees of another management com-
pany, but they, too, have yet to be
tried.

So far, nobody has gone to jail; so
far, no official of the admittedly
scandal-riddled Bureau of Real Es-
tate has even been indicted. This 1s
the tally sheet in a fraud that took
$2 million out of the taxpayers’
pockets—perhaps more!

Even today nobody knows how
big the swindle really was. Eighteen
months after the scandal broke, city
officials admit they still don’t know
the full score, and they give the im-
pression they aren’t trying very hard
to find out. When we first checked
the Comptroller’s office to see what
loss their final audit showed, we were
told that the records were all packed
away, they couldn’t say offhand.
When we insisted on knowing
whether the loss actually had been
$2 million, we finally got an answer.

“It would go to the vicinity of $2
million,” a spokesman said. “But I
can’t give you a solid figure. We
still don’t have the books of the big-
gest contractors. Hogan has them,
we’ve been told. And I think we
might have to make a motion in
court if we expect to get them.”

Hogan for Senator

New York, as you can see, takes
an attitude of lofty nonchalance
about a $2 million municipal scan-
dal. It doesn’t even trouble to find
out finally and definitely just how
bad it all really was. Nor does it
show any disposition to punish any-
body for letting such things happen.
In fact, in the very months when
the scandal was dying out of the
headlines from malnutrition of news,
one of the men who was supposed
to be under investigation—Percy
Gale, Jr., the bureau director who
had resigned under fire—kept pop-
ping up in close association with the
man who presumably was investigat-

ing him, District Attorney Frank S.

Hogan.
This association sconce has its
roots in one of the strangest turn-

abouts i in politics. For nearly seven-

a 5 a i: 5 4.

teen years, Hogan had built a repu-
tation as a non-political district
attorney. Sponsored originally by
Dewey, he had been backed by all
parties, and until the summer of
1958, he had projected the image of
a man not tied to any political ma-
chine. He had embarrassed Tam-
many with his Aurelio-Costello dis-
closure; he had certainly not endear-
ed himself to Carmine De Sapio with
his denunciation of the manner in
which Joey Rao and Joe Stretch had
deposed a Harlem district leader.
These flashes of fire, repeated on
various occasions during his long
span in office, had led the press to
hail Hogan as an incorruptible prose-
cutor, one of the ablest in the na-
tion. He had been mentioned sev-
eral times as a possible candidate for

Frank S. Hogan

mayor, and many believed that, if
he had ever wanted to get into a
knockdown fight with such as
O’Dwyer, he could have had the job.
But Hogan, in the end, had always
shunned bitter party warfare; he
had kept his image as the unfettered
prosecutor, admired by both. Repub-
licans and Democrats. |

Then, abruptly, in the summer of
1958—at a time, coincidentally, when
his office was poking into the Bureau

of Real i ne Ho-

et ! i
*

Be Meek:

headmaster. The De Sapio 2

gan suddenly plunged with both
feet knee-deep into politics.

New York State Democrats were
faced with the necessity of picking
a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Gov-
ernor Harriman, who was running
for re-election, and Mayor Wagner
were known to want a liberal can-
didate, preferably Thomas Finletter.
But there, suddenly charging into the
lists, came New York’s long-time,
non-charging, non-political District
Attorney, Frank S. Hogan. Hogan
wanted the nomination, and Carmine
De Sapio, it was whispered, was
solidly behind him.

Still the Boutonniere

The climax to this strangely off-
beat drama, in which nobody appear-
ed to be acting the way one might
expect him to act, came at the Demo-
cratic State Giecanoa in Buffalo
in August. Monroe Goldwater, the
former law partner of Ed Flynn and
the attorney for Title I builders, and
Percy Gale, presided over the unruly
sessions. Almost inseparable com-
panions in the days of maneuvering
that preceded the day of decision
were three oddly assorted figures —
Thomas J. Shanahan, the Tammany
fund-raiser and ally of De Sapio;
Percy Gale, who was the husband of
De Sapio’s secretary and who had
been De Sapio’s personal choice for
director of the Bureau of Real Es-
tate; and Frank Hogan, the district
attorney who was supposedly inves-
tigating the $2 million scandal in the
bureau that Gale had headed and
who was now being backed by De
Sapio for the U.S. Senate.

“T saw them during numerous oc-
casions at the Buffalo convention,
and they were inseparable,” says one
sharp-tongued, anti-De Sapio Demo-
crat. “Gale is like a lap dog and be-
haved as one during the convention,
while Shanahan took the arrogant
position from the beginning that Ho-
gan was the only man for the spot.”

The convention ended with De
Sapio ramming Hogan down the

throats of Governor Harriman and +
Mayor Wagner. In one revealing —

front-page picture, these two- out.
standing Democratic officials wore
the glum and chastened look of —
schoolboys just dressed down by the

performance for Hogan at Buffal

Si hig PB

ris tire Ley

was attacked quite widely as one of

the baldest and worst modern exam-
ples of bossism, and there can’t be
much doubt that the popular revul-
sion against it opened the way for
the surprising triumphs, in a heavily
Democratic year, of Governor Nel-
son Rockefeller and Senator Kenneth
Keating.

The verdict of the voters wasn’t
known yet on election night when

PART 9

THE LARGEST single industry in
New York City is run by the under-
world. It is a miulti-billion-dollar
yearly exercise in illegality, and it
flourishes today, as it has flourished
for years, by almost open connivance
with the law, by widespread pay-offs
and ever-widening corruption. The
officialdom of New York has tacitly
pleaded guilty to the existence and
size of the underworld monster; just
this year, desperate for revenue to
keep its $2 billion-a-year bureaucracy
functioning, it sought legislative ap-
proval to tap the stream of gang-
dom’s dollars by legalizing and im-
posing a 15 per cent pari-mutuel tax
on off-track betting. Mayor Wagner
and his advisers estimated that, by
splitting the revenue evenly with the
state, New York City would get
$100 million a year and the state
$100 million. What wasn’t generally
realized at the time was this: when
the city contended that a 15 per cent
pari-mutuel tax would bring in $200
million a year in revenue, it acknowl-
edged in effect that the illicit book-
making industry in the city was do-
ing an annual $1.33 billion betting
business.

Fantastic? Impossible?

The public and many of the more
learned gazettes seemed to think so,
for the plan was greeted with hoots
of derision. Hardly anybody bother-
ed to find out just how the huge
betting-revenue estimate had been
- derived, and so the real shocker —
the admission by the city of the size
of the underworld colossus — never

pra eny Sae x ive Penne
the reporting half of

team walked into Hogan’s Senatorial
campaign office. At this time Percy
Gale hadn’t yet been called before
the grand jury probing the Bureau
of Real Estate scandal (he was to
appear briefly later in the month),
and the whole, unpleasant, $2 mil-
lion fraud that had been worked on
the taxpayers had been just about
forgotten. But suddenly, on_ this

ein nt eon
this writing |

night, with Hogan’s defeat in the —
election imminent but not yet appar-
ent, the late unpleasantness in the
Bureau of Real Estate was brought
vividly back te mind by the natty,
boutonniered figure of Percy Gale,
sitting there behind a desk in Hogan’s
campaign headquarters. He had
worked hard in the campaign, we
were told. He had been doing his
best to make a U.S. Senator.

RACKETS — AND PAY-OFFS

registered with the public. Actually,
all that New York was proposing
was to tap just one of the rackets
of the syndicate — and perhaps not
the lushest racket at that. Even so,
its estimate of a $200 million yearly
tax revenue derived from a $1.33 bil-
lion flood of off-track betting was
not visionary; it was ultra-conserva-
tive.

A man whom we respect as one of
the really good brains in a city gov-
ernment not noted for cerebral ca-
pacity gives this inside view of the
manner by which that $1.33 billion
annual bookmaking estimate was
arrived at. .

“The Mayor’s committee that
studied the problem relied heavily
on the 1954 report of the Wicks Com-
mittee of the legislature,” he says.
“They did this because the Wicks
report represented the most conserva-
tive estimate of a staunch opponent
of legalized off-track betting. The
figure settled upon in the end —
$200 million a year — was chosen
not because it was the most accurate,
but because it was the lowest. We
wanted to make absolutely certain
the plan would produce the mini-
mum revenue we had claimed.

“Actually, there is evidence to in-
dicate it would have produced much
more. City Budget Director Abra-
ham D. Beame and his staff worked
on the problem and produced esti-
mates from a number of different
sources. One estimate indicated that
off-track betting runs at a ratio of
about 10-1 over track betting, and

this figure was not considered ex-
cessive. Yet the Wicks report, on
which we based our estimate, used
the conservative ratio of only 3 to 1.”

One of Many Rackets

What emerges from this analysis
is the startling thought that the city
deliberately underestimated rather
than exaggerated the size of the un-
derworld bookmaking racket. The
probable size of the underestimation
is indicated by experience in coun-
tries where there is some basis of
comparison. In Puerto Rico, for ex-
ample, betting on five- and six-horse
parlays is nine times heavier off-
track than on-track; in England, a
church commission recently reported
that off-track betting was about
twelve times as heavy as on-track
betting. A common, conservative
rule of thumb in the underworld in-
dictates that in New York, $5 will
be bet with the bookies for every $1
bet at the tracks. When one recalls
that $804 million was wagered at all
New York State tracks in 1957 (the
bulk of this at flat and harness
tracks in the New York City area),
one comes to the rather startling
conclusion that the city’s bookies are
battening each year off the proceeds
of $2.5-3 billion in off-track bets.

Such figures italicize the conclu-
sion — and admission — of the May-
or’s committee studying the problem
that “illegal betting was carried on
in tremendous proportions”; but
even these gigantic figures do not
give the full picture of the tremen-

|The Navion

i aie i - i u
Hy ty fe te ites A Teall

Jou ces of the underw otld an
heir infinite power to co ig Risck-
king i is just one racket, and book-
‘making on the horses is just one phase
of it. The play on baseball, football,
boxing and especially basketball, is
heavy all over the city. High-stake
crap games are not uncommon. And
larger than any of these is the
policy racket.

Policy, or betting on the numbers,
flourishes from Brooklyn to the
Bronx. In policy, the better can
wager on a single number, two num-
~ bers or a series of three numbers.
_ Usually, the winning number is de-
_ termined by adding the totals of the

money bet on the pari-mutuel ma-
_ chines in the first three races of the
day. The number to the left of the
decimal point is the winner. If a
player is gambling on hitting a series
of three numbers, the odds are an
astronomical 600 to 1 against him,
but such horrendous prospects only
whet the appetite of the policy ad-
dict. He is gambling on the big,
lightning strike. The viciousness of
the racket lies in the fact that it
plucks the pockets of the poor. The
ordinary housewife can play for any
stake from dimes to dollars, and the
racket, with its false promise of big
money for little money, seems to
hold an especial allure for women.
Once hooked, they’ll rob the house-
hold budget and let their children
_ go hungry, avid as any narcotics ad-
dict to get their play down.

Inevitable Pay-Off
| There is no way of estimating
_ what such a racket costs in human
misery or how many millions of dol-
Jars it rolls into the treasure chest of
_ gangdom. Even the most conserva-
_ tive estimate today, however, places
policy in the _ billion-dollar-a-year
racket class, and some estimates in-
sist its play is three times the play
‘| in bookmaking. Arrest records, for
| what they are worth, indicate a
phenomenal growth in noligg activity.
In 1957, for example, only 922 book-
makers were arrested, but policy ar-
_ rests climbed to 11,531, slightly more
_ than double the total just four years
earlier, in 1953.
_ When organized crime is bank-
rolled by such flourishing rackets,
it goes almost without saying that

a) soul

October 31, 1959 ;

there has to be widespread corruption

na ‘
ott 4

of the police. Individual bookies may
operate for a time without paying
protection, but it’s impossible to
conduct a wide variety of multi-bil-
lion-dollar illicit businesses under the
noses of nearly 24,000 policemen
without the pay-off. So true is this
that in New York today, the pay-
off has become almost a way of life.

It has been that way for a long
while, and the system is now so
deeply ingrained in the life of New
York that it seems impossible it can
ever be eradicated. A graphic indica-
tion of the city’s calm acceptance of
its own corruption occurred in late
July. City Councilman Earl Brown,
who comes from Harlem, wrote a
letter to The New York Times in
which he said: “Rackets, such as the
numbers game, are run fairly wide
open in Harlem. The police cannot
stop the gambling so they join the
gamblers. Under these circumstances,
many citizens, particularly the hood-
lum element, lose respect for both
the law and its enforcers. . . .” Here
was a flat statement by a City Coun-
cilman who knows his section inti-
mately, but neither the editors of
The New York Times nor anyone
else showed any immediate reaction
— at least publicly.

Just how much graft is actually
involved in this calm official accept-
ance of the rackets? What percent-
age of the Police Department has
been infected?

These are the key questions, the
hard questions, and there has never
been a positive answer to” them be-
cause there has never been

the will,
since gambling became big yin ‘the

post-Prohibition era, for a thorough

and searching look. The usual reac- Pt
tion — often the well-cultivated re- ‘eee
action — in any discussion of the Papel
delinquencies of the Police Depart- ae
ment is that there are bound to be i
a few bad apples in so huge a barrel. ie
You’ll hear it said every time a police- ce
man is caught with his hand on a ~ 4

bookie’s bank roll. The few-bad-ap- an
ples theory, however, does not seem F
to explain the immunity and years- +
long persistence of multi-billion-dol- '
lar rackets, does not seem to agree
with Councilman Brown’s observa- ™
tion that police are joining the
gamblers en masse. On this basis,
there is perhaps some justification y
for believing that the outnumbered
apples in that huge Police Depart-
ment personnel barrel are the good
ones.

A Twice-Told Tale

This unhappy view finds factual
support in some partial disclosures
in the city’s past. As long ago as
1942, John Harlan Amen conducted
a special investigation of the Brook-
lyn rackets. His investigators set up
hidden movie cameras equipped with
telescopic lenses and recorded the
traffic around some of Brooklyn’s
more nefarious bookmaking parlors.
They even captured and preserved _
on film the likenesses of policemen a
coming around with their hands out
to take their cut. In a special wets
in April, 1942, Amen charged th:
New York police on a city-wide a
were taking more than $1 as :
year from gamblers in protection —
money. a oe of grands jes

307 ;
, Ld

~ >

he
*

examined Amen’s charges, and cops
who had been so indiscreet as to
walk into the camera’s eye were
bounced off the force; but nobody
really suffered much, nobody went
to jail, the bookies continued doing
bigger and better business, and the
pay-offs — as the sequel was to
show — continued to get bigger
and better, too.

Concrete evidence of this devel-
oped some eight years after Amen’s
denunciation had fallen on deaf ears.
Again the scene was Brooklyn. Miles
McDonald found Harry Gross doing
a $20 million-a-year bookmaking
business — and paying out $1 mil-
lion for protection. The pay-off
figure was the same that Amen had
cited, but this time it wasn’t a city-
wide pay-off. Gross operated almost
exclusively in Brooklyn, which is
neither the largest nor the wealthiest
of New York’s five boroughs. One
can only presume that lush territor-
ies like Manhattan and the Bronx,
to say nothing of Richmond and
Queens, were not being neglected by
the mob.

One indication of the size of the
mob bank roll that corrupts official-
dom came out of the Kefauver Com-
mittee hearings in 1951, shortly after
the Gross scandal. The committee
found that, in Philadelphia, one
gambling ring was paying monthly
installments of more than $150,000
for protection — an annual bribe of
$2 million a year. Philadelphia, of
course, is not New York. Neither is
it anywhere near as large as New
York nor anywhere near as wealthy;
and sad experience over a long span
of years has shown that the syndicate
is not an organization to ignore the
biggest pot of gold, the richest pluck-
ings in the entire nation.

“Our No. 1 Business”

The colossal stake of the under-
world in New York has been exposed
many times — almost invariably
with tragically ludicrous results. In
1954, the Daily News, New York’s
largest circulation newspaper and
one of the most accurate in writing
about crime and criminal operations,
focused a strong spotlight on the en-
tire issue in a series in which it bold-
ly proclaimed: “Gambling Is Our
No. 1 Business.” It found that the

308

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a. a , © Re.
Leer te Rin aae

ne a een es A ae ka
volume of money wagered annually had more 1
-tives.. But despite its small

averaged a billion dollars every three
or four months, that this huge flood
dwarfed the gross sales of any legiti-
mate business in the city, and that
the entire colossal, illegal operation
ran without any serious interference
from the police. High police officials
told the Daily News then exactly
what they tell questioners today —
oh, sure, there is some gambling, but
there is no large-scale syndicate oper-
ation and you can’t catch every-
body; sure there is some surreptitious
bookmaking, but it isn’t out in the
open, it isn’t big-time the way it
used to be. Such alibis sounded bet-
ter before the Wagner administra-
tion, in its need for new taxes, ad-
mitted officially that bookmaking
alone, by the most conservative
estimate, does a minimum business
of $1.33 billion a year.

Volunteer Detectives

The contrast between pretense
and reality showed up most graphic-
ally only a couple of years after the
Daily News had drawn official yawns
with its account of multi-billion-dol-
lar underworld gambling operations.
In a farcical sequence that went al-
most unnoticed at the time, the city’s
police became greatly exercised, not
at the prevalence of gambling crimes,
but over the activities of some volun-
teer detectives who moved in and
tried to show officials and the pub-
lic just how wide open the New
York rackets really were.

This was in the fall of 1956, and
the city had at the time an organi-
zation that since then, most unfortu-
nately, has been allowed to die. It
was called the New York City Anti-
Crime Committee. It had _ been
formed in the aftermath of the Ke-
fauver disclosures, when the public
became excited for a time about the
monstrous specter of American crime.
The committee was headed by
Spruille Braden, a diplomat, and it
was supported by some _ wealthy
businessmen with good intentions
but with little practical experience
in the hard, cynical field of big-
league crime. The original ballyhoo
indicated that the committee would

have a $250,000 budget; in actual

practice it usually operated on little
more than one-fifth of that. It never

+ A a
Ba ta

Tény (Fat Tony) Salerno, whom
‘Donlan and his detectives had al-

TY (en menor a een eal
Sqy. andfu okt

skimpy resources and lack of offi-
cial powers of arrest, subpoena and
interrogation, this tiny group some-
times uncovered seamy facts of life
that appeared to be completely hid-
den from the great, sprawling New

‘York Police Department.

The Face of Crime
Thomas J. Donlan, who headed the

anti-crime committee’s detective
staff, had long been concerned about
the fantastic growth of the policy
racket in Harlem. In late 1955, he
and his detectives launched a year-
long investigation. They obtained a
jeep station wagon and transformed
it to look like a television-repair
truck. Signs were painted on each
side of the body, and in the middle
of each side panel appeared what
looked like a replica of a huge televi-
sion tube. Actually, the tubes were
two-way mirrors. Behind _ these,
movie ‘cameras were ‘installed to
record the action on the streets. The
truck with its concealed equipment
enabled Donlan and his detectives,
disguised as television repairmen, to
park almost on the doorsteps of some
of the best policy and bookmaking
joints in Harlem without attracting
the least suspicion. Their cameras
began to grind away, recording the
face of crime; and as in the Amen
probe of 1942, it wasn’t long be-
fore some of New York’s Finest
loomed up in the camera eye in con-
tact with some of the most eminent
figures in the Harlem underworld.
The anti-crime detectives operated
for months and were caught spying
only once. They had their truck
parked one day near a key action
corner in East Harlem. The movie
cameras were grinding away when a
couple of neighborhood kids climbed
up on top of the truck, leaned over
and peered into the interior through
the front window, laughing and
pointing. At the time, the discovery
was annoying because the detectives
were recording the activities of an
East Harlem racketeer who wasn’t
catapulted into headline fame until
this summer, a full three years later.
The racketeer was short, beefy

The Nation

(- q

“size,

i IE

ready identified as the “big man in
policy” in Harlem. Salerno often
held a rendezvous on this particular
corner with another emperor of the
Harlem underworld, Joey Rao; but,
though Salerno’s importance was
known to the anti-crime detectives,
as their 1956 records show, he ap-
parently had not aroused much offi-
cial curiosity. He hadn’t been dis-
turbed by so much as an arrest since
1933, when a policy rap had been
lodged against him. He continued to
enjoy a priceless anonymity as far
as the general public was concerned
until, in August of this year, it was
disclosed that he had muscled him-
self into a one-third interest in Ros-
ensohn Enterprises, sponsors of the
Floyd Patterson-Ingemar Johansson
world heavyweight championship
fight.

Salerno was only one of many
East Harlem policy figures whom
Donlan and his detectives fitted in-
to the picture of the big-time racket
in their months-long sleuthing. They
pinpointed policy banks and activi-
ties; they charted tie-ups between
the key East Harlem mob and other
policy mobs in West Harlem and
the Bronx. Inevitably, word of their
activity eventually leaked out. When
it did, New York police swung into
action. They began to try to hunt
down the anti-crime committee’s
camera-equipped jeep!

Donlan’s Report

It became quite obvious, accord-
ing to Donlan and one of his key
investigators, William A. Giustiniani,
that police had been tipped off about
their “spy” truck. Patrolmen on the
beat and detectives began to watch
for it, but the information the police
had been given was a bit imprecise.
Apparently, they had been told to
look for a green-paneled truck, with
an interior-decorating firm’s name
on the side. Eventually, they found
the truck they had been looking
for, and when they did, they camped
a squad car right beside it and fol-
lowed it everywhere, calling public
attention to it and making it com-
pletely useless as an anti-crime ve-
hicle. Only one thing. was wrong.
The police had the wrong truck.
The one they had spotted belonged
to detectives of the Waterfront Com-

October 31, 1959

mission. The anti-crime committee's
jeep continued to elude the city
sleuths.

Affairs had come to this ridiculous
impasse when, in late October, 1956,
Donlan himself gave the fruits of his
year-long investigation to District
Attorney Hogan’s office. He identi-
fied the seven men who, his investi-
gation showed, controlled the policy
operation in the city and, in a pub-
lic statement, emphasized the magni-
tude of the policy operation:

In only one spot these racketeers
had four clerks, five lookouts, one
sheet-writer, two runners to the
six clerks at the “drop,”
clerks at the bank and
twelve lookouts where the bank was
located.

From the numbers of places the
ring operates in the Bronx alone,
this indicates there are approximately
3,500 employed in the other organ-
izations. What the Committee would
like to know is: How could such a
highly organized racket operate un-
der the eyes of the Police Depart-
ment?

“ ”
drops,
six more

This biting question, asked by
Donlan on Oct. 24, 1956, was the
prelude to an amazing scene at Police
Headquarters. There, a few days
later, Police Commissioner Stephen
P. Kennedy publicly announced that
his men had been trying to find a
truck with concealed cameras that
had been used in Harlem for spying
purposes. Such a public statement
by the city’s Police Commissioner,
whatever its intent, could only have
the effect, it would seem, of warn-
ing every. gangster who could read
that the time had come to lay low.

The anti-crime committee, not es-
pecially noted for its belligerency,
was sufficiently aroused by Ken-
nedy’s disclosure to snap back in a

stinging rebuke. In a statement on.

Nov. 1, 1956, it accused the Police
Department of squandering time and
manpower in “investigating a_ re-
sponsible anti-crime committee” in-
stead of criminals. The committee
said it had learned somewhat earlier
that “members of the Police Depart-
ment were tailing our investigators,”
but said it was “shocked” that Com-
missioner Kennedy had “publicly
proclaimed” the fact and had re-
vealed for all to read the precise de-
tails of the investigative methods

being used. The statement went on:

The conduct of the Police Com-
missioner raises serious questions.
Why didn’t the Police Department
determine the true user of the ve-
hicle? Hasn’t this disclosure ham-
pered the work of the agency using
the vehicle? Hasn’t the disclosure of
this investigative technique harmed
all law enforcement agencies?

Death of an Inquiry

To these hard questions, there
were no answers. The Police Depart-
ment replied merely that it had more
important things to worry about
than what the anti-crime committee
was doing. And with that brush-off,
the whole pregnant issue died, in-
terred in obscure news items in the
back pages of capacious newspapers.

The anti-crime committee’s policy
investigation died too. The official
agencies of the law, offered all the
information, never did become very
much excited. Less than a month
after Donlan had conferred with
Hogan’s aides, division detectives
apparently went right back on the
take. A memorandum in the anti-
crime committee files, dated Nov.
19, 1956, noted that earlier in the
month division men “had refused to
pick up the pad” and “had made a
number of inconsequential arrests.”
The memorandum continued:

However, this past Friday the divi-
sion men contacted the various spots
and commenced collecting again. The
present tab is $470 [monthly] per
spot. It is understood that the dis-
tribution of these moneys is as fol-
lows: $20 for each division man and
the pad man [the individual picking
up the moneys] gets an additional
$20; the remainder is split among
the bosses, who are believed to re-
ceive about $50 apiece. The $470
does not take into consideration
moneys paid to uniformed personnel
of the Police Department, which are
an additional expense for each spot.

The accuracy of the anti-crime
committee’s information was indicat-
cd a couple of years later, in April,
1958, when a Kings County grand
jury in Brooklyn returned a present-
ment in which it cited the same seale
ol pay-offs. In 1956, it charged,
bookies paid $450 a month to oper-
ate (a figure almost identical with
the $470 a month policy pay-off the
anti-crime committee had found in

309

—>-

i
ih
:

310

IIarlem), and since that time the
tariff had been raised to $500 a
month.

What this means is that each
hookie (i.e., policy spot) is paying
$6,000 a year just to operate, and
in some sections of the city, like
Ifarlem, the spots are thicker than
fleas on a dog’s back. One source
estimates that, from policy alone, a
sergeant in a Harlem precinct can
average $200 a month, and this is
chicken feed compared to what the
higher brass, paid at the top rate of
$50 a spot, drags down. Even this
pay-off, huge as it is, isn’t the only
one. As the anti-crime committee
memorandum noted, uniformed men
have to be placated and, in addition,
clearances have to be negotiated with
top-level squads that might be
tempted to interfere. When all this
has been taken care of, the bookie
or policy runner must brace himself
for little extras like the “toss,”
which may be described most suc-
cinctly as an extra shakedown. Every
once in a while a plainclothesman or
a detective may be a little extra
short of funds, or perhaps he may
be feeling just a little extra greedy,
and he’ll back a bookie up against
a wall for a “toss.” A “toss” does not
come cheap; it usually costs about
$200.

“When that guy hustles you into
a doorway and asks you if you can
take a toss, it is cheaper to give it
to him,” one bookie says. “You lose
more than $200 if they take you in.
You got to spend at least a day in
the tank with assorted characters
and crawling things. Then the lawyer
is $100 or so, then there’s the fine,
and by the time it’s all over, you’ve
lost the best part of two days from
your own business. It’s better just to
give it to them.”

Phony Shake-Ups

This is the system that operates
in New York. Quite a volume of
credible evidence indicates that it
has been operating this way for a
long time now; that it is a system
that has weathered repeated ex-
posures; and that, after the head-
lines of the moment die, nothing
ever happens to put an end to it.
One of the best illustrations of the
fact that there is in America today

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a special, unwritten law of immunity
for officialdom ‘comes every time
there is a rumor of cop-bookie col-
lusion. “Big Cop Shake-up in Har-
lem,” the headlines will scream. In
fifteen years in New York, the writ-
ing half of this team has written
the same phony story so many times
that he is now positively afflicted
with nausea. The story will explain
that the police commissioner is
angry, he is getting tough, he is
bouncing commanders out of Harlem
and bringing fresh blood in. This is
supposed to be drastic action. But
is it? Is anybody ever prosecuted?
Do any of the bribe-taking cops —
and common sense says their num-
ber must be legion — ever go to jail?
The public knows better. All that
happens, usually, is that the bribe-
takers are given new areas to culti-
vate.

“ie

The Luberda Story

Some idea of the kind of individual
wealth the system breeds burst into
the open most surprisingly last
March. On March 5, a retired New
York plainclothes sergeant, Joseph
G. Luberda, was arrested for drunk-
en driving on the New York State
Thruway near Suffern, N.Y. When
state troopers looked into the trunk
of his car, they were startled to find
an old, earth-stained, 30-caliber am-
munition canister packed with $19,-
500 in cash. There were nine pack-
ages of $20 bills worth $2,000 a
package, and other packages of 5s,
10s and 100s totaling another $1,500.
Some of the bills appeared to be
twenty years old. Bank books found
in the car indicated that Luberda
had some $16,000 on deposit in vari-
ous banks. In addition to all this,
there were some 200 memoranda
listing the names of at least a hun-
dred known gamblers and racketeers,
with addresses and figures that seem-
ingly represented monthly pay-offs.

Luberda, who was fifty-two, had
joined the police force in 1929 and
had retired on May 20, 1956 — the
year in which, coincidentally, the
anti-crime committee was investigat-
ing the policy racket in Harlem.
tT hough he had retired on an annual
pension of only $3,277, Luberda lived
in a $40,000 Tudor-style home in
Forest Hills, L.I. Asked to explain

where he got thet ti

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lyford e found
in his car trunk, the De erent
said he was just mindirig the money
for his mother. This turned out to
be news to the mother, Mrs. Estelle
Matysiak, of Jersey City. She was
married to a retired railroad worker
so poor that he didn’t even have an
overcoat to protect him from the
raw March weather when he ap-
peared in court. Told that her son
had said the car trunk fortune was
hers, Mrs. Matysiak protested in
amazement: “I got no money —
just enough to live.”

Discovery of Luberda’s hoard
touched off a frantic scramble. High
brass of the Police Department
swung into action. They went right
out personally to track down the
gamblers whose names cropped up
on Luberda’s list — found them,
too, right where Luberda’s notes
said they would be, doing business
at the same old stand. About fifty
suspects were hauled off to police
stations. Some were fortified with
wads worth from $1,000 to $2,000
in their pockets; they couldn’t be
charged even with vagrancy. In a
few hours, after a few slap-on-the-
wrist charges had been lodged, all
were let go. The great sensation be-
gan to die.

Luberda himself was taken before
several grand juries, where he relied
constantly on one of the world’s
most atrocious memories. Finally, on
May 28, District Attorney Hogan
had him indicted for criminal con-
tempt of court for answering ques-
tions “evasively, equivocally and
falsely” before a grand jury. In an-
nouncing the indictment, Hogan and
his chief assistant, Alfred J. Scotti,
revealed some of the questions and
answers before the grand jury. Asked
whether the cash figures Luberda
had jotted down opposite the names
represented pay-offs, he replied: “I
don’t know.” “Do you deny they
were pay-offs?” he was asked. “No,
sir,” he said. He insisted he couldn’t
recall who had drawn up the lists. He
might have prepared one himself,
but he couldn’t be sure. Asked spe-
cifically if one list represented a col-
lection sheet, his only answer was
the familiar refrain: “I don’t know.”

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In addition to some of the grand
jury questioning, Hogan’s office also

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revealed the names and addresses of
some of the gamblers on Luberda’s

list. It escaped notice at the time
that many of these names and loca-
tions — names and locations that
sent police into such a frenzy of
activity to round up suspicious char-
acters — were identical to those
given to authorities two and a half
years earlier by the anti-crime com-
mittee.

Fixed Targets

The largest money figure on Lu-
berda’s memoranda was 750 after
the name “Lou Gimt, 539 Lenox.”
This was evidently a misspelling of
Louie Gimp, which is the way the
name appeared elsewhere on Lu-
berda’s lists. The anti-crime com-
mittee’s investigators in 1956 had
identified Louie Gimp as one of the
principal lieutenants of the Apuzzo
brothers, top Harlem policy racket-
eers. They had found Louie Gimp
operating at the same 539 Lenox
Avenue address, and they had noted
that, on one occasion when he had
been disturbed by the police, he had
been accused of nothing more seri-
ous than vagrancy. Furthermore,
Luberda’s lists indicated that Louie
Gimp’s pay-off took care of three
other locations besides the one at
539 Lenox; one of these, a store at
677 Lenox Avenue, had been spotted
by the anti-crime committee investi-
gators nearly three years before and
had been identified by them as a
major Apuzzo policy drop.

The anti-crime committee sleuths
had spotted activity in a private
house on 126th Street near St. Nich-
olas Avenue. Luberda’s lists included
_ this address, too, the item reading:
f “Man 126 & St. Nick,” and along-

side the figures “(Hat 25) and 25.”
“Hat” is another term for “toss.”
In underworld parlance, it represents
an extra shakedown under the pre-
tense that the poor guy doing the
shaking is so hard up he needs money
fot; a bar.”

Even the most casual examination
of Luberda’s lists and the anti-crime
committee’s memoranda show these
and other similarities. Most im-
portant, in this connection, is that
many of the specific areas of policy-
play pinpointed by anti-crime com-
mittee detectives were confirmed by

October 31, 1959 Ke

“?
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“ie

Luberda’s nee This, plus
the fact that many of the men named
by Luberda were picked up right
where they were supposed to be, il-
lustrates a characteristic feature of
the policy racket. Unlike bookmak-
ing, in which a large amount of busi-
ness can be transacted by telephone,
the policy operator has to have di-
rect contact with his clientele. The
housewife in a neighborhood must
know that she can go to a certain
store every day and find the policy
operator with whom she is doing
business. In policy, if a man moves
several blocks to avoid suspicious
police, he loses his clientele; he may
move to the store next door or the
one across the street, but he is
literally anchored by his business to
one definite locale. All of this would
seem to indicate that big-scale, wide-
open policy rackets are more vulner-
able than bookmaking and might be
more easily suppressed if the police
were really trying — especially when
authorities have been given precise
names and addresses and supporting
detail by volunteer helpers equipped
with sleuthing cameras.

Everyone Must Pay

The continued prevalence of multi-
billion-dollar rackets in the face of
such specific information would seem
to deprive the police of the excuse
of ignorance and to leave only one
possible explanation — widespread
corruption in which, as the Amen and
Gross and Kefauver testimony would
indicate, the city-wide pay-off prob-
ably runs into the millions. But
even this is not the most horrifying
aspect of present-day New York.
For the plain truth is that when
corruption begins, there is no end to
it; the system that is used to col-
lect from racketeers is simply ex-
tended to collect from legitimate

. businesses.

It is almost impossible to go any-
where in New York today, unless
you are stone deaf and totally blind,
without hearing constantly repeated,
with infinite variations, the story
of the pay-off. Even in the hinter-
lands, fifty miles from New York,
you cannot escape it. Fire inspectors
come to check a business building;
the codes are 6 stringently drawn
that it is easy for them to find some

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kind of violation, but for a little
fee they'll go away and leave things
alone. If a firm is installing Univac
or some similar electronic monster
to take care of its bookkeeping — NA
and literally thousands: of firms in
the city are doing just this — a
building permit has to be obtained,
the wiring has to be inspected and
approved. Again a little money
strategically placed insures that the
work can proceed smoothly, without
trouble.

Sometimes the rumblings of protest
against such rackets become so audi-
ble that the authorities are impelled
to act. In the last six months of
1957, James R. Kennedy, First Dep-
uty Police Commissioner, conducted
an ~ investigation into published
charges that the police had been
systematically shaking down build-

ing contractors throughout the city. “i
Both the Real Estate Weekly and aan
The New York Post had run articles u
charging, in essence, that pay-offs ao

had become practically a prerequisite
for doing business in the contracting =

field.

In his final report —on Jan. 21,
1958 — the Deputy Commissioner
said he had found the charges com-
pletely unjustified. He had question- on
ed 300 construction firms, he said, 4
and only one admitted making pay- i
offs to policemen. He said that his
study “failed to reveal any evidence
of an organized scale of pay-offs,
graft, or any systematic shakedowns
or acceptance of gratuities by mem-
bers of the department. . . .” But his
report, if you read far enough, did _
seem to indicate that perhaps there |
had been some fire under all the
smoke. The Deputy Commissioner
had unearthed twenty-one com-
plaints of shakedown attempts; one
sergeant had been forced to retire;
one patrolman had been dismissed;
three captains and two patrolmen
had been scheduled for departmental
trials; and unspecified charges had
been filed against six sergeants and —
eight other patrolmen.

This seems like quite a tally to
have been returned along with a
purity clearance, and it is pe
belaboring the obvious to point q
that when an accused agency inv
tigates itself it hardly ever returns
harsher verdict than it has to.

haps a more thorough and independ-
ent probe, with auditors ferreting out
what petty cash disbursements in a
construction firm’s books really rep-
resent, would have yielded a dif-
ferent picture. For one thing is de-
finite: some multi-million-dollar cor-
porations putting up new steel and
concrete skyscrapers all over New
York still feel that they couldn’t
do business without the pay-off.

Cheaper to Pay

Business executives time and again
will tell you the same story. “We
don’t like it,” they will say. “We
don’t approve it. But we just have
to do it; you can’t do business other-
wise.”

One of the most reputable con-
struction men in New York spent
several minutes assuring us of this.
He insisted there was no other way
of operating, that it’s absolutely im-
possible for any firm, however big,
to buck the well-established system.
He pointed out that every time a
truck parked, tying up traffic, every
time a sidewalk was blocked, techni-
cally a ticket could be issued. Fire
and building inspectors, in addition
to the police, can make all kinds of
trouble if they want to. It would
not be unheard of for a firm to garner
thirty to forty summonses a day for
various offenses, and there would be
all kinds of delays — workmen
would be standing idle waiting for
material that could not be delivered.
It’s better to spread $10 or $20 here
and there; the pay-offs on a $6 mil-
lion office building, during the period
of its construction, will come to some-
thing less than $10,000 — far less
than it would cost to fight the in-
numerable tickets in court and lose
construction time.

The contrast between the advan-
tages of “the system” and the dis-
advantages of bucking it were vivid-
ly illustrated by the experience of
one construction company that put
up a big midtown office building a
couple of years ago. The building
firm was so conscientious that it de-
cided it wouldn’t pay off anybody
for anything. The result was, accord-

ing to the story in the trade, that it |

was almost buried under an ava-
jJanche of tickets; its profits were
slashed; and the. firm decided that,

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in the future, much as it didn’t want
to, it would have to go along with
“the system.”

In New York today, everybody
goes along. Even the newspapers.
Some of the largest and most repu-
table papers in the city pay off the
police to make sure that their paper
trucks and their delivery trucks
don’t get tickets when they clutter
the streets at edition time. Some
lists of newspaper “contributions”
are pretty inclusive; they begin with
the captain and the sergeants in a
precinct and go down through the
ranks of patrolmen. Each gets his
honorarium, and the total in the
course of a year runs into thousands
of dollars. There may be some news-
papers in the city that do not fol-
low the, practice; but it is wide-
spread, well established, and before
any editorial writers take umbrage
at the charge, they had better ascer-
tain just what some of those mis-
cellaneous expense vouchers initialed
by their circulation departments real-
ly represent.

SERNA eee: TE Oe
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Story of One “Kitty”

When even the newspapers are
paying, it may be taken for granted
that “the system” is well organized
and solidly entrenched. How well or-
ganized and how solidly entrenched
may perhaps best be illustrated by
the story of “the kitty.” There are
various kitties. Sometimes it is called
“the sergeant’s kitty” or “the cap-
tain’s kitty”; at other times, just “the
kitty.” Whatever the term, the
“kitty” is an organized collection,
and it gets especially fat at Christ-
mas time.

It should be said by way of pref-
ace that businessmen as a_ class
don’t object to taking care of the cop
on the beat. They expect to do this
and, indeed, are often glad to do so
because they want the cop’s good
will — his presence and help in time
of trouble, the extra protective check
he may give their businesses when
he walks his beat at night. Business-
men don’t consider the money they
give to the cop on the beat a pay-
off; rather, it’s a good-will offering
freely and willingly given, The “kit-
ty” is a cat of a different color.

Our story of “the kitty” and its
origins goes back a few years. Short-

van

ly before Christmas some years ago,

a of ear a

we were dining in our favorite tavern ©
when a police car stopped outside
and two police sergeants came in.
They presented the proprietor with
a printed list containing the names
of all the men in the precinct office.
Their demand: bottles for every-
body. The proprietor was indignant.
“T always take care of the fellows
on the beat,” he said, “but do you
mean I have to take care of these
guys too? Guys [ve never seen,
never heard of?”

Our paper ran a story based on
the incident, and Police Commission-
er Stephen P. Kennedy got quite
wroth about it and read the riot act
to his men. There was to be absolute-

ly no solicitation of Christmas gifts,
he said, and he’d deal sternly with
any policemen attempting it. The
words were right, but in the inter-
vening years, they appear to have
been forgotten. All that has hap-
pened, it seems, is that the printed
lists with the possibly incriminating
names have been eliminated, and a
nice, anonymous “kitty” has been
born.

Last year at Christmas time, the
reporting half of this team was lunch-
ing in a tavern run by the same
proprietor who had had the list
served on him years ago. A patrol-
man came in, said he wanted a con-
tribution for “the kitty.” The amount
he asked sent the proprietor into
voluble protest. He was at a new
location, he pointed out; business had

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been bad; he simply couldn’t afford
to cough up $75 or $50 for “the
kitty.” He finally donated $25; the
patrolman took it and left.

About a week later, the ax fell.
The tavern proprietor, perhaps car-
ried away by the spirit of the season,
had put up a small sign wishing his
patrons a Merry Christmas. Now
State Liquor Authority regulations
provide that nothing shall obstruct
the view into a tavern from the
street. This particular sign was
small, hung at the top of the window
and left a clear view underneath;
but the police said it was a violation
and gave the owner a summons.

The downtown New York area in

A LIGHT flashed on the central
switchboard of the New York Tele-
phone Company office in Forest Ave-
nue, West Brighton, S.I., at precisely
2:04 A.M., Sept. 2, 1958. Mrs. Cath-
_ erine B. Thompson, one of the opera-
tors on duty, plugged in on the line.
She heard the sound of heavy
breathing: “Hello,” she said, “hello.”
| There was no answer, just that
heavy, breathing sound. Mrs.
| Thompson turned to another opera-
| tor, Mrs. Florence Parkin, and asked
her to trace the call. Mrs. Parkin
| quickly found that it was coming

_ from a house at 242 Vanderbilt Ave-

~nue. Then she cut in on the line,
holding it open, while Mrs. Thomp-
son notified police that something
appeared to be wrong.

_ Even as Mrs. Thompson was
| speaking to the desk sergeant at the
| St. George police station, Mrs. Par-
| kin heard the labored breathing on
the line turn into a voice. A woman
gasped: “I’ve been stabbed.”

The operator immediately cut the
police in on the conversation, and
both she and the desk officer heard
the woman repeat: “I’ve been
stabbed. I’ve been attacked with a
knife.” A second later, the voice
added: “My husband has been
} stabbed, too.”

October 31, 1959

RES, SET aT

PART 10

which this occurred is an especially
busy one. It is cluttered with small
and large businesses, wholesale firms
and loading platforms. Conservative-
ly, there are 1,000 businesses in the
precinct area, and the experience of
our favorite tavern would indicate
that nothing much less than a $50
contribution to “the kitty” is con-
sidered proper. Some estimates place
the average at double that, but even
at $50 — and using a conservative
estimate of the number of businesses
that could be tapped — this means
a “kitty” stuffed with some $50,000,
enough for a very merry Christmas.

This is the picture, as we have
found it, of a city that breeds rackets

Then there was silence. It lasted
only a second. Then a new voice, a
little boy’s voice, came on the wire.

“My mother is bleeding,” the voice
said.

Mrs. Thompson told the boy po-
lice already were on the way.

“Til wait for the police outside,”
he said.

“No,” she told him,
stay with your mother.”

Such was the beginning of a drama
that was to shock the nation.

“you better

The Curtain Lifts

Just six short minutes after that
first warning light flashed on the
Staten Island switchboard, at ex-
actly 2:10 A.M., Patrolmen Vincent
J. Meli and Henry Tyson pulled up
before the two-story house at 242
Vandervilt Avenue in the Fox Hills
section, an area that in olden days
had been known as “The Witches’
Field.” The house sat on a steep
little hill. The patrolmen climbed
seven steps, went up a ten-foot walk,
climbed three more steps and enter-
ed the front door. Waiting to greet
them, clad only in pajamas, was a
small, slender, tow-headed boy, Mel:
vin Dean Nimer, aged eight. |
him in the silent house w is a

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.
and lives by the pay-olf. There will,
no doubt, be angry denials. Some
perfectly well-meaning people will
doubtless contend that, even if it’s on
true, we should have kept quiet. rt
We can’t agree, When things are bad,
the badness has to be understood;
if it is compounded by hypoensy,
it will never be corrected. Corrup-
tion breeds sloth and indifference.
It creates a society that gives the
horse laugh to the old-fashioned ideal
that a good job should be done for
the job’s sake. It creates a society in
which average people have no rights ae
and the worst kind of injustices can a) |
happen ~—even to an eight-year-old
boy. .

CHANCE 4

The patrolmen found the boy’s ey
father, Dr. Melvin A. Nimer, thirty- *

one, a physician at the nearby Ma- :
rine Hospital of the U.S. Public \3y
Health Service, sprawled on the t
kitchen floor, covered with blood
from deep stab wounds. In the mas- wie
ter bedroom upstairs, they found
Mrs. Lou Jean Nimer, thirty-one,
slumped on the floor between the :
bed and the wall where she had col- 3
lapsed while telephoning. She, too,
had been badly stabbed.
An emergency call went out for
an ambulance and detectives. The
ambulance arrived promptly, and at
2:18 A.M., Mrs. Nimer was placed
in it to be taken to the Marine Hos-
pital, just three blocks away. She
was still conscious. Significantly, in
the light of future developments, she
still retained her presence of mind.
As she was being placed in the am- ©
bulance, her thoughts obviously
turned to her younger children. still”
asleep in the house—Melvin Deatis
brother, Gregory, two, and his sistas Tr,
Jennifer Jean, just five months. ’ 2
baby especially was on the moth
mind, for she told police: “Ple eo
feed the baby plain milk. No for-
mula.” |» «
Even as the ambulance left, in th
house, on the kitchen floor,

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Nimer was dying. Blood was welling

up from his wounds. “I’m choking,
V’m choking,” he moaned. But he,
too, still retained his faculties.. He
warned police against moving him
or raising his head, and told them
simply to brace his feet against the
wall until the ambulance returned.
When it did, within a few minutes,
he too was rushed to the hospital,
and there he died shortly after he
was admitted,

Mrs. Nimer lived a few hours
longer. An emergency operation was
performed in a desperate attempt to
save her life, but at 5:30 A.M. she
died while still on the operating
table.

Staten Island authorities had a
sensational double murder on their
hands, and investigative forces were
quickly marshaled. District Attorney
John M. Braisted, Jr. and his assist-
ant, Thomas R. Sullivan, were noti-
fied. Deputy Chief Inspector Ed-
ward W. Byrnes and Inspector Carl
I. Blank assumed command of the
police investigation. Detectives and
technical experts swarmed over the
house at 242 Vanderbilt Avenue.
From the outset, they had one thing
going for them. They had an eye-
witness—Melvin Dean Nimer,
known as Deany.

Deany’s Story

The boy told this story:

He had been asleep in his bed-
room across the hall from his par-
ents’ room when he was awakened
by something touching the bed, dis-
turbing the bed clothing. Startled,
Deany woke, looked up, saw a man
looming above his bed. The man, he
said, wore a white mask, like a sheet,
that covered his entire head. Deany
screamed,

The masked man grabbed him by
the throat, tried to idle him. Across
the hall, Mrs. Nimer, hearing her
son scream, rushed to his aid.

“Mommy came and the man hit
her with something and she started
bleeding,” Deany told police. “Then
Daddy ran in and they started fight-

ing and Daddy started bleeding.”

The struggle between his father
and the masked intruder took place
in the hall outside his bedroom, at
the top of the stairway, the boy
told detectives. The prowler, he said,
was “a little bigger than Daddy,”

Ga. sets aa

and he broke away and ran down-

stairs with Dr. Nimer in pursuit.

Mrs. Nimer had gone to her bed-

room and sat down on the edge of
the bed to use the telephone and
call for help. She slid off the bed,
moaning faintly, “I’m dying. . . .”

This was Deany Nimer’s story.
Based upon it, police sent out a
thirteen-state alarm for the prowler
who had slain Dr. Nimer and _ his
wife: “Unknown male, white, wear-
ing blue dungarees and _ blue-striped
shirt. May have blood on his cloth-
ing.”

The Cloth Strips

Right at the start there was one
bit of undeniable physical evidence
that seemed to lend substantiation
to the story Deany Nimer had told.
Only vague hints of this appeared
in the press at the time, and its sig-
nificance was quickly forgotten, It
was mentioned that police had found
a piece of cloth (some accounts said
two pieces) that had been left folded
on the boy’s bed. Actually, we are
told, there were about half-a-dozen
strips of cloth torn into handy
lengths that suggested they had been
intended for gags or bonds. The
cloth was a faded, odd-colored, cot-
ton ticking—the kind of. coarse,
heavy material that was often used
for old ‘mattress covers—and the
strips, according to those who tested
them, were strong. The material
matched nothing else found in the
house, and police at first thought
that the strips might have been
ripped from an old hospital mat-
tress. The nearby Public Health
Service Hospital was checked on this
supposition, but the cotton ticking
evidently hadn’t come from there.
It never was traced and identified.

Indeed, the mysterious cloth
strips soon were forgotten as inves-
tigators concentrated on two other
elements of the mystery. How had
the prowler entered the home? And
where was the murder weapon?

Again these key questions were
never to be answered, but the first
one, from a combination of circum-
stances at the murder scene, appears
to have assumed from the early mo-
ments of the investigation an exag-

gerated importance in official minds.

An examination of the house show-
ed that a cellar window» had been

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left open. A water hose led out the

window into the driveway, where Dr.
Nimer had washed the car the day
before he and his wife were mur-
dered. An intruder could have
slipped into the house through this
window, but technical experts ex-
amined the window sill and quickly
discounted the possibility. Minute
particles of dust and dirt on the sill
had been undisturbed, and this would
hardly have been possible had a
full-grown man squeezed through the
comparatively narrow opening.

Yet this appeared to be the only
easy means of entrance. Elsewhere
in the house, a screen on one of the
downstairs windows was unhooked,
but again there was nothing to in-
dicate an intruder had _ crawled
through the window. The inside
front door had been partially open
when the first patrolmen arrived,
but the aluminum screen door had
still been latched and Deany him-
self had released the catch to admit
police. It almost seemed as if no one
could have entered the house—and,
especially, that no one could have
departed in the kind of hasty flight
that Deany Nimer had described, if
Deany’s story were true.

Beginnings of Mystery

This, it became obvious later, was
the first fork in the road the investi-
gators were to take. A second ele-
ment involved the location of
Deany’s Boy Scout knife. In search-
ing the house for the murder weapon,
detectives discovered that apparent-
ly none of the kitchen ware had been
used. But Deany’s Boy Scout knife
was missing. The boy was positive
it had been in a pocket of his trou-
sers, hanging on the knob of his bed-
room door. Detectives looked, but
the knife wasn’t where Deany had
said it was. A thorough search of the
house finally turned up the poten-
tial weapon, hidden between the
covers of the Mormon magazine
Era. A \aboratory analysis—the kind
of minute examination that can re-
veal droplets of blood not perceiv-
able by the human eye—soon estab-
lished that the knife was absolutely
unstained. Still, could the knife have
been cleaned? ‘Could it still be the
murder weapon?

These questions were hovering un-

asked in the air, unknown 1 as yet to ;

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press and public, when the first re-
porters converged upon the murder
scene. Even though the early road-
blocks, the early forks in the investi-
_ gative pathway, were not clear, there
was about this investigation from the
start a disturbing overtone. One of
the first reporters on the scene was
serambling for information when he
was elated to receive a_high-sign
from a high-ranking detective whom
he knew. The detective drew him
aside, and the reporter was all an-
ticipation.

“T thought he had something he
wanted to tell me,” the reporter re-
called later. “But do you know
what he said? He pointed to District
Attorney Braisted, and he asked
me: ‘You’ve been around quite
awhile. You’ve seen Hogan work.
How do you think he compares with
Hogan? Is he as good?’”

This early, it would seem, some
minds were already more preoccu-
pied with the question of the re-
flected public image, the question of
their own reputations, than they
were with the baffling details of the
horrible crime that cried out for
solution.

Finger on the Boy

In the succeeding days, the inves-
tigation followed the usual frenetic
course of sensational headline crimes.
A number of suspects were picked
up, questioned, released. The ground
around the Nimer house, the streets
in the area, were searched and search-
ed again. In all of this just two dis-
coveries were made that seem of sig-
nificance now. Detectives disclosed
that they had found two footprints
—the footprints of a man—in the
soft earth at the left rear side of the
Nimer house. Plaster casts were taken
_ of them in the hope that they might

ultimately serve to identify the foot

that had made them. The second dis-
covery involved a knife. About 6
_ P.M. on Sept. 3, the day after the
murders, two patrolmen found a
sharp-pointed knife, with a five-inch
blade and a wooden handle, in a
hedge about 1,000 feet from the
» Nimer home. Under laboratory anal-
ysis, the knife revealed traces of
blood, but they were so faint that
it could not be scientifically de-
termined whether the blood was ani-
‘mal or prstsian

meant anything at all, seemed to
point away from the suspicion that
already had taken root in the minds
of officials. This suspicion involved
Deany Nimer. Newsmen, under a
pledge of confidence, were told that
the boy was a suspect in the murder
of his parents. He was undergoing
psychiatric examination.

While the public still had no sus-
picion of the sensation that was
about to burst, journalists who had
been given the tip dug energetically
into the background of the Nimer
family. The parents had been Mor-
mons. They had been married in
September, 1946, in the culmination
of a childhood romance that had be-
gun back in their home town of
Orem, Utah. Dr. Nimer had received
his medical degree from the Univer-
sity of Utah, had served in a Pub-
lic Health Service Hospital in Se-
attle, Wash., and had come to Staten
Island only a few months before to
start a three-year surgical residence
at the Marine Hospital. Intimates
of the family had considered their
home life ideal. There had never
been a hint, prior to the murders,
of any mental problem involving
Melvin Dean Nimer. He was an
open-faced, smiling, attractive boy.
Indeed, he and his father had seem-
ed to have great affection for each
other. Neighbors recalled how, when
Dr. Nimer came home from the hos-
pital, Deany would run up to him
and throw his arms around him.

Was it possible that such a boy,
at so young an age, could be a verita-
ble Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Even
if he were possessed by a dark soul-
demon hiding under the smiling face,
was it physically possible for such
a tiny lad to murder both of his par-
ents? After all, Deany was only 4
feet 4; he weighed only sixty pounds.

The authorities obviously decided
that he could. Relatives of the
Nimers had been notified promptly
of the tragedy. Mrs. Bertha Park,
mother of Mrs. Nimer, and Dr. Har-
old Nimer, Deany’s uncle had flown
to New York immediately. With Dr.
Harold Nimer’s consent, District At-
torney Braisted sent the boy on

Friday, Sept. 5, three. days after the |

‘murders, to he Staten
Health Center for

clinic, under the directior
Ry, € Ce

Both of these discoveries, ‘if “they

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Richard M.. Silberstein, examined
the boy on just two days, Friday
and Saturday. It was after these ex-
aminations, it was to be disclosed
later, that Deany changed his origi-
nal story and gave a statement con-
fessing that he had committed the
murders. This was still not known,
even to reporters, when Deany left
on the weekend, accompanied by his
uncle and Detective James Cox, to
fly to the funeral of his parents in

Orem, Utah.
The Turning Point

The funeral was held on Tuesday,
Sept. 9, and on Wednesday, Sept.
10, as Deany was returning to New
York with his uncle and Detective
Cox, the New York Journal-Ameri-
can broke the story and announced
in sensational headlines that the boy
Was a suspect in the murder of his
parents. What happened next has to
be considered of the greatest signifi-
cance, For this was the crossroads,
the point at which the life and the
future of an eight-year-old boy were
going to be protected—or he was
going to be pilloried in public.

The Journal-American’s story was
damaging, but it was not official.
Other newspapers did not touch it
until District Attorney Braisted had
been given an opportunity to com-

-ment, and on what he said depended

the extent to which the story would
be used, the credibility that would
be attached to it. The district at-
torney, quite obviously, had several
courses of action open to him. He
could have denounced the publish-
ed story as a violation of confidence
and refused to confirm it; he could
have refused flatly to comment, as
district attorneys often do, because
the case was under investigation and
still unsolved; or he could have con-
firmed the fact that the boy had
been under suspicion—and at the
same time pointed out all of the
solid facts in the case (as yet un-
known to the public) that seemed
to negate that suspicion.

District Attorney Braisted did
none of these things. He gave the
impression of a public official who
was glad the story was out. He re-
fused to be quoted on the fact that
he had required a pledge of silence
from newspapermen about the sus-
picions that had been focused on

316

cae ne Ae: 8

1 oe
fie i ,

Deany; he refused to eriticize publi-
cation of a story that had tarred an
eight-year-old boy as a suspect in
the murder of his parents. He said,
on the contrary, that preliminary
psychiatric examination to which
Deany had been subjected had shown
the boy was suffering “from a para-
noid type of schizophrenia and that
the boy’s illness and basic personality
were compatible with the commission
of a crime of violence.”

While thus throwing the prestige
of his office behind the most horrible
and harrowing suspicion that could
be leveled at a child, the district at-
torney left himself an out in care-
fully expressed reservations. He
pointed out that the boy’s uncle,
Dr. Harold Nimer, was not satisfied
with “the statement”—he refused to
say confession—that Deany had
made. He added, “I am not satisfied,
either,” and said the boy would be
subjected to more extensive and
more thorough psychiatric tests.

Drawing the Net

The district attorney’s statement
made the story official. Press serv-
ices spread it nation-wide. And in
the next hours it seemed that the
last room for doubt had been ban-
nished. On the evening of this day
of horrible revelation, little Deany
was taken back to the house of
tragedy on Vanderbilt Avenue, and
there, in a pattern reminiscent of the
one followed with all-but-convicted
criminals, he “re-enacted” the crime,
authorities said. The next day,
Thursday, Sept. 11, he was sent to
Bellevue Hospital in New York for
psychiatric examination. And_ that
same day, in an extended press con-
ference, District Attorney Braisted
was subjected to searching questions
by reporters about the circumstances
that pointed to young Deany
Nimer’s guilt or innocence.

On the side of innocence, District
Attorney Braisted listed just one
theoretical proposition. “The one im-
portant thing that would negate”
the idea of guilt, he said, was that
the statement came from an eight-
year-old boy. On the side of guilt,
he listed an impressive array of sup-
posedly solid facts.

The most important factor. een
ing to the boy’s guilt, he said, ‘
the statement by the Mediel ae

i ve NI FAP a “i ge . > Latin

Pri
iner that the wounds, their Tesanal,
etc., could indicate they were re-
ceived while the victims were in a
prone position in bed.” The first au-
topsy report (it was later revised )
by Assistant Medical Examiner Dr.
Dominick DeMaio disclosed that Dr.
Nimer had a superficial wound on
the back of the left shoulder and a
fatal wound “in the upper abdomen
under the left chest cage.” Mrs.
Nimer, Dr. DeMaio’s report said, had
a superficial wound of the right
breast and “a lethal wound of the
upper abdomen under the ' right
chest cage.” The medical report
added that “the thrusts all were di-
rect downward thrusts,” supporting
the theory that the Nimers were sur-
prised and stabbed while lying “
a prone position in bed.”

This scientific | documentation
seemed to offer a rational explana-
tion for the incredible. Conceivably,
even an eight-year-old, 4 foot 4, 60-
pound boy could stab both of his
parents to death if he surprised them
as they slept and stabbed them in
the soft flesh of the abdomen be-
fore they were aware of what was
happening. The medical report seem-
ed almost to explain how the crime
had happened; but even so—and
even though there were vital facts
in this ease that were still being
kept from the press and public—
there were a few obvious pieces that
did not fit into this almost-final
solution.

Some Awkward Facts

One dealt with Deany’s person.
Authoritics said he had admitted he
had washed his hands, and so, of
course, there was no blood upon
them. But what of his pajamas?
They had, according to Dr. DeMaio’ s
report, only “one or two” small
bloodstains on them. Then there was
the peculiar matter of the bedcloth-
ing. The murder night had been an
exceptionally cool one when, almost
certainly, the Nimers would have had
covers over them. Yet there were no
knife rips, no tears at all in the bed
sheets.

These minute flaws in the case did
not seem too significant at the time,
but reporters questioned District At-
torney Braisted closely. And every-
thing he said built one picture, a
dark picture for Deany Nimer..

ints The D ATION
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ener tree +)
Asked about reports that the boy
had changed his confession, the dis-
trict attorney said: “No, he has not
changed his story.” Then he admit-
ted that the boy, in answer to a
question from his uncle, had said
that his original story about an in-
truder was the true one. The dis-
trict attorney was asked whether
there were discrepancies in the boy’s
story. He said flatly: “No discrep-
ancies.” He added that Deany had
had a motive and that it lay in “an
attitude he had toward his parents.”
He explained, “I would be inclined
to say they (the Nimers) were very
strict.” Of Deany, he said: “He has
never shown any remorse.”

Braisted was questioned about the
absence of blood on any of the
knives in the house, especially on
Deany’s Boy Scout knife. Assuming
that the knife had been washed off,
had detectives examined the drain
traps to see if they could find any
traces of blood? They had—and they
found no blood. Only six minutes
had elapsed between the first wink-
ing alarm light on the telephone
switchboard and the arrival of po-
lice. Could Deany have _ rushed
downstairs, washed off the knife so
perfectly that it retained no trace
of blood and hidden it in that short
time? “It is possible,” said District
Attorney Braisted. “The time limit
is conceivable?” he was asked again.
“Tt is possible,” he said.

The Boy’s “Confession”

The effect of all this was to ac-
cuse and damn Melvin Dean Nimer
in the public eye without accusing
him in court. The story touched a
sensitive nerve of the times and was
a sensation across the nation. Par-
ents everywhere have been concern-
ed in recent years about the increas-
ing frequency of violent and bloody
youth crimes, and the case of Melvin
Dean Nimer seemed to touch a new
nadir. If so young and so attractive
a boy could have committed so hei-
nous a crime, then there were no
limits to youthful depravity. No
New York crime case in our experi-
ence caused such deep and wide-
spread agitation among parents.

Yet all the time there were vital
elements of the case that had been
kept secret—elements that did not
fit into the picture of a little boy’s

October 31, 1959

seemingly almost-certain guilt. They

were vital facts that supported the
story Deany originally had _ told
about a masked intruder. For the

plain truth was this: virtually every
word that he had uttered had been
corroborated from the mouths of his
dying parents.

Though District Attorney Brais-
ted had been questioned with the
utmost thoroughness, he had given
no hint of this. The district attorney
had insisted there were “no discrep-
ancies” in the boy’s confession—nor,
presumably, in the case against the
boy. It was left for newsmen to drag
the truth out into the light of day.
On Friday, Sept. 12, Vincent E.
Sorge, a painstaking and tireless re-
porter for The New York World-
Telegram and Sun, broke through
the veil of official reticence. He re-
vealed the verbatim question-and-
answer exchange between a detective
and Mrs. Nimer before Mrs. Nimer
died. This was the exchange:

Q. Can you tell me anything about
the case? A. A mask...a mask.

Q. Can you tell me anything else?

A. A hood... a hood.

Q. What kind? A. White.

Q. Slits in the eyes? A. Yes,
covered full head.

Q. How tall? A. Tall as my hus-
band, same build.

Q. Why did you get up? A. Heard

boy scream.

District Attorney Braisted was in
the midst of another press confer-
ence, discussing Deany’s motives,
when The World-Telegram and Sun
broke the story. Asked if Mrs. Nimer
had made a statement before she
died, Braisted said he understood she
had described the killer as about the
size of her husband and added: “We
believe she might have seen her hus-
band and no one else, but this mat-
ter is still being investigated.”

Thomas Sullivan, Braisted’s as-
sistant, came into the room at this
point, leaned over and whispered into
the district attorney’s ear. Braisted
paled noticeably. Then he turned to
reporters and said: “Mrs. Nimer did
mention the words ‘white mask and
hood’ to Detective John Morgan,
but you must remember that she
was in shock and was put under
sedation . . . and [her statements]
were made in dribs and drabs... .
She also said, ‘tall as my husband,

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same build.’” Pressed for further de-
tails, he said abruptly: “I will make
no comment on any published state-

ment attributed to victims of this
crime. I am declining comment be-

cause I sincerely believe that com-
ment would impede our investiga-
tion.”

The lid had been lifted. Answers
that did not answer no longer satis-
fied. More and sharper questions
were asked. What about Dr. Nimer?
He had lived for some time after the
stabbing. Had he, like his wife, iden-
tified his assailant? “He didn’t give
us anything you would call useful
information,” one high police source
said. “He made no positive identifi-
cation of the assailant,” said Dis-
trict Attorney Braisted. It took re-
porters three days to pierce this
screen of non-answering answers; but
finally, on Monday, pressed again
and pressed harder, District Attorney
Braisted admitted that Dr. Nimer,
too, before he died, had used the
words “prowler” and “mask.”

First Version Substantiated

The picture that then developed
was this: Little Melvin Dean Nimer’s
first story that he had been awakened
by a masked prowler, that he had
screamed, that his parents had come
to his aid—all of this had agreed in
exact detail with the statements his
dying parents had made to police.
His description of the mask, his de-
scription of the intruder as a man
“about Daddy’s size,” agreed per-
fectly with his mother’s dying state-
ment. Why, in the face of all this,
had authorities concentrated such
strong and, harrowing suspicion upon
the boy?

The answer may be found, per-
haps, in District Attorney Braisted’s
admission of official investigative
frustration. Three things, he said,
led authorities to suspect Deany, and
he listed them: “1. Our inability to
establish with any certainty that
there had been an entrance to and

an exit from the house. 2. Motive—

we couldn’t settle on a motive. 3. A
few statements by the boy which
did not conform to the facts. Adding
‘it all together—though we, like many
other people, just couldn’t believe
it—we had no choice.”

The only way, seemingly, that the

positive statements of the dying par-

318 : |

we eg Lor
baled
,

“ents could be explained away lay in

the assumption that, to protect the
son who had stabbed! them, they had
conferred and concocted the story
of the masked intruder. Yet Mrs.
Nimer had collapsed in the upstairs
bedroom, Dr. Nimer in the down-
stairs kitchen, and there was ab-
solutely no proof that they could
have talked with each other in those
six short minutes before police ar-
rived. Anyway, in logic, the whole
idea appeared preposterous, and in
an analytical article on Sept. 19,
1958, the writing half of this team
tore into the case against Deany
Nimer and asked this question:

Is it conceivable that a dying
mother who thought enough of her
children to warn about her daughter’s
formula would make up a story about
a prowler and a mask to protect her
son—and endanger the other two
children—if he were a killer?

The day that question was asked
District Attorney Braisted was not
available to reporters, and Sullivan,
his assistant, said: “No comment.”

And with that story, the Nimer
case virtually died. Melvin Dean
Nimer’s psychiatric examination at
Bellevue was concluded, The report,
as relayed to the public, was vague.
Psychiatrists said they found evi-
dence of “a personality disorder pre-
dating the tragic occurrence on
Staten Island.” Deany needed con-
tinued psychiatric treatment, they
said; but clear evidence that the boy
was not considered dangerous was
seen in the fact that he was released
and allowed to go to his grandpar-
ents’ home in Orem, Utah, there to
attend school and mingle with other
children. Deany left New York for
Orem on Oct. 23, 1958, and on Nov.
3, the forty detectives who had been
working on the mystery were called
off. The case was as good as dead.

At Last the Answer

But the damage had been done,
and a haunting, horrible suspicion
still remained—the suspicion that
Melvin Dean Nimer, only eight,
might have committed one of the
most horrible crimes of the century.
Everywhere a reporter went, even
in towns miles away from New York,
he was asked: “What is the truth
about the Nimer case? Did the boy
really do it?” It was a qui 1 to

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which there was no official answer,
but one to which we can, we feel,
give a positive answer now.

It is an answer that was obtained
by the reporting half of this team
only after weeks of exhausting and
meticulous leg work. Every inch of
the murder scene was re-examined.
Every person who would talk, even
many who didn’t want to talk, was
questioned. The picture that emerged
grew more shocking every step of the
way. For as we dug more deeply into
the mystery, it became apparent that
there wasn’t a chance, there never
had been a chance, that Melvin
Dean Nimer could have committed
the murders. Only the most incred-
ibly slipshod investigation that pro-
ceeded in blind defiance of some
facts and in blind ignorance of others
could have resulted in even the
vaguest suspicion being cast upon
the boy.

The Blood Clues

We began with the house at 242
Vanderbilt Avenue. Any supposition
of Deany’s guilt rested upon the be-
lief—in all logic, the only possible
belief—that he had surprised his
sleeping parents in bed and stabbed
them there. But once we got into the
master bedroom and examined the
mattress on the bed, we found this:
there was just one splotch of blood
on the entire mattress and that was
on the side of the bed on which Mrs.
Nimer sat when she used the tele-
phone.

The traces of blood still discern-
ible in the house indicated clearly
that the crime had been committed
elsewhere. Across the hallway, there
was a splash of blood on the door
jamb of Deany’s room, and there was
a large amount of blood around the
light switch in the hall nearby—an
indication perhaps that Dr. Nimer,
his hands already bloody from his
wounds, had fumbled desperately for
the switch in an effort to turn on
the light so that he could sce his as-
sailant already fleeing down the
stairs. It was significant to us that
signs of blood in massive quantities
appeared first in the hallway and
trailed down the stairs through the
house—just as would have been the
case if the first story Deany told
were the right one.

Downstairs, we faced the problem

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of the front door. It was obvious
that a key angle had been the con-
clusion by the police and the dis-
trict attorney that no one could have
come in—or, even more significantly,
could have left in haste—thtough
the aluminum door with its spring
lock. Yet aluminum doors with this
kind of latch often give under pres-
sure. Gene Gleason set the catch,
then gave the door a slight tug—
and open it came, easily, without
damaging door or lock.

Mrs. Nimer’s Evidence

Turning from the mute evidence
of the house, we sought information
of a more positive kind in the records
of the Marine Hospital, where the
Nimers had been taken. Mrs. Nimer,
the records showed, had been placed
in a recovery room at 3:05 A.M. Per-
sonnel of the hospital who knew her
had talked with her. She was fully
conscious, fully coherent. When a
nurse giving Mrs. Nimer oxygen mis-
takenly placed the mask on back-
wards, Mrs. Nimer reached up with
one hand and said: “It’s on back-
wards.” This was not a woman, ob-
viously, who was in such a state of
shock or under such sedation that
she did not know what she was say-
ing when she talked about a prowler
and a mask.

The vital questioning of Mrs.
Nimer had been overheard by hos-
pital personnel. Two detectives were
present, and they questioned her
gently, carefully, hospital personnel
said. They heard Mrs. Nimer tell
about the mask-hood, the slits for
the. eyes; heard her describe the in-
truder as “about the size of my hus-
band.” And they heard her say: “I
met the man in the hall.”

Every effort was made to save
Mrs. Nimer’s life. Dr. Norman Tarr,
deputy chief of surgery, was sum-
moned to perform an emergency op-
eration. He knew Mrs. Nimer per-
sonally, and she recognized him. Be-
fore he operated, the records show,
he examined her carefully and turn-
ed her body over gently so that he
could see if she had any wounds on
her back. Mrs. Nimer told him that
she had not been stabbed there and,
indeed, she had not—a_ sequence
again that seems to demonstrate that
this was a woman still in possession
of her faculties. ,

tober 31, 1959

In his examination of his patient,
Dr. Tarr discovered that she had
three wounds. There was -a slight
knife wound on the heel of her right
hand, received apparently when she
had tried to ward off a blow. She
had a one-inch stab wound in the
upper right chest above the breast.
And she had a mortal wound, not
in the abdomen as the official med-
ical examiner’s report had said, but
in the right chest between the sixth
and seventh ribs.

The location and nature of this
last wound assume vital importance.
The presumption of Deany Nimer’s
guilt had been based to a large extent
upon the autopsy report that placed
the wound in the abdomen and de-
scribed it as a direct downward
thrust. This enabled officials to en-
vision a boy stabbing his parents in
bed, but Dr. Tarr’s reports show
conclusively that this was a com-
pletely inaccurate impression, that
the stabbing did not and couldinot
have happened that way at all.

Powerful Thrust

The blade of the knife had been
driven through the rib cage and
muscles with terrific force. It had
gone in at an angle, slanting down
and towards the center of the body.
So vicious was the thrust that the
blade had penetrated about five
inches, and there was evidence that
the blow had been struck by an ex-
perienced knife-wielder. The wound
on the outside was small, only about
the width of the knife blade; but
there was evidence that the knife
tip had been flicked on an arc inside
the body, the trick of an experienced
killer. The flicking tip had slashed
through the diaphragm, had severed
the major blood vessel going into
the vena cava, and had inflicted a
cut about five inches long and very
deep in the liver.

Dr. Tarr knew that only a mira-
cle could save Lou Jean Nimer, but
he attempted to perform that mir-
acle. He made an incision, beginning
approximately at the navel and pro-
ceeding upward to the bottom of
the breast plate. He mopped up the

blood and tried to staunch its flow.

His patient was sinking fast. Her
pulse and breathing fadeds She was
only a whisper away from death. Dr.
Tarr reached into her chest cavity

. f es + ‘ is
x lp a tae ee ARAN Be

and tried frantically to massage her
failing heart. He tried for twenty
minutes, but he failed as he had
known, almost from the first, that
he must fail.

All during this grim drama of the
operating room, Dr. Tarr detailed
every step in operative notes that he

dictated as he went along. Realiz-
ing that he would have to cut
through the original wound, he was

careful to describe its location, its
size, its depth. All of this detail, so
vital to any understanding of the
murder case, was in Dr. Tarr’s op-
erative notes when Mrs. Nimer’s
body was released to the city morgue
for autopsy at 7:05 A.M., Sept. 2,
1958.

What happened next seems fairly

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obvious. The medical examiner, Dr.
DeMaio, confused the incision which
Dr. Tarr had made with the fatal
wound. Only so could the wound
have been erroneously located in the
abdomen instead of between the sixth
and seventh ribs; only so could it
have been described as a direct
downward thrust when Dr. Tarr, the
only nan who could know, desenbed
it emphatically as an angled, down-
ward-slanting blow. How could this
confusion have occurred? Quite sim-
ply. The autopsy report was ready
the day after the murders, but Dr.
Tarr’s operative notes were not
transcribed and forwarded to authori-
ties for four days! And in the mean-
time, nobody asked. It was not until
“about ten days” after Mrs. Nimer’s
death that detectives came around
to question Dr. Tarr and hospital
personnel—and learned, presumably
for the first time, one of the most
elemental facts about the crime they
were investigating: the nature of
Mrs. Nimer’s fatal wound.

Deany’s Throat Marks

This sequence, revealing enough,
is not quite so shocking as one other
medical fact that until now has
been buried from the public. Deany,
it will be remembered, had told au-
thorities originally that the intruder
had grabbed him by the throat and
tried to strangle him. During the
period when suspicion was being
focused on the boy, District At-
torney Braisted had been asked
about this. Had there been marks
on Deany’s neck? He had replied:
“There might have been one or two
little marks on the boy’s neck. There
were no lacerations or deep marks.
The boy was examined superficially
on the night of the murders, but was
not given any medical treatment.”

This account simply does not agree
with specific reports that show con-
clusively that a man had tried to
strangle Deany Nimer!

The story of the evidence that
was plainly visible on Deany’s throat
comes from Dr. William Smith, an
associate of Dr. Nimer and a neigh-
bor and friend of the family. He
hurried to the Nimer house early on
the morning of the tragedy. Deany
had already been questioned, had
been sent back to bed to sleep and
had only just reawakened. Dr.

320

Smith and Ralph L. Perkins, admin-
istrator of Marine Hospital, were
present when detectives began to
question the boy again about 6 A.M.
Even then, police were saying that
the boy’s “story doesn’t conform
with the facts.” And even then the
trend of the questioning indicated
that they suspected Deany. The
questioning went on and on for near-
ly two hours, and considering the
circumstances, the age of the boy
and the horror of the night, it im-
pressed observers as excessive, as
constituting a virtual verbal third
degree.

Finally, about 8 A.M., in the
kitchen of the Nimer home, police
asked Dr. Smith to examine Deany’s
throat. The doctor turned a sun-
lamp on the boy, and this is what he
found:

On the right side of the boy’s neck
—to the rear of the midway point—
four fingerprints. On the left side, in
approximately the same position, a
thumb print and the curvature of a
thumb nail mark. Clusters of pete-
chia, more commonly known as pin-
point hemorrhages caused by the
rupturing of the capillaries.

Dr. Smith said he told police and
the D.A.’s men present: “The marks
are more than halfway back. He
could not have done it himself. The
hand was too big.”

This positive finding, it would
seem, should have put an end to all

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suspicions of Deany Nimer. But as
the sequel was to show, it did nothing
of the kind.

Obviously, police and investigating
officials were not listening to facts
that they did not want to hear. Their
attitude even at the time, even when
one could not know what was to
come, must have been obvious; for
Dr. Smith, when he left the house and
took Deany home with him, was so
worried that he did an unprecedented
thing. He discussed the situation
first with his wife, then he called in
a second doctor to examine Deany’s
throat again. This second examina-
tion corroborated Dr. Smith’s find-
ings, and both doctors wrote out
formal reports of what they had
found and filed them im the hospital
records.

“A Rotten Deal”

It was not until some weeks later
that Detective James Cox, who ap-
pears to have taken a more realistic
view of the case than some of his
superiors, came around rechecking
evidence and discovered that ‘two
formal medical reports establishing
beyond doubt Deany Nimer’s inno-
cence, showing that a man had tried
to strangle him, were reposing in hos-
pital files like a couple of concealed
time bombs. Cox was visibly dis-
turbed. But no one else appears to
have been. At least no one in official
position to this day has had the
grace publicly to admit the horrible
sequence of blunders that ended in
the pillorying of an eight-year-old
boy. The pretense has been main-
tained publicly that the investigation
is still open; that anyone, including
Deany Nimer, could conceivably still
be a suspect. But privately a high
police official has since admitted to
the reporting half of this team, “We
know that the boy could never have
done it.”

Out in Utah, Deany went back to
school last winter like any other eight-
year-old boy. According to his grand-
father, Dean E. Park, he appeared
normal and bright in every way.
There had been no trouble, no need
even for Deany to make regular
trips to a psychiatrist. But, under-
standably, there was_ bitterness.
Dean Park, speaking of New York,
put it well. He said: “We think we
got a rotten deal back there.”

million humans, 9 million rats; a city
dominated by its $2 billion-a-year
bureaucracy, its multi-billion-dollar
rackets, its executive suite deals for
power on the political, the business
and the underworld levels. It is a
city of the very rich and the very

- poor in which the middle class and

the small businessman are being
steadily squeezed and crushed. It is
a city in which corruption has be-
come inbred, in which sloth and in-
difference rule, in which nobody
cares what happens to people—not
even to an eight-year-old boy whose
parents have just been murdered. It
is a city that has lost its soul.

Must that soul remain lost? There
are some signs that redemption is
possible.

In last month’s primary, a group
of independent Democrats, support-
ed by such leaders as Herbert Leh-
man, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and
Thomas Finletter, waged a vigorous
campaign against the leadership of
Carmine De Sapio. De Sapio himself
faced fierce opposition in his native
Greenwich Village stronghold, and
the issue was so close that the Tam-
many boss became a pallid, fretting
caricature of his usual confident self
before he eked out a 586-vote margin
in his fight for the district leader-
ship. In other districts, some key
De Sapio leaders were toppled, and
for the first time in years, some
dissident voices were added to the
Tammany executive committee.

It was a startling achievement,
considering the entrenched power of
the machine, its massive resources.
It was the kind of moral victory that
could be won only if there were a
widespread revulsion among the elec-
torate of New York; it could happen
only in a city that senses its own
loss and degradation and that is
struggling to live with itself again.
This is what has Tammany worried

today. Leaders in the Wigwam, be-.
latedly heeding the public pulse beat, -

CONCLUSION

recognize a familiar rhythm. It is the
throbbing spirit of reform and, in it,
Tammany veterans sense overtones
that remind them of the 1930s and
Samuel Seabury and Fiorello La-
Guardia. ;

The parallel is close, both inside
New York and in the Governor’s
mansion in Albany. In 1932, Frank-
lin D. Roosevelt, about to become
President, forced the resignation of
Jimmy Walker. In 1959, Nelson A.
Rockefeller, another man of magnetic
personal charm, sits in the Gover-
nor’s chair and looks to 1960. The
crisis in New York presents him with
a challenge and an opportunity—an
opportunity not just to better his
personal political fortunes, but to
help a great city shake off its shackles
and find itself again.

The Challenge

For the salient fact is that New
York needs help. Gallant moral vic-
tories like the one scored this Sep-
tember by the independent Demo-
crats are not enough to do the job.
New York needs a wholesale house-
cleaning, the kind of thorough purge
that only another Seabury investi-
gation could achieve. The Republi-
cans, who control the state govern-
ment, can institute such a cleanup
if they will. In the past, they have
hesitated because they prefer an
evil Tammany as a state whipping
boy and because “some of our own
boys” are involved. Governor Rocke-
feller has it within his power to
change this historic attitude of his
party, if he will. He is a man without
the usual political ties and obliga-
tions. His triumph was a personal
triumph; the party machine is in-
debted to him, he doesn’t owe. it
anything. He is free to act, and the
noisome mess in New York today
calls for action—for the kind of
drastic, thorough probe that only a
strong Governor can order. The op-
portunity rests with Nelson Rocke-
feller, and a great city waits.

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We believe that in this special issue of The Nation,
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How Congress Killed Civil Rights x

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SORCERY AND
FLYING SAUCERS

LETTERS
“The Shame of New York’

Dear Sirs:
of The Nation entitled “
New York”. . .. This is a sobering and
thought- prpeola piece. The material
in it is impressively presented.

I, of course, have no direct knowledge
of some of the facts which are set forth,
but the entire picture, as it is drawn,
is one which must deeply concern every
New York citizen. I and many people
in the so-called reform movement have
been trying to draw attention to some
aspects of the situation outlined in the
Amel Clean aie

I do not agree with the remedy that
is prescribed, for I feel that the Demo-
cratic voters of New York City can
take care of this situation themselves.
I am confident that they will.

Hersert H. Leaman

I have read the special issue
The Shame of

New York City

Dear Sirs: 1 read “The Shame of New
York” with deep interest. Frankly, I
am delighted that you are exposing con-
ditions that have cried for remedy for
so many years. ... “The Shame of
New York” certainly gives invaluable
ammunition to those who believe that
there is no possible cure except the
voting out of corrupt Democratic lead-
ership from its present control of city

Bene mentee Srantey M. Isaacs

Minority Leader, City Council
New York City

Dear Sirs: 1 read “The Shame of New
York” with great care and found it to
be extraordinarily interesting. While I
do not agree with all of the facts, I
think that the objective of the article
is good — at least insofar as it may
awaken public interest in the situation.
I am not, however, sure that a “Sea-
bury investigation” is called for.
Francis W. H. Apams
Former Police Commissioner, N.Y.C.
New York City

Mr. Trumbo, Lancer
Dear Sirs: One hopes those who assem-
ble anthologies for school and college
use, either in English courses or in the
social science curriculum, will not over-
look the magnificent commentary on our
society by Dalton Trumbo (Oct. 24).
It is rare these days to find so sharp
a lance laying open the carbuncles on
the body politic. But then, it is not
often, either that a writer greviously
ill-used by society is presented an op-
portunity for such sweet revenge.
Freperick B. Sweet
Cincinnati, O,

SrA pe and,

a Ie

ie. bes ll ol

Reminiscent
Dear Sirs: Plaudits for . . . Gene Ma-
rine’s brilliant study of Caryl Chessman’s
treatment by the California judiciary in
your October 17 issue. Governor Brown’s
handling of this cause célébre is ap-
pallingly reminiscent of the manner in
which a former Governor of Massachu-
setts, who also had his eye on the White
House, ignored evidence obviously suf-
ficient to create a “reasonable doubt”
and permitted two men to go to the
electric’ chair... .

Eric A. SEIFF
New York City

It Needed Saying
Dear Sirs: I was greatly impressed by
Emile Capouya’s “On the Art of Book
Publishing” in the October 24 issue.
That has needed saying for a long time
and was very well said.

R. V. CassiILt
New York City

Evils of ROTC

Dear Sirs: Referring to your October
24 issue—‘Failure of a Mission” by

Gene M. Lyons—There were a couple
of evils of ROTC not mentioned, name-
ly: (1) scheduling of ROTC classes and
drills during the most convenient class
hours and (2) the extra parades, etc.,
which are not on schedule, causing
ROTC students to seek release from
other classes.
S. Brooks Watton
San Jose State College
Saratoga, Calif.

Jefferson’s Slip

Dear Sirs: With all deference for Jeffer-
son, it must be recognized that the
“pursuit of happiness” phrase was a...
philosophical slip of the pen. On the
basis of the slip, an imponderable deal
of nonsense in the national life has been
justified and has gone unrebuked.
George P. Elliott (The Nation, Oct. 3)
does an excellent job of rebuking; but
perhaps you will permit me to supple-
ment his argument with one which I
used in the past on college classes:

Prof: We would appear to believe
that the attainment of happiness is
the proper goal of life?

Class: Yes, yes.

Prof: And that the attainment of
this happiness is closely connected
with the achievement of material pos-
sessions?

Class: Yes, of course.

Prof: In fact, we might almost say
that the achievement of the posses-

sions and the happiness are indistin-
guishable, the same thing?

Class: Yes, indeed, _

Prof: And it is -certainly a dem-
onstrable fact that the United States
has the highest material standard of
living that the world has ever known?

Class: Oh, yes, no doubt of that.

Prof: Fine, all agreed. Now then,
tell me please, how many happy peo-
ple do you know?

Class: —————__—_?

Hersert L. Smiru
Morro Bay, Calif.

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
321 @

ARTICLES

323 @ The Siege at Highlander
by DAN WAKEFIELD

325 @® How Congress Killed Civil
Rights: Murder by the Moderates
by WAYNE MORSE
328 @ The U.N. After Camp David
by JANE STOLLD

329 @ High Cost of Free TV
by GEORGE A. CODDING, Jr.

331 @ Saucery and Flying Saucers
by DAVID CORT

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

333 @ Trotsky: from Power to Exile
by CRANE BRINTON

The Hero as Inventor
by CARL DREHER

Note in November (poem)

by MARY, THRO RAUTH
Architecture

by WALTER McQUADE
Peri poietikes (poem)

by LOUIS ZUKOVSKY
Theatre

by STUART VAUGILAN
Theatre

by HAROLD CLURMLAN

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 840)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

= George G,. Wirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, Bditor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Editor

Robert Hateh, Books and the Arts

Tlarold Clurman,

Maurice Grosser, Art

M. I. Rosenthal, Poetry

Lester Trimble, "Music f

Alexander Werth, Buropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager

The Nation, Nov. 7, 1959) Vol. 189, No. 15

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Vas

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1959.
VOLUME 189, No. 15

EDITORIALS

Unanimity, in Principle

- In the nature of its business, the United Nations is
a forum not likely to be mistaken for a ladies’ garden
club or a convocation of the Society of Friends. It is
a place of collision, and all one can say is that it is
better for Henry Cabot Lodge and Vassily V. Kuznetsov
to exchange recriminations, or even vituperations, than
for their respective missile men to exchange warheads
over the sea. Yet on October 28, in the General As-
sembly, not only did Mr. Lodge and Mr. Kuznetsov
jointly sponsor a resolution, but they were joined by
the entire membership, so that the gallery witnessed a
spectacle as strange as the back side of the moon —
-eighty-two_ self-seeking, wrangling nations for once in
unanimous agreement. In fact, they all sponsored the
draft—an unprecedented occurrence, which fits in very
well with Jane Stolle’s optimistic picture of the U.N.
elsewhere in this issue (see page 328).

There was, of course, good reason for the phenomenon.
The resolution expressed the hope that measures lead-
ing to “general and complete disarmament under effec-
tive international control” would become effective “in
the shortest possible time.” What it meant was that
the delegates, and their policy-makers back home, had
their ears to the ground. Peace is the most popular
word in every language, all over the world, and every
statesman wants to be on record as favoring it. The
peoples may not know how to get it, but they know
what they want, and the lawgivers must listen.

The Big Should Be Magnanimous

Three of the smallest producers in the steel industry
—Kaiser with 2 per cent of production, Detroit Steel
and Granite City Steel each with 1 per cent—have indi-
cated a willingness to grant a wage increase to the Steel-
workers Union without raising prices (although unwill-
ing to make a firm commitment not to increase prices
later). The companies insist that the basis of settlement
is non-inflationary in effect. These firms are not merely
small in relation to the giants, but they are among the
less efficient producers in the industry.

The Kaiser settlement points the way to resolution
of the vexatious “2-B” issue — the work-rules provisions
‘of the contract — by agreeing to hold it in abeyance

Aah »

THE

NATION

while a joint committee, during the course of the agree-
ment, conducts a review. The difference here is between
Kaiser’s willingness to deal with work rules in a specific
manner, issue by issue, as against big steel’s adamant
insistence that the matter be settled in the abstract,
as a question of power or prerogative.

It is no secret that some of the Big Twelve would
be willing to adopt Kaiser’s formula on 2-B were it not
for prior commitments to U. S. Steel, Republic and Beth-
lehem to stand firm. The whip which these giants can
crack over the smaller, less efficient producers is suf-
ficient to hold most of them in line. As one of the few
integrated plants — i.e., one with its own ore supply — al
on the West Coast, Kaiser is in a somewhat preferred
position; Detroit and Granite City are simply not large
enough to be of interest to the great producers. But
even if they are in a special category, it is none the less
significant that three of the smallest companies in the
mdustry have proven themselves to be more generous ray
than the low-cost giants. The big are usually the mag-
nanimous but not, it would seem, in the steel industry.

Bolt in Reverse 2

Senator Strom Thurmond, who bolted the Demo-
cratic Party in 1948, has threatened a “massive new
bolt” in 1960 unless the nominees and platforms are
acceptable to the Dixiecrats. As a bolter, the Senator is
small beer compared to certain Northern right-wing
malcontents who gathered in Chicago last week and
came out resoundingly for (1) abolition of the federal
income tax; (2) cessation of all federal aid to states,
including farm supports; (3) repeal of the Reciprocal
Trade Act; and (4) severance of diplomatic relations
with the Soviet Union. But even Senator Thurmond’s
position, relatively moderate compared to that of Chi-
cago’s wild men, did not get much support last week
at the Southern Governors’ Conference at Asheville,
where the delegates exhibited little enthusiasm for a
bolt, massive or otherwise. ;

True, South Carolina’s Governor Ernest F. Hollings
tried to drum up sentiment for secession. But rightly
or wrongly, the Southern Governors are convinced that
no dramatic action on their part will be necessary, since
they believe it isn’t within the realm of political realism
that the Democrats will choose a “left-wing liberal” —

+s
in

—.*

es eet MPT mee, e aet,

tions and ameaing 3 it is a dianoaed of, If C

a Lb

i, @., a strong proponent of civil rights — in 1960. Paul
Butler? Our correspondent on the scene reports: “Most
Southern Governors say: ‘Oh, Butler has to talk ervil
liberties in order to appease the liberals and keep his
job. In the end he’ll back a candidate acceptable to
the South.’ ”

Obviously, the Southern Governors have concluded
that Senator Humphrey cannot be nominated; that
Kennedy, Johnson and Symington would be equally
acceptable; and that even Adlai Stevenson could be
supported on the basis of his “moderate” stand to date
on civil rights. With the Dixiecrats exhibiting this mood
of contentment, and the Northern right-wingers having
committed themselves to a program that can rally only
the fringe of the fringe, it is difficult to take Senator
Thurmond’s threats of a “massive new bolt” very seri-
ously. If, however, the Democrats do nominate candi-
dates and adopt a platform acceptable to the Dixiecrats,
the threat of a “massive bolt” might become very real
indeed. But it would not be a bolt of the Dixiecrats.

Chinese Fireworks

The Chinese are traditionally great noisemakers;
their New Year’s Day celebrations, with the papier-
maché dragons and loud firecrackers, are a staple of
American journalism. The use of noise as an instrument

_of diplomacy is, however, a recent Red Chinese inno-

vation the end of which we have not yet heard. It is
connected with American policy in the United Nations.
Once again we have blocked the admission of Red China
to the U.N. — a recurrent diplomatic triumph which
becomes more Pyrrhic each year. We managed to drum
up the necessary majority despite twenty-six absten-
tions, including such dear allies as Britain, France,
Belgium and Portugal. What preceded and followed
is as if the Chinese Reds said, “Very good, if you can’t
see us, maybe you can hear us.” They began with a
few shells lobbed over at Quemoy and Matsu which,
being a habit of long standing, registered as only a
feeble demonstration. They stepped up the decibels at
Laos, but this was still a small bang. Next Tibet, and
here the thunder began to roll. By now nobody ignored
the Chinese. They were still not at the limit, however;
the encroachments on India’s frontier shook the earth,
and showed what Chinese revolutionaries were capable of
in their noise technology. Where neither Laos nor Tibet
were clear-cut U.N. issues, this one certainly was, and
we may assume that the creation of the crisis was no
accident. It also shows that the Chinese Reds are com- '
pletely ruthless in their determination to be heard and
recognized. They are just as ready to shoot their friends
as their enemies — the noise, in the former case, may
be even louder.

All this is morally indefensible, clue points up the
folly of keeping a Great Power out of the United Bate

<< oe

interspersed between the rigged questions and answers —

— eae Ter Chinz —_ Were a member of the Un rited N a- |
tions it could be brought to book in some fashion, and —
perhaps in time it would mend its ways. As things are, —
we can only expect more noise — and it will not be
harmless.

Panache

Except perhaps for the panzer corps of General
Rommel, the most formidable personal instrument the
allied commanders had to counter in World War II
was the self-esteem of Charles de Gaulle. The General
has since explained that, modest by nature, he adopted
a calculated tone of personal glory to compensate for
the distinct lack of national glory that then depreciated —
his country in the world’s eyes.

The logic would be plausible, except that the Cyrano
style persists. A dispatch to The New York Times late
last week reports that the Paris theatre critics delayed
their notices of Giraudoux’s Electra, revived by the
Comédie Francaise, at the request of the President’s
office. General de Gaulle was to attend a gala per-
formance on the following night and it was felt, so the
Times correspondent explained, that reviews in advance
might rob the occasion of “the luster that the Presi-
dential presence is supposed to give it.” There was no
suggestion that General de Gaulle planned to arrive
at the theatre on horseback.

Stanton in the Augean Stables

It may be said on behalf of Dr. Frank Stanton, presi-
dent of the Columbia Broadcasting System, that at
least he has taken cognizance of the mess on the air
waves, while his fellow network presidents try to pre- —
tend that nothing much has happened. But that is
about all that can be said. Dr. Stanton’s proposed re-
forms are ail right as far as they go, but they don’t
go very far; he proposes that the routine technical
deceptions of radio and television (hereinafter to be
referred to jointly as radio, since television is merely
visual radio) are to be disallowed. No more canned
applause, no more pretense that interviews are un-
rehearsed when the stilted intonations of the partici-
pants clearly indicate the opposite, no more quiz shows.
Radio will be like the politician’s life: an open book.
But this is only compounding fraud with hypocrisy. The |
fact is that the broadcasting kilo- and megacycles, |
ostensibly the property of the public, have been usurped |
by as scurvy a crew of quacks and confidence men as |
the nation has seen since the days of Teapot Dome.
What if the big-money quiz shows were fixed? They |
were no more crooked than the commercials that were |

and | the mugging of the contestants, no more misleading
than the commercials still wus night and an Did |
Mai TCO is measndlen, De Forest, / es

oe om \ -
i o J a i \ > Hl

ph 7

‘in a courtroom this weck in Grundy

and thousands of engineers and inventors labor to the
end that the medicine show should be brought from
the vacant lot into the living room? The radio magnates
must think so; no other assumption fits the facts. If he
is sincere, Dr. Stanton has taken on the task of cleaning

out the Augean stables. It will not be done with a
garden hose, as George A. Codding, Jr., implies else-
where in this issue (see page 329).

The Halfback Is Worthy of His Hire

“New York City Wooing Army Football,” read the
headline heralding last Saturday’s West Point-Air Force
Academy game. It was revealed, before the clash,
that Mayor Wagner, the great apostle of metropolitan
culture, had been responsible for bringing the magnif-
icent contest to Yankee Stadium. This he accomplished
not so much by the well-known mayoral charm as
by money. At first it was planned to rebate the city’s
5 per cent amusement tax on tickets, but this was
found to be illegal. The amount of the rebate would
have been $15,000, so Hizzoner decided to take the
$15,000 out of the City’s Department of Commerce
promotion fund and present it to the Military Academy.
“It’s a darned good investment,” the Mayor said. “The
city will return $15,000 in admission taxes and will re-

ceive some $9,000,000 spent in business by the visitors.”
They spent, sure enough. The airlift bringing the play-
ers and the supporting air cadet contingent from Colo-
rado darkened the New York skies. The main party,
arriving Friday afternoon, prepared for its heroic hour
by an overnight stay in the Spartan surroundings of
the Westchester Country Club. It included the super-
intendent and. his entourage, the cadet cheer leaders,
erudite faculty members and a task force of trained
falcons. (The air footballers are called the Falcons.)
A glorious time was had by all. But now that it is
all over, including the shouting, two questions obtrude
themselves. By what authority does one governmental
body dole out largesse, even in the trifling sum of
$15,000, to another governmental body? And if this is
all in good order, and football is a business entitled to
get its funds where it can, why does the National Col-
legiate Athletic Association place on probation two er-
ring institutions, Wyoming and Montana State College,
for violating rules on reeruiting and financial aid to
athletes? If the Military Academy won’t play in New
York unless it gets that rebate, what’s the inconsistency
in these western universities, or for that matter the
Military Academy, paying for its athletes? Is not the
halfback worthy of his hire? It will be hard to teach
the boys otherwise.

THE SIEGE Aol HIGHLANDER ee by Dan Wakefield

MRS. SEPTIMA CLARK is sitting
where people ‘
County, Tennessee, guilty of engag-
ing all her life in such curious prac-
tices as teaching the poor to read,

tices.”

gathering and becoming drunk,”
‘drink and engage in
immoral, lewd, and unchaste prac-
More to the point of the

and port in advance of the final hearings
that opened this week in Grundy
County on the petition of District
Attorney General A. F. Sloan for the

closure of the entire school.

write, vote and earn a living, Bich.

ing Wéptces and whites to live and

work together in peace and brother-

hood, and spreading the gospel of
_ love and non-violent action. These
alarming activities have not been car-
ried on by Mrs. Clark alone, but by
a number of her friends and co-
workers at the Highlander Folk
School, which sits on a wooded
mountain top in the Cumberlands,
at Monteagle, Tennessee. The state
is attempting to close the school per-
manently on the grounds that it is
a “public nuisance,” a place where
a “boisterous, noisy, rowdy, and
drunken crowd makes a habit of |

DAN WAKEFIELD, author a

- land in

state’s desire to lock up the school
is that Negroes and white people
live and study there together, and,
as some of the local patriots have
explained, “That mountain wasn’t
made for niggers.”

The “Whites Only” sign that God
put on His mountain has not yet
been seen by the people of the High-
lander Folk School.

Last week Septima Clark, director
of education at Highlander, came
North with two leather bags full of
papers and tape recordings of the
preliminary hearings that were held
in Altamont, the county seat, on
September 14.16, ag a result of which
the school’s main buil
temporarily pedi ced.
met with interested gro

about | th

Some of the informal meetings
Mrs. Clark came North to address
were arranged by a Highlander com-
mittee in New York City, some by
interested people who had _ heard
about the case and called up friends
and neighbors to gather in homes
and hear the story told by Mrs. Clark
and the recordings of the earlier hear-
ings.

ABOUT twenty friends and neighe
bors came to hear Mrs. Clark at th
home of Kay Boyle, in Connectic
assembling in the dining room
listen to the story that envi
remote. from ‘the warmth of |

house, the. - people, the late autun
afternoon sun, the sine col

Mrs. Shey by t

tory of Hig

i - +
ae

14 oe es

its founder and president, Myles
Horton.

“Myles Horton was a poor moun-
tain boy from the Cumberlands,”
Mrs. Clark explained. “But he work-
ed hard and studied and got scholar-
ships and went to the Union Theo-
logical Seminary and the University
of Chicago and then a year in Den-
mark. He got an idea for a school,
and he had this dream—the dream
of Negroes and whites living and
working together in brotherhood.”

Myles Horton came back from
Europe to the Cumberlands in 1932,
and was given one building and forty
acres to begin his school. It was dur-
ing the depression, and he tried to
help the mountaineers, Negroes and
whites alike, find a way to make a
living. His mother taught weaving
and sewing at the school, and Hor-
ton taught skills and crafts to farm-
ers who could no longer make a
living off the land. In the middle
thirties, trade unions started bring-
ing people there to meet and hold
discussions and workshops, and in
1938 the first Negroes came to join
in classes along with whites. In sur-
rounding Grundy County, with a
population of 12,000, nearly all
white, the school first gained a “sub-
versive” reputation for being “mixed
up with unions” and then, more
seriously, for allowing Negroes and
whites to meet together.

MRS. CLARK spoke briefly about
recent work of the school: workshops
for Negroes and whites to discuss
citizenship and cooperation (one
student of these sessions was Rosa
Parks, who left Highlander and be-
came one of the key leaders in the
Montgomery bus boycott) and the
extension of its program to the peo-
ple of the Sea Islands off the coast
of Georgia and South Carolina. These
people, mainly Negroes, live in
weather-beaten shacks in dilapidated
villages long neglected by the out-
side world (the people of Daufuskie,
one of the islands near Savannah,
still must pay $100 for a visit from
a doctor, and the island can only be
reached by motorboat) except for
Highlander Folk School and Septima
Clark. With the backing of High-
lander, Mrs. Clark organized adult
schools for reading, writing and cit-
izenship on the islands. Since the

program began, 619 Negroes on
John’s Island alone learned to read
and write and pass the requirements
for voting registration, as have hun-
dreds of others on the surrounding
islands, and in Charleston. A South
Carolina paper reports that the past
two years saw the largest number of
Negroes to register for voting in the
area since Reconstruction.

IN TELLING this history, Mrs,
Clark did not tell about herself. What
I know about the life and work of
Septima Clark I know from. having
read a remarkably beautiful article
in the Catholic Worker by a young
woman named Judith Gregory, who
worked for a while with Mrs. Clark
at Highlander and on the Sea Is-
lands. Judith Gregory wrote:

Mrs. Clark is a remarkable woman,
a great leader in the South. Her
father was a slave on the plantation
of Joel Poinsette. He was a young
man during the Civil War and after
the war he settled in Charleston.
Mrs. Clark grew up there, and after
finishing high school became a school
teacher. She got a college degree
after twenty years of summer school,
then took an M.A. at Hampton and
Columbia. After the Supreme Court
decision of 1954, South Carolina re-
fused public employment to any
member of the NAACP. Mrs. Clark
tried to persuade Negro leaders to
resist, and herself was seen on the
platform at an NAACP meeting, and
lost her job as a teacher, just a year
or two before retirement.

Mrs. Clark did not mention any of
that; when you get your B.A, i
America by going twenty years to
summer school, you most likely lose
the need for self-flattery. Mrs. Clark
spoke briefly of how she and three
white men were arrested this July 31,
when a party composed of twenty
state troopers, deputies and a cam-
eraman and reporter from the Chat-
tanooga I’ree Press marched into the
Highlander grounds and buildings to
search for liquor (Grundy County
is dry) and, in the course of their
duties, ripped up workshop notes,
tore pages from a book by Martin
Luther King, and confiscated a per-
sonal letter, a billfold, cash and
credit cards. Mrs. Clark briefly sum-
marized this, and then
tapes of the hearings to § to ¢

, ei pe
iy) i aoe

eh “7

the? biel
,
fi

: fyid : ,
r, noe a mW Ps oS.

5 oO * CS ae ee

Since we have gone in big fo
“social criticism” by way of cultural
commentators, perhaps someone will
someday make an LP record of
selections from these tapes of the
hearings. It would, at a modest mini-
mum, tell us more about the state
of American society in 1959 than the
monologues of Mort Sahl. It contains
all the voices of the South: the rage,
the love, the hate; the bitterness and
bravery; the -frightening ignorance
and honesty and pride.

THERE was the voice of state wit-
ness May Thomas, a woman who
had once been ordered off the prop-
erty of Highlander on suspicion of
theft from its residences, and was
actually arrested for stealing in the
town several months ago. (All
but two of the state witnesses had
records of arrest or imprisonment. )

May Thomas testified that she had ©

once seen a Negro man and a white
woman having sexual intercourse in
the school library. Only, at the time
she cited, the library had not yet
been built. When the defense attor-
ney, Cecil Branstetter, asked her

-where her son was, she said he was

there with Mrs. Eleanor, Roosevelt, }

in Nashville. The attorney asked her
what he was doing in Nashville, and
her voice blared back, raspy with
anger and pride:

“He’s in the state prison, but he’s
not there for no communism.”

Dr. Wilfred Owen, head of the
theology department at the Univer-
sity of the South, at nearby Sewanee,
Tenn., testified that he had never
seen drunkenness, immorality, rowdi-
ness or the sale of liquor on his visits
to Highlander; that he. once was
served beer at a social gathering
where the guests had their choice of
beer and orange juice. In a voice low
and solid and quietly challenging,
Dr. Owen said of the school’s rep-
utation in his own town that “Some
people in Sewanee disagree with in-
tegration of any sort, or improving
racial relations. ...” and added that
it was these considerations that gave
the school its “bad reputation.”

There came after a while the
weary, bruised voice of Miss Vera
McCampbell, who had gone to work-
shops at Highlander and, after the
Grundy County Herald had run a
picture of her attending a meeting —

WK, 4 Kae Wie Was NI, aS

s attacked by the local American
Leg eo . The Legion eee to her
employer, the local school board,
which ordered her never to set foot
on the grounds of Highlander if she
wanted to keep her job. She refused
to agree, and after thirty-four years
of teaching in the county was re-
tired “with no reason given.” A. F.
Sloan, the attorney general of Ten-
nessee’s eighteenth judicial circuit,
asked her if she didn’t understand
that the school had a bad reputation.
She replied that “reputation is what
people say we are, character is what
we know we are,” and that the same
thing applied to Highlander, which
people accused of “integration and
communism” because they thought
something bad would happen when
people of different races got together.
The drawling, thick, deliberate
voice of John Clark, who had worked
as a night watchman at Highlander,
came on, and as the attorney gen-
eral railed and rose against him, he
slowly, steadily spoke back as if he
were weighing each question and re-
cording its answer for no less high
a tribunal than that of the Last
Judgment. His words were spoken as
if he were carving each letter in
wood with a penknife. Asked why
Highlander had such a bad reputa-
tion, he said of the people who talked
‘that way that “They don’t like the
~ colored folks — that’s the main is-
} sue.”
The attorney general

‘
,
fy

“accused”

Tohn Clark of having rane help
from Myles Horton, and Clark ad-
mitted it was true that Myles Hor-
ton had indeed helped him when
his wife was ill and he was out of
work: “He’s been nice to me and
he’s been nice to the county. Lots
of them that’s agin him he’s ac-
commodated time after time.”

At the end there was the voice of
Attorney General Sloan, pleading
that the judge lock up the school
and eliminate this public nuisance.
Sloan’s voice, choking with rage and
almost indistinguishable, roared out
that Highlander Folk School was “fan
integrated whorehouse.”

He rested his case and then Judge
Chester C. Chattin summed up. He
said that the state had failed to
prove anything except that beer had
sometimes been sold in the main
building of the school, and since the
sale of beer without a license was
illegal, he would order the main
building temporarily padlocked. In
rendering his judgment, Judge Chat-
tin said: “Sometimes I wonder at
the power of somebody to do some-
thing to a human being. Sometimes
I shudder at what I have to do to
enforce the law.”

His voice, slow and gracious and
tired, was the voice of Southern
gentlemen like Judge Curtis Swango,
who presided at the Emmett Till
murder trial in Sumner, Mississipp1;
the voice of all those in the South
who are caught in the maelstrom of

HOW CONGRESS KILLED CIVIL RIGHTS

te
¥

A LITTLE more than two years ago,
the United States Senate was en-
grossed in the consideration of what
was widely advertised as the first

legislation bearing the name of civil

rights to reach the final stages of ©

_ Congressional action since 1871.
Among both liberals and conserva-

tives, among all who believe that the

Constitutional rights of Americans

; ator
~

t i pte ae

4 WAYNE MORSE i is the ed n- haps no legislation at al
m Oregon. “nieaeh

The > first to go was P
a4 i

k MURDER by the MODERATES ee by Wayne Morse

must be more than pro forma rights,
the enactment of a civil-rights bill of
some kind became an overriding ob-
jective — indeed, became more im-
portant than what was in it. As a
result the major sections, designed
to protect and further the voting and
other rights of Negroes, were stripped
from it on the Senate floor o on the

hate that swamps i a. and try-

Ses

Se bey
Ce Ph an

aN be)
ae rey
¥ ve Be re *

===

ing to hold their heads up in it and
speak from its depths of honor rather
than its depths of fear.

SSS

IT WAS over then; the machine was
turned off, and there were only our
own voices, and Mrs. Clark’s. She
was saying that she hoped when it
all was over she would be able to
invite the attorney general to come
to some of their workshops and see "he
for himself what Highlander was real- oe
ly like. She smiled, recalling how he at
had shaken his finger and yelled at .
her in court, and how she later shook a
his hand; and she told her friends she a
felt no bitterness toward him. a
“T knew he was all stirred up >
inside. I could see the veins sticking

out in his neck, and I thought to oe
myself, that man won’t even be able a
to digest his dinner tonight. Me, I Ay

went home and ate hearty as you
please.”

Now she is back there, along with
Myles Horton and all the others,
fighting to continue the work that ad
the state has found such a “nui- 2
sance.” We are left, those few of us 12
who heard Mrs. Clark and her re- +4
cordings, with the haunting recollec- ¥
tion of the voices, speaking even Kt
now in a county courtroom in the
Cumberlands, determining whether
or not the active practice and teach-
ing of equality and brotherhood is

“legal” in’ the heart of America in
1959,

House-passed bill, which would have
enabled federal law-enforcement
agents to institute proceedings for
preventive relief, including injunc-
tions, on behalf of the victims of —
segregated schools. By that decision,
the Senate removed the segregation —
issue entirely from the legislati on,
confining it to voting rights.

~The pending bill still authorized _
the Attorney General to seek preven-
tive relief where deprivation: of the —
night to 1 vote appeared imminent;

but where the preventive relief was
obtained through injunction or sim-
ilar court order, the Senate bill guar-
anteed that violators, who would
then stand in criminal contempt of
court, would get a jury trial.

‘These were the controversial parts

of the 1957 civil-rights bill. Also in-
cluded in it were a provision for a
Civil Rights Study Commission,

which was to study and collect infor-
mation on civil-rights violations, and
another for an additional Assistant
Attorney General to handle civil-
rights cases in the Justice Depart-
ment.

‘This was the legislation which the
Senate was urged to approve as being
a milestone in the advancement of
civil rights in America.

As it turned out, I was the only
Northern Democratic Senator to
vote against it. Explaining my vote,
I said at the time:

It is said that half a loaf is better
than nothing, but I question whether
in this bill there is even half a
loaf. A year or two of delay in en-
acting a true civil-rights bill could
very well improve the quality and
substance of the measure enacted.
In contrast, I fear that once a bill
bearing the name “civil rights” is en-
acted, it will not be possible for
many years to obtain further Con-
eressional action on the subject.

Even the voting-rights section of
the bill has been weakened to the
point where its enforceability is in
doubt. The interposition of a jury in
voting-rights contempt-of-court cases
weakens that section and further de-
tracts from the independence of the

judiciary. ...
We have a solemn obligation to
enact legislation whose. promise

brings fulfillment, not bitter frustra-
tion.

Now, two years later, the Civil

Rights Study Commission, which was’

considered by many to be the major
feature of the Civil Rights Act of
1957, has made its report on the state
of voting rights in the nation and
upon the degree to which existing law
protects those rights.

The commission finds that since
enactment of the 1957 civil-rights
law, the Department of Justice has
instituted three suits to protect the
suffrage. One of these was dismissed
because the board of registration in-
volved in the case resigned, leaving

4 “i+, . ae ’ u
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no one to sue; another was also dis-—

missed, but is now on appeal; the
third is still pending. Said the com-
mission:

In short, no one had yet been
registered through the civil remedies
of the 1957 Act.

Class suits on behalf of a number
of Negroes to obtain registration
have rarely been successful. The
courts have inclined to the view that
these suits are of an individual na-
ture, with the result that a vast num-
ber of suits may be necessary... .

It [the commission] finds that the
existing remedies under the Civil
Rights Act of 1957 are insufficient
to and protect the right to
vote of such citizens.

secure

IN JANUARY, at the start of the
succeeding (86th) Congress, Senator
Douglas of Illinois introduced in be-
half of a group of Senators, including
myself, a bill authorizing the Sec-
retary of Health, Education, and
Welfare to prepare school-desegrega-
tion plans, or to extend advice and
information on the subject to com-
munities, and granting financial aid
to school districts to help them meet
the costs involved in desegregation.

On July 15, the Constitutional
Rights Subcommittee of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, under the
chairmanship of Senator Hennings
of Missouri, approved a_ two-part
civil-rights bill. One part extended
the life of the Civil Rights Commis-
sion for two years; the other provid-
ed for retention by local officials of
federal election records and their pro-
duction, on demand, to the Attorney
General or his representative.

After several meetings, the full
Judiciary Committee failed to bring
a favorable report on this bill. Sen-
ator Hennings then offered the bill,
plus six other civil-rights measures,
as amendments to §.1617, a bill of
ready on the Senate calendar, which
set out certain rules for federal-state
legislative jurisdiction over federally
owned lands. 8.1617 was reported out
of the Senate Government Opera-
tions Committee, but upon adjourn-
ment of the Senate it was left on the
calendar, along with the Hennings
amendments.

On the final day of the session, I
introduced the legislative recommen-
dations of the Civil Rights Commis-

D
F S

es ; d 7
‘ wail) Cee te

sion, rer called for fereneiga of a

voting and registration records; the
appointment of federal registrars
where local registrars discriminate
against Negroes; authorization for
the commission to aid in formulation
of desegregation plans and, upon re-
quest, to serve as a mediator; and
penalties for failure of election offi-
cials to carry out their duties.

My proposals, along with those of
Senator Hennings, as well as several
other versions of these bills, now go
over to the next session of Congress.
The two-year extension of the life of
the commission was the only “civil
rights” measure adopted at the first
session, and Congress adjourned with
a promise upon the lips of the leader-
ship on both sides of the aisle that
the close of the Lincoln Day holiday
next February would be the time for
civil-rights legislation to be brought
once again before the Senate.

How this is to be done, and what
measure is to be considered, remain
unknown.

ONE OF MY principal reasons for
opposing the adjournment of Con-
gress on September 15 this year was
the fact that Congress was walking
out on the recommendations of the
Civil Rights Study Commission for
further legislation’ to protect the
right to vote. In effect, Congress
walked out on the Fifteenth Amend-
ment, just as it had two years earlier.
And I do not think it is an exaggera-
tion to say that this latest failure to
deal with a basic issue was due to
the original passage of a bill which
(except for the creation of the civil-
rights commission ) was toothless and
meaningless. For once a statute deal-
ing with a highly inflammable prob-
lem is put on the books, further con-
sideration is in most cases forestalled
for years.

Because civil rights is probably
the most inflammatory domestic is-
sue on the Hill, every Congress tries
to avoid facing it. It involves vast
political implications and extreme
points of view which themselves
are but reflections of the economic
and social changes that could well
result from the free exercise of the
franchise by Southern Negroes.

Consideration of a civil-rights bill
often means hard words and hurt—

Es The N

J »; TLO N “
7 ( ee wt

feelings, displayed in public and for
the record; it means prolonged de-
bate or even filibuster, and wounds
to both parties, especially to the
Democratic Party. Now, with a bill
bearing the civil-rights label already
on the books, the rolling ball has been
stopped, and great new effort will be
needed to put it in motion again.

A second reason for the failure to
date of the 86th Congress to deal
with the issue ‘was the liberals’ sur-
render, at the start of the session, on
Senate Rule 22 — the “filibuster”
rule. The 1958 election gave the
Democrats two-thirds of the Senate
and almost the same margin in the
House — the heaviest majority in
more than twenty years. A reinforced
liberal wing then started out boldly
in January to revise Rule 22, pre-
paratory to consideration of a new
civil-rights bill; but most of the
troops melted away the moment they
were presented with a revised rule
which offered a distinction without
a difference.

Thus right at the start of the 86th
Congress it was apparent that the
influx of Northern Democrats would
not necessarily mean a strong or
persistent insistence upon civil-rights
legislation. Unhappily, too many lib-
erals in the present Congress have
displayed a tendency to settle for
labels regardless of content, not only
on civil rights but on the whole
liberal program. And this year the
Democratic majority is so heavy that
the usual excuse of a lack of a work-
ing majority cannot be trotted out.

SO FAR as this Democratic Congress
is concerned, then, there are, first,
those Senators and Congressmen
from the South who adamantly op-
pose any and all civil-rights legisla-
tion; and second, the Senators and
Congressmen from northern, eastern
and western states who, though
pledged to the civil-rights cause, are
willing to accept a label if that is
all that can conveniently be obtained.
And in the middle stands the party’s
leadership, offering not a set of prin-
ciples, but only its expertise in find-
ing the compromise which will induce
the entire legislative process—right
up to the President’s signature—to
operate with a minimum of friction.

It seems to be true of the legisla-

ovember 7, 1959

tive process that a truly adamant
opposition—no matter how small nu-
merically—tends to dictate the com-
promise; in other words, the most
extreme opposition becomes the low-
est common denominator in any
civen legislative situation. During the
debate on civil rights in 1957, the
old saw about politics being the art
of the possible was repeated over
and over; but the corollary, that
moderation works only with moder-
ates, was ignored. As long as the lib-
erals in the Democratic Party suc-
cumb to the party-unity-above-all-
else theme, there will be no realistic
legislation on civil rights. The “do
nothing” side will always win.

I do not, therefore, foresee the en-
actment of an effective civil-rights
bill until liberals make it clear that
they will settle for nothing less than
genuine enforcement of the 14th and
15th Amendments, and show them-
selves ready to face up to whatever
struggle within the Democratic Party
this entails.

REPUBLICANS in Congress hold
the balance of power on civil rights,
both in committee and on the floor
of the House and Senate. Without
the GOP, no bill can be passed; with
it, a strong bill could conceivably be
passed.

Those who think a Republican
Congress offers a better chance for
civil-rights legislation than a Demo-
cratic one have precious little argu-
ment to advance. In the 83rd Con-
gress, which the GOP controlled,
several civil-rights measures got no
further than the Senate Judiciary
Committee. The same Congress per-
mitted a modest fair-employment
practices bill, which had been re-
ported from the Senate Labor Com-
mittee, to die on the calendar.

Moreover, in the 84th, 85th and
86th Congresses, the GOP failed to
swing its weight onto the side of
civil rights. Instead, it has revived
its traditional coalition with South-
ern Democrats. This year’s record
shows that Southern Democrats are
again voting with the Republicans
on etonomic and social-welfare is-
sues, such as the Kennedy-Landrum-
Griffin labor law, while the GOP
leadership, in turn, has failed to push
for civil-rights legislation.

Another significant point: Since
the GOP took over control of the
Administration six years ago, it has
neither pressed for enforcement of
existing civil-rights statutes, nor
fought for new ones. In fact, it was
President Eisenhower who sounded
the retreat from Part III of the 1957
civil-rights bill—the’ part which
would have given the federal gov-
ernment power to enjoin school-
segregation practices.

IT ADDS up to this: today’s Demo-
cratic Party leadership does not lead
so much as it is pushed, and to pass
a civil-rights bill means that Demo-
cratic liberals will simply have to
exert more pressure on the leader-
ship than do the Southern Demo-
crats. At the outset of the first ses-
sion of the present Congress, the
“heat” for civil rights seemed to be
on, and the Senate Majority Leader
did introduce a civil-rights bill of
sorts. But as soon as the steam went
out of the liberal drive for a real
piece of legislation, even the thin
measure introduced by the Majority
Leader was dropped.

Because I say these things, there
are those who will attack me as a
party-wrecker. To keep the record
straight, I am not inviting anyone
out of the Democratic Party. But I
shall not be one to purchase party
unity at the expense of the Negro’s
right to vote, his right to equal edu-
cation, his right to share equally in
all public services and facilities.
That price is too high to pay for
party unity, in my opinion; and it
is long past time for those of us in
the Democratic Party who are dedi-
cated to the furtherance of human
justice to stop paying it.

327

OT er ka c nr oye Bee
7 Wht ' ~ a

THE U.N. AFTER CAMP DAVID... by Jane stotte

United Nations
THE CURRENT trend toward per-
sonal diplomacy among the great
powers worries many friends of the
United Nations. How long can the
world organization maintain its pres-
tige, they ask, when the headlines
center not on the East River, but on
Camp David, Blair House, a corn
farm in Iowa, a dacha outside Mos-
cow, an ambassador’s villa in Gen-
eva? If this continues, will not the
U.N. end as the League of Nations
ended — a monument to the futility
of the international idea?

As U.N. Day was celebrated last
week, members of the Secretariat
showed no sign of worry. On the con-
trary, the atmosphere here continues
to be as vibrant as ever; there
is an aura of confidence discernible
that bespeaks satisfaction with the
present and hope for the future. The
reasons for this confidence are nec-
essarily complicated, for they have
to do with a concept of the U.N.’s
role in world affairs which is itself
complex and in process of subtle
change from year to year.

In the introduction to the “Annual
Report of the Secretary General to
the (Fourteenth) General Assem-
bly,” Mr. Hammarskjold noted that
“intense diplomatic activities main-
ly outside the United Nations” had
taken place during the year, and re-
marked:

The United Nations is not in-
tended to be a substitute for nor-
mal procedures of reconciliation and
mediation, but rather an added in-
strument providing, within the limits
of its competence, a further or ulti-
mate support for the maintenance of
peace and security,

This does not mean, the Secretary
General added, that matters which
concern the peace and security of the
world can be dealt with summarily
and in disregard of “third-party” in-
terests.

Thus, in the view of the Secretary
General, direct negotiations are as
necessary a component of the world
political mosaic as the U.N. But, he
LTT Le eae
JANE STOLLE is The Nation’ s
U.N. correspondent.

328

warns in effect, the U.N. has. its
place in the negotiating process. One
may safely infer that in the view of
the Secretariat, the moment for U.N.
intervention depends upon circum-
stances; im one instance, it may be
in the early, preparatory stage of
negotiations; in another, in the mid-
dle or, perhaps, the terminal stage
of the talks.

Each problem develops its own
characteristic contours, and the world
organization must feel free to adapt
itself accordingly if its role is to be
constructive.

IN ANY CASE, the world issues
which have launched prime ministers
and presidents on their current per-
egrinations are already deeply rooted
in the U.N. agenda. Disarmament
has been there since the birth of the
organization, and there is no disposi-
tion here to consider that the forma-
tion, outside of the U.N., of a ten-
nation body to deal with it in any
way detracts from ultimate U.N.
responsibility for the question. On
the contrary, there is a certain relief
felt here that this extraordinarily
complicated issue need no longer be
debated, at the initial stage, in an
unwieldy eighty-two-member U.N.
Disarmament Commission. Ties be-
tween the ten-nation body and the
U.N.’s own commission were immedi-
ately established; and, if there were
any who speculated that the U.N.
was being by-passed, Mr. Khru-
shchev’s proposals before the current
General Assembly effectively answer-
ed them. The Secretariat is con-
vinced that in the long run the prob-
lem would have returned to the U.N.
without Mr. Khrushehev, even if in
some other form or under quite an-
other aegis.

Indeed, the Secretariat remains
convinced that all major problems
will be brought, sooner or later, to
the door of the U.N. And if they
have not communicated that assur-
ance to their worried friends in the
degree that they feel it, it is largely
because of the inadequacy of words
to describe concepts that involve
dynamic growth and change. During
an interview last May in Geneva for

Mr. Hammar-

German __ television,
skjold said:

I believe that the United Nations
represents a necessary stage in the
effort to create the more vigorous
forms of international life which I
believe must come some day if na-
tions are to solve the problems of
living together in peace... ... You
will note that I purposely avoid us-
ing such phrases as “world govern-
ment” or “world federation,” be-
cause the forms suitable for a uni-
versal society are quite likely to
prove altogether different from those
to which we have become accustomed
in national states.

This is the long view, and in their
thoughtful moments, it is the view
that the Secretariat take as they
watch the frequently fruitless debates
in the great hall of the General As-
sembly, or note how often hoped-for
agreements dissolve in the acid of
conflicting national aspirations. And
they feel that this long view is justi-
fied on the basis that today’s world
has already accepted the idea that
organized international cooperation
is the only hope for mankind’s sur-
vival. Born as an ideal, the interna-
tional idea has become a necessity;
there is no other answer to man’s
question: “How can I stay alive?”
The United Nations, in its present
form, may or may not be the ulti-
mate concrete form which the inter-
national idea will assume, but what
comes must perforce be built upon
what has gone before.

MEANWHILE, the U.N. is giving
this historical process a helping hand.
Especially in recent years, the con-
stant testing of the body’s facilities
for political and social action have
resulted in its slow transformation
from a forum for debate to a place
where things happen. The handling
of the recent Laos crisis is a case in
point. Mr. Hammarskjold, taking
advantage of the elasticity written
into the U.N. Charter by its wise
founding fathers, made an unprece-
dented “personal approach” to the
Security Council, and by so doing
avoided a Soviet veto and kept. a
touchy situation in Laos from ex-
ploding into a possible second Korea.

| ol aren y > Se Tee ay

‘The Soviet delegate called the Sec-
retary General’s action illegal, and
even some of his supporters called
his maneuver “daring”; but it
worked, and no one “took a walk.”

We have opened a door [the
Secretary General noted later] to a
method by which the Secretary Gen-
eral can, in the most official, solemn
and responsible form, report to the
Security Council on a situation, on
a question, without any substantive
item being inscribed on the agenda
li.e., thus avoiding the possibility of
a veto]. From my point of view, this
is a solid gain and one which opens
up new areas of possible political
initiatives from the Secretary Gen-
eral and necessarily, as a counter-
point, increases the responsibilities of

the Office.

Thus an almost defunct organ of
the U.N., the Security Council, has
been given a new lease of life, at least
temporarily. There is additional hope
for it from another quarter. Article
28, Section 2, of the Charter says:
“The Security Council shall hold
periodic meetings at which each of
its members may, if it so desires, be
represented by a member of the gov-
ernment or by some other specially
designated representative.” It almost
seemed as though the authors of the
Charter had Summit meetings in
mind; certainly, if Mr. Khrushchev’s
proposals for periodic Summits ever
come to fruition, what better place
to meet than around the council
table?

Growth is the result of stimula-

tion, and an imaginative Secretariat,
and imaginative member nations, are
constantly stimulating the various
organs of the United Nations — the
General Assembly, the Economic and
Social Council, the Trusteeship
Council and the International Court
of Justice—to new forms of activity,
to new potentials for growth. The
dynamism of the United Nations
must be reckoned with in any evalu-
ation of its future world role. This
dynamism makes it difficult, per-
haps, to define exactly what the
United Nations is, and what its re-
sponsibilities are; but it is the best
possible assurance that the world
organization will be around to chal-
lenge its deriders for a long time to
come.

HIGH COST of

THE CURRENT television “fix”
scandals, sordid as they are, should
not blind those interested in this
important medium to the basic is-
sue involved: does the system un-
der which television now operates
provide adequate insurance that it
will be used in the public interest?

The pervasiveness, immediacy and
intimacy of television make it one
of the most powerful influences on
men’s minds that the world has ever
known. If used with imagination and

a sense of responsibility, it has vast
potentials for enriching men’s minds.
But by design or accident it can also
be turned into a wearisome prop-
aganda machine; or, hardly better,
just another instrument for amuse-
ment and distraction, luring the
viewer to go on listening until he can
no longer hear, to watch until he can
no longer see.

Technical limitations take televi-
sion out of the category of other
media of mass communications such
as newspapers. The frequencies used
by TV broadcasting are a scarce na-
tional resource; there are not enough

GEORGE A. CODDING, Jr., author
of Broadcasting Without Barriers,
teaches political science at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania.
November 7, 1959

i L

FREE TV..

available to permit everyone to have
one for the asking. Those who make
use of a frequency are thus in a posi-
tion of employing a facility that in
the last analysis belongs to the pub-
lic. Thus, as stated by Sydney Head
in his book Broadcasting in America
(Houghton Mifflin, 1956): “Those
who directly profit economically
through the broadcasting service —
the advertisers and licensees — do
so only in consideration of a service
rendered to the general public.”

The American system of television
was organized on the theory that
active competition between rival
television stations would insure that
the viewer would receive the finest
programs that money could buy. The
Federal Communications Commis-
sion, a federal regulatory body, was

given the task of making certain.

that stations would be operated ac-
cording to the standard of “public
interest, convenience and necessity.”

Through the years, the FCC has

decided to use its powers only to

protect the public’s interest in the
technical field, leaving program con-
tent to the ‘ada staits .

In its first decade of - full-fledged
Operation, this re shown
some serious defects. The theory
that competition would Drove te for

by George A. Codding, Jr.

the best possible programs was the
first to fall. As it turned out, televi-
sion stations sold not programs, but
products — cigarettes, laxatives and
automobiles. As a result, competi-
tion stimulated the growth not of
good programs, but of the kind of
entertainment that pandered to the
largest possible viewing audience.
Another defect in the competitive
system, well demonstrated by the
current fix scandals, has also become
clear. The networks and individual
stations have lost control of program-
ing to the sponsors who pay the
bill, and the sponsors, in turn, have
handed over control to the advertis-
ing agency. Thus, however enlight-
ened or public-spirited the television
executives might be, they were
forced by financial considerations to
relinquish control to interests with
no responsibility to the public.
Consequently, American television
began to merit the derision of many.
In the parliamentary debates pre-
ceding the inauguration of commer-
cial television in Britain, one mem-
ber of the House of Lords stated
that he was terrified of the deaden-
ing effect that American-style “triv-
iality” would have in Britain if a
like system were adopted. Only a
year ago, one of America’s respected

329

broadcasters made an urgent plea
to the networks to clean house so
that American children would not
be able to look back, in later years,
and accuse them of having been
perpetrators of “decadence, escapism,
and insulation from the realities in
which we live.”

EXCEPT FOR a few meritorious
public-service programs, American
television has done little to improve
the fare offered to the public, not-
withstanding industry “codes,” pious
proclamations by network executives
and even hints by the FCC.

And the price the viewer must pay
for what he is being offered! Accord-
ing to recent surveys, the ordinary
American television family spends
almost six hours a day before the
screen. The industry’s own code sug-
gests that no more than six minutes
of each hour of program time should
be devoted to commercials. (This is
for sixty-minute programs only, of
which there are relatively few; short
programs, under the code, may con-
tain more. For instance, fifteen-min-
ute programs are permitted up to

io ae es woe
Ae are a

television is a voracious consumer,

and the desire to provide a variety
of programs, have caused some of
the traditional government-monopoly
countries to look for other sources
of income.

Few countries have been as for-
tunate as Switzerland in this mat-
ter. Late in 1957, while the gov-
ernment was debating the future of
Swiss television, an offer was re-
ceived from a commercial trust of-
fering to pay the television service
two million francs a year for a half-
hour daily of advertising time. Al-
though somewhat reluctant to in-

ice differs in many basic respects
from the American system. The gov-
erning body, appointed by the gov-
ernment, obtains revenue by leasing
its facilities to privately financed
program contractors selected com-
petitively. The contractors prepare
programs and sell “spot” advertise-
ments directly to the advertiser, or
through advertising agencies. The
content, time and place of advertise-
ments are all controlled by the goy-
ernment authority, and Parliament
has prescribed that it should always
be made clear to audiences that the
advertisers do not control the pro-
gram itself,

Unfortunately, as many have al-
ready pointed out, the ITA system
has broken down in several respects.
For instance, the rule that advertis-
ing should come only during a “nat-
ural break” in a program has been
abused by ingenious arrangements
of these natural breaks. More im-
portant, despite the intent of Parlia-
ment, the English advertiser has
come to enjoy an identification with

one
&

24% to 3 minutes of advertising time,
and so on.) Thus thirty-six minutes
a day, at the very least, the Ameri-
can family watches commercials;
each week, the viewer spends a little
over four hours, each year the stag-
gering total of eight and a half days,
looking at nothing but commercials.

ape aa 6

the program around which his
“spots” have been placed, thus open-
ing British television to some of the
criticism leveled at its American
counterpart.

ee
ote = >

troduce commercial television, the
offer did have the advantage of pro-

viding the means for improvement WHAT is overlooked by many com-

There are alternative methods of
paying for television. Many coun-
tries, both in the West and East,
have adopted the principle of gov-
ernment monopoly. This system pro-
vides, in most cases, for payment of
an annual license fee by the TV-
owner. These fees, supplemented
where necessary by direct govern-
ment subsidies, supply the financial
basis of operation. In France, for
instance, the viewer pays about
$10.75 a year for the privilege of
watching several hours of daily —
mostly in the evening hours — com-
mercial-free television. Some coun-
tries place telecasting in the hands
of a corporation distinct from the
state, but supervised by a govern-
ment-appointed board; others place
the control of TV directly in the
hands of a government bureau.

The high cost of talent, of which

of the service. The dilemma was re-
solved when the Swiss Association
of Newspaper Publishers made a
counter offer of two million francs
a year for ten years if the television
service would agree not to resort to
advertising during that time. This
offer was accepted, and Swiss televi-
sion remains ad-less.

A more common method is that

‘adopted in Britain — a combination

of state and commercial control. In
the older BBC system, consisting of
a government corporation supervised
by an appointed board, the operat-
ing funds are raised by imposing a
£3 ($8.40) annual fee for each set
in operation. (Britons can purchase
either the £1 radio license or the
combined £4 radio-television license. )
In addition, there is now the In-
dependent Television Authority
(ITA), created in 1954 to own and

mentators who reject the ITA for-
mula for American television is the
great advantage the British system
enjoys in the competition for view-
ers between BBC and ITA. The
BBC, as an arm of government, has
a responsibility to use its resources
to provide an alternate fare for the
viewer based upon its raison détre
as a public service. With its in-
dependent source of income, the
BBC can experiment, can provide
for programs whose appeal is not
solely to the largest common denom-
inator. The viewer is given a choice,

This is the very element that is
too often lacking in American televi-
sion. Our system is forced by finan-
cial consideration to cater to the
mass taste; the result is often an ex-
tremely low level of intellectual fare.
The manner in which TV pollsters
approach the viewer furnishes a kind ©

- The Nation p

bation of present programing.
The question asked is not what the
viewer would prefer to see, but, in
effect, which of the programs of-
fered at the moment is the least of-
fensive to him. There is no quality
competition.

THE ANSWER to the ailments of
American television lies in providing
this competition — and it can be
provided without changing the fun-
damental structure. Implicit in the
FCC’s power to license is the power
to demand that some time be given
by each of the networks, as well as
by unaffiliated private stations, to
public-service programs. The long-
suffering criterion of “public interest,
convenience and necessity” could be
clearly defined to mean that a cer-

Pignerdater for the con-

grams be presented every week. The
Supreme Court itself has said that
the licensing function of the FCC
cannot be discharged merely by find-
ing that there are no technological
objections to the granting of a license.
If such were the case, how could the
commission choose between two ap-
plicants for the same facilities, each
of whom was equally qualified from
a technical point of view?

To insure that the viewing pub-
lic is given a chance to view these
programs, it should be made clear
that they are to be given at specific
intervals during prime listening
times. To eliminate the fear that a
competing network or station might
take advantage of this service to the
public, the FCC could also insist
that the public-service program hours

tain number of public-service pro-

be common throughout the industry.
Few persons would fail to be excited
by the prospect of our great televi-
sion networks devoting their re-
sources to a competitive race to pro-
vide the best public-service pro-
grams.

As long as those who control tele-
vision’s resources are unable or un-
willing to realize their responsibili-
ties to the public interest, it is up to
the FCC to make them do so. If the
FCC cannot do so, it is up to Con-
gress to change the laws. One thing
is clear: if something positive is not
done soon, the possibility of establish-
ing a government network in com-
petition with our present system, or
of turning all television over to a
government monopoly, will become
increasingly attractive. Some legisla-
tors are already hinting as much.

SAUCERY and FLYING SAUCERS ee by David Cort

THE ae saucers” or “soucoupes”
or “discs” or “Ufos” (unidentified
flying Medics, in military jargon)
were first seen during World War II
over Sweden and Germany, and
afterwards practically everywhere,
_ including the Antarctic. But they
_ seem to have concentrated over the
_ southwestern United States, making
their earthly capital Los Angeles.
They are usually reported as round
or eye-shaped, sometimes as cigar-
_ shaped. Dissimilar visions seem now
_ to have been consolidated to give
_ them all the abilities to race at up to
f 10,000 miles an hour, zigzag at this
b speed, stop on a dime, hover, accel-
| erate at impossible rates, appear and
_ disappear at whim. They range in
size from a watch-face to a ware-
house, and one “observer” claims a
9,000-mile-long Ufo. When the oc-
| cupants descant themselves, they
are seen as dwarfs or giants, beauti-
| ful or ugly, human or monstrous,
| sometimes lemur-like, sometimes in-
h sectiform. The beings, as well as their
en are often composed of

aay

| DAVID CORT’S latest book, Is

_ There an American in the House?,

| wil be published soon by Mi milla.
ovember 7, 1959 {is SK

pure fire or light, but without any
combustion.

Some of the reports come from
sober, reputable people, especially
commercial airline pilots who did not
expect, and were not pleased by, the
spectacle. One pilot on the Puerto
Rico run had to pull his plane into a
steep climb to avoid a fiery mass
hurtling at him. (And this seems to
be a new problem for pilots.) Seven
other pilots that night saw a similar
object. Pan American pilot George
Wilson watched one large, bright
light followed by four small lights in
regular formation bear down on his
plane and make a sharp right turn
at impossible speed. These are prob-
ably honest reports. Yet it should
be remembered that intermittently
through the ages, sober, reputable
people have been “seeing” things that
weren’t there.

The United States Air Force regu-'
larly evaluates the Ufos. Of 143 re-
ported in the first half of 1959, 7
were balloons, 23 aircraft, 65 astro-
nomical phenomena, 19° birds, hoaxes

and searchlights, and ed giz
missed for insufficient data. Th

left three “unknown.” For
ets were about 100 “unk

year. They had dropped to 20 in
1957, 7 in 1958. However, the re-
ports are again on the increase.

Still, it is true that “unknown” is
a big, awesome word.

AND SO, bathing in its eerie light,
a new elite of hysterics and mounte-
banks has appropriated the world of
the future. Ingenious plot gimmicks
used for years by science-fiction
writers are now put forward by a
Fools’ Festival as science-non-fiction.

And respectable people do not
laugh. Everybody today is afraid of
being caught smiling at Jules Verne,
nearly a hundred years late. Every-
body’s naive belief in the incredible,
whether scientific or supernatural, is
in peculiar contrast to everybody’s
decadent cynicism about all human
affairs, even the most credible. And
this takes us back to the dawn of
the Christian era and a similar phe-
nomenon, alchemy.

Alchemy began as an honest phil- _

osophy of chemistry. It soon turned,

in Alexandria, into the making of —

imitation jewelry. This small success

for profit turned into the age-long —

attempt to transmute other metals

into real gold and find the elixir of ©

ry
Mm, |

immortality. By then the alchemists
had been in touch with the gods,
and the fallen angels, who had inter-
bred with mortal women, published
magic formulae under false names
and glorified the “philosopher’s egg”
which is now in the sky, in a distinct
comedown in nomenclature, as the
“flying saucer” or “Ufo.”

Today, the elixir of immortality
has been vouchsafed to one George
van Tassel by friends from Venus.
He has collected money and actual-
ly built the concrete foundation for
a “human regenerator laboratory”
at Yucca Valley, California, and
wants to run for President on the
Space ticket. A Missouri hillbilly,
Buck Nelson, returned from Mars,
reports that there the schools are all
happily segregated among white
Gentiles, Jews and Negroes. “Long
John” Nebel, who has a post-mid-
night radio program on New York’s
WOR, suspects the visitors from
outer space may be actually enemy
agents, and counts himself the Paul
Revere of outer space. One Orfeo M.
Angelucci has published a book de-
scribing his intimate relations with
the outer-space people. Probably a
real visionary, he has seen the gods
in their fiery light, drunk their bev-
erages (“delicious”), heard their ga-
lactic music (“etheric”), visited the
small planetoid (“celestial”) where
his friends live, and unhappily made
a disgusting mortal “pass” at his
friend’s girl. Orfeo sounds like a good
running mate for George van Tassel,
better than Nixon and somewhat
similar. “Long John” would be Sec-
retary of State, with a somewhat en-
larged jurisdiction. Surely we could
overrun three or four other solar
systems in four years, with such an
administration.

Tomorrow, the galaxy.

MY favorite argument against man-
ned flying saucers must be discarded.
I had thought that all mathematical
odds would be against other planets’
inspecting us at just the moment we
conceived an interest in them —
sixteen years out of the 4,000,000,000
of our planet’s existence, or .0000004
per cent. However, mathematicians
say that the odds would remain the
same — very long — through all
time, since there can be no relative

332

probabilities on an event for which
there are no data. Alchemy, astrol-
ogy, the Hitlerian “big lie,” and all
such legends as Prester John, the
non-existent Christian ruler of Asia,
meet this fine definition: “the event
for which there are no data.” When
the sane begin believing in such
events, the holiday is on and even-
tually it must be paid for.

Stull, one may be attracted to the
Fools’ Festival. Very well.

But let us set some standards.
Please don’t give us any more of this
stuff about the objects’ weightless-
ness in the earth’s field or immunity
to atmospheric frictions. If the ob-
jects are made of fire, they must
singe or ignite what they approach,
and the fire must smell. I beg the ad-
dicts not to speak of “visitors from
other galaxies”: the word galaxy
seems to be new and lovely to them.
They cannot realize how large our
own galaxy is—a diameter of 100,000
light years, each light year being six
trillion miles. Our sun requires about
200 million ordinary years to make
one revolution around the center of
the galaxy and is only one of at
least 200 billion stars. At this stage
of the myth, the saucerites would
be wise to confine themselves to this
galaxy. The odds against any one
“visitor from another galaxy” being
able to find our little solar system
are really astronomical; and here the
mathematicians agree.

A layman can add, without pre-
sumption, the note that about the
time flying saucers were first seen,
planes had just begun to fly at 20,000
feet. At these heights there may be
rare light phenomena, like the Aurora
Borealis, that can do all the unnatu-
ral things flying saucers do — hover,
turn at right angles, disappear, ac-
celerate. Or meteoric or electrical or

ye A ae ae ks

magnetic phenomena. Unfortunately, —
a pilot is not in the most objective
possible mood after he has been fly-
ing for hours alone through a night-
ful of sky; his psyche can become
very active.

And so the second great zone for
flying saucers, outside Southern Cali-
fornia, is the couch of every psychi-
atrist whose patients see flying sau-
cers in bed.

Dr. Carl Gustav Jung has just
published a book on the subject
(Flying Saucers, Harcourt Brace,
$3.95). Surely subject and author
have rarely been more happily wed-
ded. The genius for ambiguity or
“double talk” conceals whether or
not Jung believes in flying saucers
until, on page 149, we have: “The
only thing we know with tolerable
certainty about Ufos is that they
possess a surface which can be seen
by the eye and at the same time
throws back a radar echo. . . . Their
movements indicate volition and
psychic relatedness, e.g., evasion and
flight, perhaps even aggression and
defense.” He believes in them, though
in the preface he denies it.

To give the best first, Dr. Jung
takes these phenomena, or possibly
vision, as proof of the end of an era.
(You see, this subject is not a waste
of your time at all.) He writes:

As we know from ancient Egyptian
history, they are symptoms of psychic
changes that always appear-at the
end of one Platonic month and at the
beginning of another. They are, it
seems, changes in the constellation
of psychic dominants, of the arche-
types, or “gods” as they used to be
called, which bring about, or ac-
company, long-lasting transforma-
tions of the collective psyche.

Human history, Dr. Jung tells us,
has moved from the age of Taurus
into Aries and then into Pisces
(around the time of Christ) and is
now going into Aquarius,

This rendering of history must
make us all wonder where we have
been and sorry we were away. It is
exciting to hear about eras ending
and new archetypes forming; one of
us may be the new archetype. If this
is astrology, eight signs come be-
tween Aries and Pisces, and Aquarius
is before, not after, Pisces. If it is

(Continued on page 340)
The Nation

boat fecl 2

= 0 ee 5

Pee oe A

BOOKS

rd
*

and the ARTS

Trotsky: from Power to Exile

THE PROPHET UNARMED: TROT-
SKY: 1921-1929. By Deut-
scher. Oxford University Press. 490
pp. $9.50.

Crane Brinton

Isaac

THIS second of a three-volume life of
Trotsky is fully up to the standard set
by the first volume, The Prophet Armed:
Trotsky, 1879-1921, which appeared in
1954 and was very well received in all
save dwindling Stalinist circles. Isaac
Deutscher, a former active member of
the Polish Communist party, expelled
as an anti-Stalinist in 1932, is now a
British subject, a scholar-journalist, and
the “Peregrine” of the London Qb-
server. He was and is undoubtedly
some kind of Trotskyist, but that label
covers so wide a range that it has little
semantic use. The essential thing is that
he knows from first-hand experience
the kind of world in which Trotsky
lived. He admires, respects, indeed loves
Trotsky, so much so that he does not
need to write a slavish, foolish, adula-
tory book about him. His biography is
written with detachment and_profes-
sional competence. It is not the book
an outsider, a skeptic, a convinced anti-
Marxist or a debunker might write.
Perhaps for so complicated and so
important a man as Trotsky we need
studies written from all these and in-
deed other points of view. But — and
one need not be a Pangloss to take this
position — the best biographies are
written in sympathy, not in hate and
contempt. Mr. Deutscher does not ex-
aggerate, does not persistently and a
bit tiresomely defend, as for instance
Ernest Jones did in an otherwise excel-
lent life of Freud. There should be
pretty general agreement, even among
reviewers who hesitate to add to the
uniform sweetness of contemporary
American reviewing, that this is by all
odds the best life of Trotsky available.
The scale seems about right. The
book is indeed long and detailed, but
it is not the pedestrian accumulation of
day-to-day trivia found in an overlong
biography like the Monypenny and
Buckle Disraeli. The trees are certainly

CRANE BRINTON: is the author,
among other books, of Ideas and Men,
The Shaping of the Modern Mind and,
most recently, A History of Western
Morals (Harcourt, Brace). He is pro-
fessor of History, Harvard University.

; November 7, 1959

there, but from time to time Mr. Deut-
scher gets off a bit and takes a Jook at
the wood. The narrative almost always
flows along, even in complex situations
like the culminating struggle for the suc-
cession to Lenin. Trotsky was a polymath
and an incurably active, almost obses-
sive, writer; Mr. Deutscher pays full
attention to his writing on all sorts of
subjects and quotes liberally. Historians
will be especially interested in Trot-
sky’s appeal to the history of the
French Revolution in a speech in de-
fense of himself made before the Pre-
sidium of the Central Control Com-
mission in July, 1927. The defense was
of course useless, for the decision had
been made in advance. But his conclu-
sion was superb, and most Trotskyist:

The Jacobin Clubs, the crucibles
of revolution, became the nurseries
of Napoleon’s future bureaucracy.
We should learn from the French
Revolution. But is it really neces-
sary to repeat it? (Shouwts.)

As in his first volume, Mr. Deutscher
has made good use of the Trotsky
Archives now in the Houghton Library
at Harvard, the many published works
of Trotsky in the four major languages,
Russian, French, German and English,
the proceedings of party conferences
and congresses, newspapers —in short,
impeccable sources. The Moscow edi-
tion of Trotsky’s collected Works was
of course stopped in 1927 with volume
XXI, but there was no way the Stalin-
ists could really achieve an Orwellian
suppression and distortion outside Rus-
sia. It is likely, that even in the Soviet
Union there remained more of the real
Trotsky, if only in carefully hidden
copies of his books, than is generally
admitted in the West. Certainly in the
West the sources for appraising Trotsky
have never been at all difficult for any-
one with a mastery of the Russian
language to get at.

This book is in no sense the last word
on Trotsky. The final volume will be
a difficult one to write, for the last
years in exile must seem a_ letdown,
must invite to more apologies than is
good for an admiring biographer to
make. But Trotsky will hold our in-
terest to the melodramatic end. It is
to be hoped that Mr. Deutscher will
attempt at the close of the work the
very difficult task of a eritical summing-
up of his hero’s life and work.

Yet even if he should so conclude
this long work, there would still be need
for something that is never quite sup-
plied even by the irreproachable classics
of full-length biography, a Boswell’s
Johnson, a Lockhart’s Scott, a Sand-
burg’s Lincoln. This is the view that
emerges from the brief biographical
essay: at its best with Ste. Beuve; good
also, if unfair — perhaps because un-
fair — with Lytton Strachey, and today
a somewhat neglected genre. It is not
clear why the great biographies some-
how fail to clinch an image in the mind
of the reader—perhaps just because
they do not show a single image, but a
whole gallery of such. At any rate, a
life like this one of Trotsky does make
possible the work of many other writers,
who will owe Deutscher a debt they
ought always to acknowledge explicitly.

THE abiding impression Trotsky makes
is of a personality of very great com-
plexity indeed, a man who fits no one
system of pigeonholing, and especially,
no such system devised on the currently
fashionable social psychological basis.
Mr. Eric Hoffer, for example, makes in
his The True Believer a suggestive and
indeed useful classification of revolution-
makers into the man of words who in
a sense “begins” a revolution; the fana-
tic who presides over its crises and its
Reign of Terror, and the man of ac-
tion who finishes it off. And reason-
ably pure types of the kind can be
found. Tom Paine was a man of words,
singularly inept in his one job with the
Congress in Philadelphia; Robespierre
— though there are those who will dis-
pute this — was a fanatic, and not much
else; Napoleon was a man of action, so
lacking in the oratorical gifts needed to
sway an assembly that he very nearly
lost his head at St. Cloud in 1799.
But Trotsky? Probably basically a
fanatic, certainly on the record a Utopi-
an; yet he was the superb organizer of
the army in the Civil War, at his best
a good administrator, an effective ora-
tor, a skillful politician; and if of all
his writings we had no more than his
masterpiece, the History of the Russian
Revolution, he would still deserve to be
called a thinker, no mere man of words.

The flaw —if there was such — that
explains his failure in 1924-1927 is not —

quite clear. He was, to repeat, in a
sense a fanatic, a Utopian, but not a
silly, unyielding, futile idealist. Per-
haps he was not coarse enough to beat
Stalin; perhaps he just had bad luck.

333

}
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1

VRS i AT La’ a =e

The Hero as Inventor

EDISON. By Matthew Josephson. Mc-
Graw-Hill Book Co. 511 pp. $6.95.

Carl Dreher

EDISON demonstrates that Josephson,
called by John Erskine “America’s ablest
biographer,” can recreate a great tech-
nological figure just as vividly as he
portrayed the robber barons, politicos
and novelists of his earlier books. In
fact, though, the current work does not
involve a complete break with the past.
A number of the barons come back on
stage in supporting roles, notably Jay
Gould, who financed some of Edison’s
early inventions in telegraphy. Gould
swindled Edison as dispassionately as he
swindled other associates and opponents.
The biography deals also with the rela-
tions between the inventor and the
elder Morgan who, though something of
a buccaneer, was predominantly a crea-
tive capitalist; Henry Villard, a lesser
but still eminent manipulator, and
Samuel Insull, who began his career
reputably enough as Edison’s secretary
and money-raiser.

Lacking even a primary school edu-
cation and starting out as a train news-
boy and itinerant telegrapher in the
eighteen sixties, Edison became the
greatest inventor and industrial devel-
oper of the nineteenth century. His
principal achievements were the multi-
plex telegraph, the phonograph, the car-
bon microphone, the first operational
electric light and power system, an
electric locomotive, the motion picture
camera and the precursor of the motion
picture projector, the nickel-iron storage
battery and — the “invention of in-
ventions” systematic industrial re-
search. Also, in the course of experi-
mentation with the incandescent lamp,
he discovered the “Edison effect,” the
passage of electricity through a vacuum,
fourteen years before the electron was
discovered by J. J. Thomson and twenty-
three years before Lee deForest invent-
ed the modern vacuum tube. Thus
Edison was the careless progenitor of
radio and electronics, although, pre-
occupied with his electric lighting sys-
tem, he abandoned the infant shortly
after its birth.

This sketch lists only the successes.

- There were failures and follies on an

equally heroic scale. The man himself
was as picturesque as his productions
were grand. Unable to spell or write

erammatically until his middle years,
he became an outstanding wit and
aphorist and a folk hero encrusted with
legendary attributes and _ experiences.
Some of these Josephson debunks —
for instance, the account of how Edison
became deaf. The legend is that the
ambitious newsboy, experimenting with
chemistry, set the baggage car on fire,
whereupon the conductor cuffed him
so brutally that the boy lost his hear-
ing. The truth is that Edison became
deaf as the result of childhood scarlet
fever, and the conductor was still his
friend some twenty years after the
baggage car incident. But Josephson
wisely spends little space on apocrypha.
He has a more serious task and when he
completes it we not only know more
about Edison and his America than we
knew before, but we know more about
ourselves: as a great technological in-
noyator, Edison had a great deal to
do with making us what we are.

The light and power development is
an illustration. Its scope is often un-
derestimated. People think of Edison as
having invented the incandescent lamp.
He certainly did that, despite the claims
and contributions of others, but few
realize what a gap there was between
electric lights and electric lighting. The
arc lamp, which preceded the incan-
descent and operated on an entirely
different principle, was essentially a
high-power device suitable only for out-
door illumination. The next step was
to devise a low-power lamp capable of
replacing gas for indoor use. But this
was only a step: no one had any idea
how such lamps could be jointly sup-
plied with electricity, and at the same
time be independently controlled. House
wiring, which any apprentice electrician
can install today, had to be invented.
Generators had to be developed to
furnish power at a more or less constant
voltage and with some degree of con-
tinuity. Neither lamps, generators, nor
inside wiring could be used without a
distribution system, safety fuses, switches
and meters, Not one invention, but
dozens, were required; in a single year,
1882, Edison applied for 141 patents,
mostly in electric lighting.

As if the problems of multiple in-
vention and manufacture were not
enough, he had to scrounge endlessly

nN Pao

e A x ere oe re om
for funds. The Wall Street sy
which had agreed to finance the project,
shrank from the complexities and haz-
ards of manufacture and _ installation;
they would have preferred to operate a
patent-holding company. Progress was
agonizingly slow. When the Pearl Street
central station in downtown New York
was finally put into commercial opera-
tion on September 4, 1882, the total load
was 400 lamps on an investment of
$600,000, or $1,500 per lamp. In 1884
the station was supplying more than
10,000 lamps, but by then it had reach-
ed its capacity and for years thereafter
customers were simply turned away.
Nineteenth-century capitalists preferred
to invest in government-subsidized rail-
roads. When they were asked to ad-
vance on their own, as in the case of
Edison’s inventions, they were exem-

plars of caution.

LARGELY through the promotional la-
bors of Edison and his organizations,
and despite the timidity of his backers,
electric lighting spread over the country.
Edison’s reward was loss of control. In
practical terms, this amounted to his
expulsion from the industry he had
created. He contributed to his own down-
fall by some pigheaded engineering not
uncharacteristic of technological pio-
neers. He had succeeded with low voltage
(220/110) direct current, suitable only
for local distribution. There he stopped,
while others took the next necessary
step. George Westinghouse and a group
of distinguished engineers and _ theoreti-
cians, including Charles P. Steinmetz,
sponsored high-voltage alternating cur-
rent for economical transmission of pow-
er over long distances. At the residence
or factory a transformer stepped down
the voltage to the same 220/110 volts,
consequently alternating current pre-
sented little greater hazard to the con-
sumer than direct current. Nevertheless,
Edison inveighed against the dangers of
high-voltage alternating current, just as,
in an earlier day, James Watt had re-
sisted the introduction of high-pressure
steam, Edison resorted to what Joseph-
son calls “cruel and lugubrious experi-
ments” — electrocuting dogs with alter-
nating current to frighten the public.
Whatever success he had was short-
lived; alternating current soon came
into general use.

‘But this aberration was not the de-

dicate, A,
headed by Drexel, Morgan & Company, —

oe Note in November “
CARL DREHER, an early radio opera- 7"

, ‘ ° } . .
tor and engineer, is a Fellow of the It’s not the white Christmas so much I remember, |
Institute of Radio Engineers. Mr. Dre- As the old-fashioned ‘Christmas that came in December. 4 ;
her writes frequently for The Natiow Bat ee Mary Taro Raura
(334, ‘ ; eee A i. . N - ‘ J , Th _ ; TION. 7
fa ial, * t - al i : Bee ye ar ' i A i a .

November 7, 1959

cisive reason for Edison’s ouster. Ie just
didn’t fit into good financial society. He
was a fiercely competitive individualist,
with a kind of Populist prejudice against
trusts and a penchant for mass produc-
tion and low prices. To raise money in
pursuance of such objectives he had to
sell much of his own stock; consequently
he no longer had control of the com-
panies he headed. J. P. Morgan, Henry
Villard and Charles A. Coffin, a former
shoe salesman who had switched to elec-
tricity, sat down together and merged
Coffin’s Thomson-Houston Company and
the Edison companies to form the Gen-
eral Electric Company. Edison was elect-
ed a director, but he sold his remaining
holdings and resigned. On the rebound,
he engaged in a disastrous ore-rmining
venture in northern New Jersey and lost
his entire fortune — several millions in
1890 dollars. “Well, it’s all gone, but we
had a hell of a good time spending it,”
he said. He was endowed with fortitude
to match his trials.

GREATLY lauded, he was also greatly
misunderstood. As late as the nineteen-
twenties there were two opposite and
equally erroneous notions about his
achievements. One held that he system-
atically “stole” inventions from his em-
ployees. The other attributed to him the
qualities of the lone genius in the garret.
The fallacy common to the two was a
failure to understand the necessity of the
transition from individual to group in-
vention. Ideas still had to originate in
individual minds, but by the second half
of the nineteenth century technology had
become so complex that invention re-
quired the interaction ‘of specialized
minds assembled in teams of scientists,
engineers and, when one happened to
come along, nondescript geniuses like
Edison. He could be understood only

as a captain and coordinator of tech-
nicians. In his role he did a superb job,
with the inevitable errors of one who,
undaunted by obstacles and his own lim-
itations, attempts the nearly impossible.

As the genius declined, the limitations
became more obvious. He had always
been a showman and publicity hound,
not so much on his own behalf as to
In his later
years he talked too much and sometimes
grieved his more discerning admurers.

promote his inventions.

In the nineteen-twenties he was certain
that radio broadcasting was only a pass-
ing craze. “Being a ‘great thinker’ and
being a great inventor,” Josephson re-
marks, “are quite different things.”
thinker. ‘His
politics were a weird potpourri of Green-
hack opposition to the gold standard,
other odds and ends of Populism and,
where dollars and cents were involved,
ruthless capitalist individualism, some-
what mitigated in his own plants by
paternalism. But in at least one field
besides the technological, his thinking
was consistent and sharply focused. In
religion he was a rationalist and agnos-
tic and a bold polemicist. “A personal
God means absolutely nothing to me,”
he declared, and pointed out that “bil-
lions of prayers” had not averted natural
or man-made catastrophes. He was at-
tacked by choleric believers, and his
business associates pleaded with him to
mitigate his blasphemies for the sake
of Edison Industries. He was not blas-
phemous, actually, nor was he an athe-
ist. He said he did not doubt the exist-
ence of a Supreme Intelligence, but he
took no credence in theories of heaven
and hell, the soul, and a life hereafter.
If there were any who hoped for a final
recantation, they were disappointed. He
died in 1931 at the age of eighty-four,
as courageously as he had lived.

I;dison was not a great

ARCHITECTURE

| Walter McQuade

TO APPRECIATE the impact of the
new Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
at Fifth Avenue and 88th Street in New
York, you should. travel to it from
midtown. Get on a Fifth Avenue bus
and stammer through the canyon of
the 40s and 50s, walled with shop win-
dows and the fronts of fat, pompous of-
fice buildings and smooth flashy ones —
an architectural dramatization of a
profit-and-loss statement. :
When the bus enters the 60s, the nice
lady passengers sigh and redistribute
their packages, for here Fifth Avenue

;
eT ie at
a ‘
aa

turns green on the left and a genteel
gray on the right, a quiet, wealthy resi-
dential neighborhood—block on block
of placid limestone trimmed with dis-
creetly dead carved ornamentation dat-
ing from the twenties and earlier. (Most
of the facades have been sandblasted
clean, which tames them even further.)

By the time you reach the 70s, even
the trees of Central Park seem weary.
And across the street from the fertilized
forest, this neighborhood’s buildings fade
and fade, architecturally, until they are
only murmuring. True, there is an occa-

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Sicilians speak
their minds in

Report
from

Palermo

by DANILO DOLCI
introduction by
ALDOUS HUXLEY

age

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before the world the age-old strug-
gle against poverty and corruption
in Sicily.

In a land oppressed by unemploy-
ment and harassed by the Mafia, one
man has fought a steady battle
against both. Danilo Dolci, often
called the “Ghandi of Italy,” gave up
his comfortable home in the North
to settle in a rural slum, and is now
searching systematically to find out
what needs to be done to mitigate
the present wretchedness.

$4.00

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mee 1 RT ae Were

sional grunt—now and then your bus
passes a gross new apartment building
jammed in, making the old ones’ gen-
tility seem almost genuine by contrast
with its new facades of glazed brick of
a nothing color, its clumsy ladders of
balconies. “Consult Pease and Elliman,”
the signs say.

But the Guggenheims and Frank
Lloyd Wright did not consult the real
estate men. When you reach their block-
front at 88th Street, you are suddenly
confronted with strength. Here is a
building which, overnight, has changed
its part of the city. Here is a product,
not of many men’s timid conventions,
but of one man’s mind: eloquent, ex-
citing, fiercely alive.

Even if you haven’t seen the struc-
ture, you are probably familiar with its
components from your newspaper. On
the ground floor are greenery and seduc-
tive entrances; above that, a, ship-
like superstructure of concrete which
stretches the width of the block; then
two stacks of concrete, rising up, striped
with windows, the larger tower strange-
ly shaped, widening toward the top.
Like a cone upside down, its walls loom
out above you.

But descriptions are paltry, and so
are photographs of this structure. You
must go and look at it, because it is
daringly sinuous, curving out and _ re-
treating in ways that the logical camera
cannot catch without distortion. New
York has some fine modern buildings,
but nothing resembling this.

For unlike most modern architects,
Wright was no understater. His de-
signs are Shakespearean—works of high
elocution which blend fantasy, structural
fact, avid connoisseurship of materials
and craftsmanship, many lights, many
dims and darks, metallic glints, day-
light, porosity, the sweep of curving
planes that carry the eye commanding-
ly. This building has the pull of a giant
winch and all the confidence in the
world. It even, surprisingly, turns out
to be a good neighbor. The buildings
around jt are not big enough to be over-
bearing; instead the Guggenheim cheer-
fully dominates their discreetness. Seen
from the street, it is a young man’s
building—imaginative, rich, drawn with
a vivid hand, a gift of great talent to
the city. In a civic sense, it is a brilliant
success. You think, “thank God for the
Guggenheims,” and wonder at those
critics who have considered the building
only as a rack for paintings.

But once inside, you understand an art
critic’s anger. The interior is not really
a museum, but a place for merchandising
art, and it oversells. In a functional
pense; itis a: failure.s: > ia) sian

Hy
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The gallery itself is in. the larger a
stack. Around a towering central light-
well a long gradual ramp climbs the
outward-leaning exterior walls, getting
wider as they lean farther out, until it
circles up under a big skylight of faintly
coptic design almost 100 feet above the
floor, and this ramp is where the paint-
ings are. The ground floor has a few
paintings, too, but it still seems largely
empty, even with an information desk
and elevator lobby, with a few pieces
of sculpture standing around awkward-.
ly, with a lozenge-shaped pool of very
blue, unreal looking water, and a most
welcome section of glass through which
exterior planting is visible. Theoretical-
ly you are supposed to ride the elevator
up the tower, then stroll down the ramp,
but the elevator is small and slow, so
for the most part people walk up the
ramp. After its first slant, rather steep,
it flattens out level for a few feet, then
resumes a milder pitch.

IT IS almost as though the stern pat-
tern — this peremptory path of the ramp
that is imposed on the visitor — were a
result of overcompensation on the part
of the architect toward his client. He
herds the viewers past the pictures so
ruthlessly that he almost seems to be
afraid they might not look at them if
he were gentle. People don’t visit this
museum; they are digested by it.

It is silly to ask for an interior of a
building which does not agree with the

Peri poietikes

What about measure, I learnt:
Look in your own ear and read.
Nor wrest knowledge

in no end of books.
Pyrrhic nor Pirke do.
Mind, don’t run to mind
boys’ Greeks’ metres gnome,
rummage in tee tomes, tee-tums,

tum-tees.
Forget terms.
No count is sure,
more safe, more stressed,
more heard, or herds peace more
in world where hearing
is a going out
or instance up or down;
from in, different instance out.
Trust: to lip words
briefs what great (?) discourse well.

Lours ZuKOrsky

Peri poietikes: “About poetry,” the open-
ing words of Aristotle’s Poetics.

Pirke: that is, Pirke Aboth, “Chapters _
of the Fathers,” included in Talmud —
and part of the orthodox Jewish ritual —
read on Sabbath afternoons.

:
¢
‘

‘
.

ey ferior—for a caieentinat Marine sys-

tem, for instance, faked within the dy-
namic, twisted Guggenheim — gallery
walls. No, the disappointment in this
building is that there is not enough sub-
tle intricacy in the interior environment.
It is a persuasive, humane functionalism
we expect from Wright, not just pat-
tern; he might have added richer, more
sudden widenings of the monotonous
ramp, with changes in ceiling heights;
he could have exerted the kind of wiz-
ardry he has brought to other buildings,
instead of this idolatry of a single
flashy idea, the ramp. This is simplicity
without either serenity or the subtle
variations that enrich what he called
his organic style; this is an organ with
one monotonous, booming note.

Why did this interior happen? It has
been pointed out that Frank Lloyd
Wright did not like modern art, regard-
ing it as a joke. The kind of art he un-
derstood was oriental and pre-Columbian,
spatial objects rich with the sure sub-
jectivity of great age. To Wright, mod-
ern artists were chess players without
chessboards, and he couldn’t follow the
game. This time he tried, and in doing
it he embraced the art ‘so tightly that
he almost smothered it. It was necessary
for the director of the Guggenheim
Museum, James Sweeney, to apply oxy-
gen to save the patient, and Sweeney
applied too much.

If Wright’s original design for this
interior had been followed there would

be more variation within the gallery

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|

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than there is now, for there would be
more natural daylight falling on the
paintings and the walls. The tower
would have had a gentler, truer sense

of roundness within, as you followed the

ramp. But Sweeney saw immediately
this would not work for the paintings.
He had to get them away from Wright’s
clutch.

So the museum director, in effect,
erased all the windows, erased the
coloring of the walls (by painting them
white) and further pulled the canvases
from the shell of the building by sus-
pending them inward from the walls on
‘horizontal rods. They now seem to
float in free space like sculpture, en-
badly remote from the building. Then
Sweeney poured mild torrents of light

_ —artificial, shadowless, fluorescent light

% t

= 2

—both in front of and hetlind the paint-
ings, further nullifying the structure,
_ making it just a vessel.

It is a brilliant technique, and a
basically sound salvaging idea, but I

think he went too far. For as a result |

of this conflict between the architect
and the museum director ‘there |
much suc oe to the f

o) A

tortion in the very intensity of the light,
as reflected back from some of the
paintings; and the fact that the front
lighting is a little redder in quality than
the back lighting may have a good deal
to do with this. Bonnard’s Dining Room
in the Garden, a very luminous canvas,
looks fine from seventy feet away, across
the gallery, but near up, it glows not
like a Bonnard, but like Times Square
of a foggy night.

SWEENEY’S job of lighting in the old
Guggenheim gallery (which once stood
on part of the same site) was mag-
nificent. The building was an elegant
old town house, and he painted the in-
terior white and flooded it with much
this same kind of illumination. But the
formality and linear quality of the old
house was on his side. It was as planar
as the paintings; they could be hung
directly on its walls. No erasure of the
architecture was necessary. Seeing the
pictures in the new Guggenheim is more
exciting, certainly, but going there to
look is too much like going to an audio
shop to listen; what you hear is ultra-
high fidelity sound, not music.

But James Johnson Sweeney still can
tinker with the knobs and the wiring,
I think, and in time bring this interest-
ing lighting under control. He is very
good at it. It may be necessary to regu-
late the lamps individually for each pic-
ture, as in stage setting, but it will be
worth it, and can be the salvation of
the gallery as a gallery. The lighting
will continue to oppose the architecture,
however, and there probably is no solu-
tion for that.

For Wright’s buildings need sunlight

and some contact with the real world— |-

and this is a high quality in them. It
is not just gaiety they enjoy, but re-
ality, the opportunity for many moods,
grimness as well as joy, melancholy on
a dim day, the seeping in of the sky.

His architecture is as receptive to na-
ture’s mood as farmland is. To divorce
his buildings from the world, even the
city world, is cruel—although this one
may seem to be asking for punishment.

NEW

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A KIERKEGAARD ANTHOLOGY

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Complete in 7 volumes, $1.65 each:
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Recaptured.

Only the big skylight survived in the
gallery, and the glass wall on the ground
floor. The first is too remote, the other
very nice, but not enough, and the rest
of the light in the building is depress-
ingly synthetic and inappropriate to |
Wright. Its shadowlessness is like wall-
to-wall carpeting, emblandishing an en-
vironment, washing out not only |

shadows but the toughne:
the difficulties of life, of

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phe little theatre before

beautiful room in New York City. In-
tended principally for talks to audiences
of about 250, it is a place where Wright
expressed himself easily and eloquently.
Love is there, in the careful changes of
level, in the coloration, in the subdued
spatial devices he used to make it easy
for the audience to enter the speaker’s
thoughts. And there are little windows,
high, like decorative cellar windows, to

Avy = 1h ee

remind people where they are, and let
a little daylight leak in. Filled with
people, it will bé a rich, genial, intellec-
tual place. I sat there alone for a few
minutes, thinking of the upstairs; it is
perhaps the only theatre where you can
do that comfortably—without feeling
that you are waiting for a performance,
without feeling lonely. Wright’s art is
there with you.

THEATRE

Stuart Vaughan

PRODUCERS Maurice Evans and
Robert L. Josephs have presented actor
Maurice Evans and a gathering of dig-
nitaries of the British stage (plus Sam
Leyene) in a production of Bernard
Shaw’s Heartbreak House at the Billy
Rose Theatre, erstwhile the National.
Mr. Rose’s rose-and-gold theatre seemed
to promise equally opulent glories be-
hind its glowing velours act-drop, but
in that domain all was not so happy.
This is not for want of effort. The
production is oh, so smartly clothed.
Ben Edward’s setting, with side walls
canted in an uneasy lilt, looks so com-

STUART VAUGHAN is Artistic Di-
rector of The Phoenix Theatre. His
most recent production is a restaging of

Lugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown.

pletely and expensively like some kind
of galleon with an awning hung amid-
ships that Shaw’s sense of an eccentric
country house goes right out the non-
existent window.

Equal effort has gone into the cast-
ing. Mr. Evans, Diana Wynyard,
Pamela Brown, Dennis Price and Alan
Webb gracefully wheel and halt, firing
their bon mots with all-too-visible deft-
ness and precision. And why shouldn’t
they, for haven’t they been doing this
for ages and ages? What matter that
Mr. Webb as Mazzini Dunn loses the
character’s essential shy dignity in sim-
pering and ogling? The laughs come.
What matter that Mr. Price seems
empty of meaning and devoid of con-
tact with any living being behind those
footlights? His voice has a fine ring.

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We hear the words splendidly, even
when we cannot follow the ideas. Diane
Cilento’s booming voice and brash at-
tack defeat what chance she may have
had to establish an Ellie Dunn whose
freshness, grace and surprisingly real-
istic appraisal of the world capture the
sympathies of the aging pagan philoso-
pher, Captain Shotover. Mr. Evans, in
a quite suitably Shavian wig and beard,
gives us a Captain Shotover whose
crusty broadsides become comedic mon-
otony by Act III.

Sam Levene is a very Sanh and
compelling actor. With a whole kit of
takes, slow burns and odd sounds, and
a pervasive American speech rhythm,
he commands the stage at his every
appearance. The play changes. English
voices lose their ring, and everyone
dances to Mr. Levene’s measured. tune.
Unfortunately, this is about as appropri-
ate as Duke Ellington’s great band hav-
ing a bash at Vivaldi. If Boss Mangum
came through with requisite sympathy
and clarity in spite of these obstacles, I
would not object so strenuously. But
Shaw’s Boss Mangum is not among the
living in this Heartbreak House.

Only Diana Wynyard and Pamela
Brown give us rare moments of relaxa-
tion, reality and genuine humor in an
evening which is over-energized and
empty of clear meaning.

Shaw wrote a play about a mad,
strange, fascinating family who talk
their lives away as their world muddles
on. In Heartbreak House we meet the
English counterpart of Chekhoy’s aristo-
crats who let the cherry trees be chopped
down. The business of an Englishman,

Captain Shotover says, is “to Jearn
navigation.” He must learn how. to

steer through the threats of destruction
posed by the violent force making a
modern society. “Learn it and live, or
leave it and be damned.” The third act
ends with the parting hum of enemy
planes which have dropped their first
load of bombs, demolishing ,the vicarage
and killing the tycoon.

Harold Clurman, who directed this
production of Heartbreak House, knows
how to evoke a mood, an atmosphere,
in which the surprising can be spoken,
the inner truth revealed. He knows
how to break scenes of endless talk into
dramatic actions and situations which
help the talk add up to something the-
atrically whole for an audience .when
the play is finished. He must. know
what Heartbreak House means even if
his audience never found out. Why then
was this evening unclear, unfocused and
distressing?
mate working circle of a production ean
ever know the answer to this sort of
question,

No one outside the inti- |

AP ome Pr

Sve

are

‘Harold Clurman

CHERI (Morosco) is a disappointment.
However, so many genuinely talented
people are involved in the production
that it is critically valuable to go into
the details behind that judgment.

A series of tactical errors was made.
Probably the most grievous is Anita
Loos’s adaptation of the two Colette
novels: Chéri and The End of Chéri.
One of the assets of Colette’s novels
is their exquisite writing: they have
a flavor and fragrance inalienably
French. The adaptation is a mere skele-
ton: its writing is toneless and dry. It
has to cover so much ground that there
appears to be no time for atmosphere
or nuance. More seriously, it does not
quite make Colette’s essential points.

Why, apart from her prose, is Col-
ette, whose subjects are usually that of
frivolous fiction, generally esteemed by
the French? She tried and often suc-
ceeded in making real flowers grow
from artificial soil. Her books generate
true human interest beyond the false
milieus in which the characters dwell.

In the “Chéri” novels two aspects are
inseparably intertwined: personal and
social, Chéri is a young man illegitimate-
ly born to a wealthy cocotte in the
era before the First World War: the
last period of solid French prosperity.
It was a time when leisure and the
hedonistic idleness that it connoted for
the French bourgeoisie, their dependents
and affiliates, were not only considered
blameless but a positive ideal to which
even the most respectable folk aspired.

Chéri has been brought up in the
coziest and rankest hot house of this
world. His senses have been pampered
and sated, his inner being ignored. He
has no family and his mother has made
a lap dog of him, But he is really a
nice boy yearning for maternal affec-
tion. His affair with the grande cocotte
Léa de Lonval, some twenty years
his senior, is at once an expression of
the boy’s need for a mother and the
courtesan’s need to give tenderness.

All would be well, so to speak, in this
relationship if the world into which the
boy stepped in his growing up were
identical with that of his first youth.
But the postwar epoch has now come,

-and France is caught between a fever-

ishly greedy capitalist class and the

_ haggard world of the discontented work-

ers—not to mention the more or less
iconoclastic artists. Having served in

the army, Chéri has become aware of

the moral emptiness of the wealthy,

_ without being in any way prepared to
_ participate in either social or artistic

rebellion. His return to Léa is a fiasco, —

not | simply because she has grown ae teur et is winning
ee

sah FO." » e,
fovember 195} Be Ma ae :-

(Ns

_a parlor entertainment eer two gen-

but because she is now a complacent
baggage living on her past accumula-
tions and new speculations. Chéri’s cling-
ing to the image of Léa, his nownow, his
“nurse” (mother) is a nostalgia for the
days of untroubled dalliance, the bed of
rotting roses, forever gone. He is truly
homeless. He kills himself.

Seen this way, the material is valid
enough, but the adapter has been un-
able to dramatize its salient features.
What we get is an outline without sub-
stance. As director, Robert Lewis has
italicized the minutiae of the story and
environment’ for comic, picturesque or
sentimental purposes which in this con-
text become slightly grotesque when not
distasteful. He has allowed Oliver Smith
to furnish him with very pretty sets
which are decorative rather than atmos-
pheric — with a sort of Dufy gloss that
might have been employed in an ad
for Rosemarie de Paris. This has only
an oblique connection with the over-
ripe but still very rich feeling (even
when vulgar) characteristic of the early
twentieth century in France.

The “pointing up” of details makes the
play’s pace slow and the behavior of
most of the characters studied as if
style were an unnatural instead of an
organic matter. On the other hand, the
casting of the two central figures tends
toward a kind of reality which is not
altogether appropriate. Kim Stanley is
one of the most gifted actresses any-
where, but she does not fit the frame.
This is not due to her being too young
for Léa (although that does not help):
her sensuality is of a tortured sort and
not maternal, while her attempt at being
French and of the period is aimed at
mere posture. None of this is her fault,
although it may be the fault of a theory

. not uncommon nowadays that a first-

rate actor can be convincing in any part.

Horst Buchholz, on the evidence here
and the picture version of Thomas
Mann’s The Confession of Felix Krull,
is a good actor. He creates the impres-
sion of a creature reared in depression,
a restored delinquent who, little and
wiry, has battled his way to a favorable
position and not, as I believe Chéri
should be, that of a sturdy boy softened
by silk and aromatized cotton wool.
Lili Darvas, as a woman who represents
the secret vice which is all that re-
mains of Chéri’s dream, alone in the
play struck me as right.

AT THE DROP OF A HAT (John

Golden) is a pastime consisting of in-

formal topical songs in the manner of

tlemen from London: Mich landers

and Donald Swann. Their |

e Y cine Drama
‘'B E ST PLA Critics’ Award

Rinne cst ; | ¥,
araisininthesun —
A new play by LORRAINE HANSBERRY a
starring CLAUDIA McNEIL 7
OSSIE DAVIS * RUBY DEE ‘i

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are light, shrewd, witty, with traces of
true sophistication,

It always amazes and amuses me how
often popular English entertainers —
no matter what the subject of their
satire may be — recall something of
Lewis Carroll and his Alice. Some peo-
ple complain that two hours of this
sort of thing is too long and the
effect too small for an evening at the
theatre. “Bigness” is one of our ail-
ments; so | am grateful for this show’s
modesty. A farce like The Golden Fleec-
ing (Henry Miller) with a full comple-
ment of actors — two of them pretty —
plus gaudy scenery seemed longer and
smaller to me than almost any one of
Michael Flanders’ and Donald Swann’s
songs. Their art suggests the message
of the “angry young men” reduced to
a wink.

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s _- STATH,...— |
po at prods ZOND ST te i

340

(Continued from page 332)

astronomy, it is true that the con-
stellation Pisces, in our view of it,
is next to Aries; but astronomy seems
even more remote than astrology
from these matters.

Eras are, of course, ending all the
time, for somebody or something.
The question always is: whom or
what? For the West, I had thought
an era had ended in 1914-18, and
surely this present one must run on
a little longer before it matures.

JUNG’S cheering implication, in hid-
ing his history in the ciphers of nu-
merology or alchemy or astrology, is
that the kind of era, the kind of
archetype and the date of the un-
veiling have all been decided in ad-
vance by forces far beyond human
control. But perhaps we do not want
so much irresponsibility. He will say
a very. good thing, such as that num-
bers were not invented, but discov-
ered, and then add ‘that the number
four represents totality: three plus
one, or Father, Son and Holy Ghost
plus the Devil; and that all life is
dominated by this overriding “truth.”

With this sort of cabalism, he in-
terprets some dreams and some
paintings of unidentified flying ob-
jects. If I understand him, the flying
saucer represents the whole soul or
anima or rotundum or mandala
(neither word in my dictionary) or
God’s eye or philosopher’s egg or
yang and yin or complexio oppositor-
um or Primordial Man or chen-yen.

He also cites mass visions of some-
thing very much like fiery flying
saucers in Basel and Nuremberg in
the 1560s, when the Counter Refor-
mation was hitting these two rich
and sophisticated cities. It may also
be remembered that the Moslem
djinn were of pure flame, good and
evil, beautiful and ugly, and appeared
and disappeared at will. The fantasy
part of the flying-saucer business is
spectacularly not novel; and Jung is
right to associate it with the dark
side of human tradition. Still, one
wonders about his reasons for choos-
ing this disreputable subject and,
as he himself says, putting his “rep-
utation ... in jeopardy.”

There may be a clue. All sorts of
people, from ‘Toynbee down, are sit-

ting around waiting, in this period,

for the revelation of a new universal
religion. Among them, in a thorough-
ly relaxed mood, is to be found my-
self. It is obvious that since the
masses are being constantly remind-
ed of higher forms of life across hun-
dreds of thousands of light years,
God must soon be revamped to take
in more territory; a great revelation
on this one little planet seems sud-
denly, to say the least, disproportion-
ate. This crass intuition appears to
have come to several of the flying
saucerites who report that Christ
and Buddha were actually born on
Venus. This must appear as pure
sacrilege to any church, since it
would imply that the two must have
been moving from planet to planet,
repeating the same message and the
same experience, to propagate truly
galactic faiths: On the stage of the
universe, communications of this
nature present logistical problems
that a one-planet religion is not pre-
pared for. The Salesman’s itinerary
would have to be coordinated with
each planet’s successive arrival at
the desired stage of cultural evolu-
tion. If the waiting list grew too
long, some cultures might have to
be “frozen,” like Egypt’s, until there
was time to get around to them. A lit-
tle less than 2,000 years after Christ
had called: the atom bomb. To mil-
lions of people, such thoughts must
soon become a consequence of any
attempt to think of a godhead that
is, In the astronomical sense, univer-
sal. And this universe is already one
of the world-wide political facts of
life. The contest between the United
States and the Soviet. Union is scored
by two billion people on which will
get out into the universe first. Even
pigmy Negritoes who do not know
about either Christ or gravity ean
see the stars and perhaps the satel-
lites. The consideration that now
confronts earthly organized religion
is the night sky.

The flying saucer visions are a
vulgar solution of this , problem,
humbly proffered by the ignorant.
The new religion, if any, would have
to come from someone with a better
grasp of astronomy. Dr. Jung, how-
ever, has put in his claim as a prophet
of the new religion. He simply de-
cided that an epiphany is well worth
a reputation,

The Nation

Crossword Puzzle No. 840

By FRANK W. LEWIS

ACROSS:

blow-out when. Junior’s
enough to dress? (3,5,

(5)

1 and 11 Big
hair‘is long
2, 3,5, 4)
10 Pound down a town,
11 See 1 across
12 Not numbered like the English peer-
.age, though Earl might be there. (9)

13 The fact is, it suggests what wolves
want to do with pretty girls. (5)

14 Caper around, or incorrectly take
the Underground for an- outstand-
ing example. (12)

19 Riparian indicator, perhaps found
on board? (4,8)

22 What Britishers do when they send
down. (5)

24 Floats a company, perhaps, but it
might be applied to a bottle. (9)

25 Certainly not the order of G.B.S. (9)

26 Not an extraordinary definition. (5)

27 Evidently the old bird is not quick
by comparison, (2, 4, 2,1, 4)

DOWN:
2 Scrooge’s version ‘of stuff? (6)
3 High walls might be. (9)

4 Is Rodin’s work responsible for caus-
ine light diversion? (9)

5 ee Navy and Scotland?

N ovember 7, 1959

6 Sounds destined’ to be honored. (5)

Listen to only half the scores?

(Cheers!) (8)

8 Part of the gum tree, no doubt. (5)

9 fae by what the candidate did?

(

15 Certainly not frontways. (9)

16 Causes a disturbance on some cam-
pus? (Jt might be called for!) (4,5)

eg, one should never feel its presence.

18 Affects so as to stimulate pent up
anger, and spins wildly around. (8)

20 and 21 As coffee might be com-
monly good, at a‘distance from the
storm. (6, 5)

23 Look at the madness of the flower
of France! (5) -

24 Did Wordsworth. find it ecompara-
tively Jonely ? (5)

io ot
SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 839

ACROSS: 1 and 10’Tackling dummies;
5 Assail; 11 Rameses; 12 Optie; 13
Equipoise; 16 Giantess; 19 By the way;
22 Essen; 24, 14 and 17 Keeping an
ear to the ground; 26 Riser; 28 Titular;

29 Equated; 30 Struts; 31 Used ears.

DOWN: 1 Tadpoles; 2 Comet; 3 Loin-
cloth; 4 Nest egg; 6 Sum up; 7 Abscis-
sas; 8 Lasses; 9 Trauma; 15 Rh
ter; 18 Intrudes; ‘agi

Yankees; 23 Skates; 25 Islet; 27 Sitka.

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NATION

SPECIAL ISSUE: 50 OCTOBER 31, 1959

preg [MPACT!

NEW YORK Oct. 25: Walter Winchell, WOR

“Fred F rs a pen oe @ Oct. 26: The New York Times

United Press International
Staten Island Advance
Barry Gray, WMCA

@ Oct. 27: The New York Times
Mike Wallace, WNTA-TV

@ Oct. 28: The Village Voice
Walter Winchell, Daily Mirror

Oct. 30: Prof. W. Kunstler, WMCA
@ Oct. 31: Leon Pearson, NBC-TV
@ Nov. 1: Mike Wallace, WNTA-TV

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Noa ae eet ee

Fall Books

WHY READ NOVELS? Dan Jacobson
REAL GARDENS for REAL TOADS. George P. Elliott

THE SALINGER INDUSTRY George Steiner
|
| Other Essays by

R. V. Cassill, John Berry, R. S. Baker

OS SES

POETRY e THEATRE e MUSIC

LETTERS

Kchoes from a
Buddhist Temple

Dear Sirs: | have just seen Mr. Lincoln
Kirstein’s review of The Temple of the
Golden Pavilion (The Nation, August
15). If Mr. Kirstein found my introduc-
tion to this novel “prolix” and “unneces-
sary” he was quite within his rights as
a critic in saying so. It is, however, alto-
gether another matter to use the word
“inaccurate.” Since I am told that Mr.
Kirstein has only recently become an
enthusiast about Japanese culture, and
Zen in particular, 1 am interested 1

knowing! specifically to what he refers.
No Japanese authorities of my acquaint-
ance, neither the psychologists whom I
consulted on the factual record of the
burning of the Kinkakuji nor Zennists
have pointed out to me any errors in
what I wrote.

I have been a student of Asian art
and philosophy since my teens—an in-
terest that was fostered by my early life
on the Pacific Coast where association
with Asian people was commonplace. I
made my first trip to the Far East in
1939 when I had already become keenly
interested in Zen. Although China and
Japan were at war at the time, I received
special permission to travel through
Japan, Korea and as far as Peking,
studying private and monastery collec-
tions of Buddhist art, gardens and archi-
tecture, and also the Japanese theatre:
Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku. Many emi-
nent and knowledgeable people were my
mentors, including the great connoisseur
of art, Mitaichi Miya (who helped me
make my own modest collection), and
Zoe Kincaid, the first American to write
a book about the Japanese theatre. I
stress my long-standing Asian experi-
ence because it seems to me pertinent.

I was glad to learn of Mr. Kirstein’s
new interest in the Asian world, and in
particular, the rich and varied culture
of Japan and the subleties of the Zen
philosophy. I am sure he would be the
first to agree with me that misinterpre-
tations, casual assumptions of knowledge,
or accusations of error based ona limited
experience could well stand in the way
of the one thing we are all seeking, which
is the “truth.” In view of the present
tiresome and even possibly dangerous,
postwar Zen cult in America, it seemed
essential to me that the viewpoint of

Mishima’s psychotic hero be most warily -
psy' y

_ approached. It was this conviction that .

led me to write as carefully and as
lengthily as [ did in my introduction, an

How sad!”
that Senor Rechy could well have been

attitude that has been endorsed by the
experienced Zennists whom L know.

Nancy Witson Ross
Old Westbury, N.Y.

Dear Sirs: Since | have never indicated
any private information about Zen other
than what one reads in the books, since
I could never presume to compete with
Miss Ross as an Orientalist, since I can
neither read nor speak Japanese, and
since I only know Japan as a recent and
superficial tourist, | was not question-
ing Miss Ross’s knowledge of Buddhist
theology, but rather her capacity as a
literary critic. The importance of Mish-
ima’s novel, as I attempted to show,
is not in its allusion to Zen, but in its
special morality, which is not comparable
to, nor can it be judged by, the facile
Western parallels Miss Ross invoked to
make the book more palatable to West-
ern readers. That I am not alone in
my opinion of her introduction may be
clear from the review of the same work,
appearing in the Japan Times (Tokyo,
September 24, 1959):

This achievement is mitigated only
by the idiocy of the original publisher
| Knopf] in allowing an introduction
[by popular novelist Nancy Wilson
Ross] which is not only wildly beside
the point of the novel, but even man-
ages to compromise it through sheer
proximity. If Faith Baldwin were to
attempt a précis of The Possessed,
the result might be similar. It reminds
one of Rosalind Russell’s trying to
describe Moby Dick, which began
(and ended) with the great line:
“Well, it’s about this whale. .. .”

Lincotn KirsTEIN
New York City

The Way Out

Dear Sirs: Amen to Wade Thompson’s
“My Crusade Against . Fraternities”
(Sept. 26). The one way to get out of
a fraternity is to be expelled. Alpha Phi
Delta finally expelled me as the out-
come of an attempt on my part to bring
a Negro friend to a frat dance.

Joseru PERoNI
Hubbard, O.

The Big S

Dear Sirs: Thank you for your kind-
ness and thoughtfulness in sending me
a marked copy of The Nation of Octo-
ber 10, which includes the article “Jim
Crow Wears a Sombrero.” Aside from
expressing my appreciation to you, |
can say little more than: “How true!
Sadder still is the fact

Sombrero.

writing about Austin, a Antonio,

See a Pe

Fs pam aes
i ; a! BG Reed
- ate *. '
Oe, a Se Ws : Ya d
‘ th ,

Brownsville, Dallas and numerous other
communities in Texas, New Mexico,

Arizona, Colorado and California.
GerorceE |. SANCHEZ
Dep’t of the History and
Philosophy of Education
University of Texas

Pex.

In This Lee
EDITORIALS
341 @

FALL BOOKS

343 @ Why Read Novels?
by DAN JACOBSON

The Maiden Shrouded as a Deer

(poem)
by THOMAS VANCE

Real Gardens for Real Toads
by GEORGE P. ELLIOWT

Weddings and Banquets (poem)
by DILYS LAING

The Snowfall (poem)
by DONALD JUSTICE

Notes of a Novelist
by JOHN BERRY

The Fox (poem)
by D. HUWS

Accusers and Pardoners
by) Rev. CASSILG

The Reviewer to Himself

(poem)
by ML. ROSENTHAL

The Salinger Industry
by GEORGE STEINER

Snow Storm (poem)
by STEPHEN STEPANCHEV

The Rain (poem)
by ROBERT CREELEY

The RLS Factor
by RK. S. BAKER

Theatre
by IAROLD CLURMAN

Musice
by LESTER TRIMBLE

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 368)
by FRANK W. LEWIS
INULIN

George G. Kirstein, ‘Publisher

Carey McWillianis, "Pditor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Mditor

Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre

Maurice Grosser, Art

M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry

Lester Trimble, Musie

Alexander Werth, Wuropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager

Austin,

344 @

345 @

362 @

363 @

364 @

The Nation, Nov. 11, 1959, Vol. 189, No. 16
The Nation published weekly (except for omis-
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A. by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
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YORK, SA’ URDAY. NOVEMBER 14, 1959

VOLUME. 189, No. 16

EDITORIALS

Fair Warning for 1960

Mayor Richardson Dilworth’s resounding defeat of
Harold Stassen in the Philadelphia mayoralty election
and Mayor George Christopher’s victory over Russell
L. Wolden in San Francisco suggest that American
voters are developing less tolerance for vicious political
smears and the cruder forms of demagoguery. Mr.
Stassen started out by trying to incite the Philadelphi-
ans to a frenzy of animosity against his opponent by
charging that Mayor Dilworth had once advocated the
recognition of Red China. The Philadelphians yawned
and went about their business. In a desperate bid for
attention, Mr. Stassen then injected the racial issue
into the campaign; if elected he would see to it that
“immigrant” Negroes and Puerto Ricans were turned
back from the gates of the City of Brotherly Love. As
all but Mr. Stassen might have expected, both press

‘and public recoiled in distaste; overnight Mr. Stassen
got a great deal more attention that he had bargained
; for: What is surprising, however, is that certain Phil-
_ _adelphia wards which are not known for their piety or
_ their addiction to brotherly love, gave Mayor Dilworth
- a larger vote than he had received in the last election.
In San Francisco, Mr. Wolden should have been fore-
warned that the press and citizens of that notably fair-
minded city would not greet with enthusiasm the
charge that “soft” police and administration policies
had made their town a hive of homosexuals and a
haven for bearded beatniks. Politicians learn slowly;
even the “pros” — and Mr. Stassen is surely one —
continue to resort to tactics so thoroughly discredited
“that even the unregenerate reject them. The Phila-
delphia and San Francisco returns are by no means
conclusive but they should place politicians on notice
that old-type “baiting” is not likely to succeed in 1960.

ore

‘The Uses of Reni

_. In the TV-quiz scandal nhgee. has been much self-
. revelation by Charles Van Doren, but if any social
_ gain is to be derived from the whole sordid business, it
lies in another direction ae There should be less
q ‘interest in Mr, Van Doren 2 more in the behavior

ite wa =
“een tea

' the right honorable members themselves. 4

Wry oy
OME bf

One of these institutions is Columbia University, which
employed him and, hard on the heels of his confession,
accepted his resignation. Some will see in this action a
cold and pharisaical attitude toward the repentant
sinner, but the trustees are running a university to
‘educate youth, not a soap-opera factory, and had no
alternative but to do what they did.

The Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight comes off
less well. It had a corny star and it put on a corny play.
Mr. Van Doren was God-blessed more often and more
unctuously than if he had performed a real and volun-
tary public service. As each member in turn, with the
exception of Representative Steven B. Derounian,
poured on the ointment, the past misdeeds of members
of the Congress were washed away. Forgotten now the
Congressional relatives on the payroll, the expense-
account padding and all the fraud and deception of

But the most squalid role in this morality play of our
times was that of the National Broadcasting Company.
It too fired Mr. Van Doren, but the motivations and
the manner of action were utterly different from those
of Columbia University. It is difficult to fix moral and
legal responsibility for anything done in the audio and
video advertising fields — the sponsor, the advertising
agency, the network, with all their vice presidents, are
intertwined like worms in a can. But what emerges in
the Van Doren case is that the National Broadcasting
Company permitted the victim to continue his disavow-
als after it was perfectly clear to the entire country that
he. was guilty, and extracted from him the telegram
which led the Committee on Legislative Oversight to
subpoena him. As long as he lied, NBC continued to
pay him $1,000 a week; as soon as he told the truth,
they tore up his contract. The purpose was to demon-
strate the purity of NBC, but it is hardly likely that its j
viewers and listeners are still that gullible.

Robbing the Cradle

The enterprising advertisers and producers who, i
of TV ratings, rigged and ultimately ruined e
pert, set no. limits to their i ena Where e
ha fe

a
po ie
Jaber,

trate between right and wrong. It has been reported

that rigging occurred on the Quiz Kids show; more
recently, a twelve-year-old Broadway stage star won
$32,000 in CBS’s “The $64,000 Challenge,”

manager now reveals that she was given advance an-

and her

swers by the associate producer. Another child. star,
this one only nine, apparently did not get a chance to
exhibit her talents on a quiz show and, like many older
actresses, found herself without work of any kind. There-
upon, according to the story, she cracked her piggy
bank for $150 and took an airplane from Los Angeles
to Washington with the intention of appealing to Mrs.

Eisenhower to help her get work. Finding her bed empty

in the morning, her parents — still according to the
story — reported her disappearance. When the child

arrived at the Washington airport, she was met by the
FBI, the peiice, airline officials and TV camera crews.
The resuiting performance will not be soon forgotten
by those who saw it on TV. This miniature exhibition-
ist, with the aplomb and diction of a woman twenty
years her senior, rattled on for several minutes about
her desire to get a part suitable for her genius.
Whether the whole affair was arranged by someone
else, or whether she is her own press agent, 1s not known;
all that is certain is that she has been converted into a
bizarre product of aborted childhood, and it will not be
back into a child. Certainly if
than that of
she is being taught by experts how to look

easy to transform her
her education is more worldly other
children,

after the contents of her piggy bank.

Arms in the Caribbean

Iixcept when the whole world is at war, there is
never a shortage of armaments, and whoever is willing
and able to pay the price can have about anything he
wants. The State Department, nervous about events in
the Caribbean, has been trying to shut off the supply
of weapons to that area. It will have to try harder.
The Trujillo regime in the Dominican “Republic” has
put itself hock to the tune of $50 million (spent
principally in Europe) for weapons. Fidel Castro is
incensed because our State Department has interfered
with his purchase of British Hunter jets for the Cuban
air force. It is a safe bet that he will get his jets, some-
how, somewhere. The channels for arms of all kinds are
devious. Norway sold a half-miilion-dollar shipment of
American arms, supplied for the defense of the anti-
Communist world, to Batista. By the time the arms
were shipped, the purchaser was in flight for his life,

and Castro got the merchandise. Up to March, 1958,

the United States supplied Batista directly; that 1s
one of Castro’s grievances against us,

At present it is reported that Spanish and Italian
arms are reaching the Caribbean, some on credit. In

1959, the British sold about 1,000,000 surplus small

A / °
. ‘ ~& oe
Tene My ee re -, -

arms, the Italians some 500,000 Carcano carbines, and
Sweden large stocks of Mauser carbines’— all to U.S.
dealers. Surplus rifles are selling in this country for about
$15, or less than one-fifth of a new American hunting
rifle. The efforts of the State Department may be praise-
worthy, if belated, but it would be hazardous to wager
on their success, especially as the NATO nations are
among the chief purveyors of lethal merchandise, and
the West Germans are only starting to get into big
production. On the one hand, Washington encourages
the flow of arms; on the other, it seeks to divert it
from dangerous areas. The task would be difficult even
if we had a consistent policy; our vacillation makes it
almost impossible. Perhaps the best chance for success
would lie in the creation of an international arms-con-
trol agency, acting under the aegis of the U.N. and
deriving its powers from an arms-control convention.

The CIA’s Pentagon

Everything about the Central Intelligence Agency is
supposed to be secret. For years its very existence was
unacknowledged; its employees were not even permit-
ted to reveal by whom they were employed. Congress
appropriated something like a billion dollars a year for
its activities, without any but a small number of mem-
bers knowing what these activities were and whether
the money was being spent for the national Sees, or
for purposes inimical to it.

Now there is a great change. The agency is still secret,
but less so than before; the ordinary Washingtonian
will now know where, if not what, the CIA is. On No-
vember 2, President Eisenhower laid the cornerstone
of the new CIA building, situated on a bluff ten miles
west of Washington on the south side of the Potomac.
The structure, about half the size of the Pentagon, 1s
to cost $46 million. The nature of the CIA’s work, said
the President, requires of its members “the highest
order of education, ability, trustworthiness and_ self-
lessness — saying nothing of the highest type of courage
whenever needed.” But evidently with these scarcely
human attributes there was mingled the itch, common
to private and governmental enterprise alike, to be
housed on a scale commensurate with one’s administra-
tive stature, real or fancied. By the size and quality of
his desk, his carpeting, the number and pulchritude of
his secretaries, shall the executive be known.

As long as the CIA was housed obscurely in the
purlieus’ of downtown Washington, its perquisites in
this line were meager. But now that it is housed in such
conspicuous splendor perhaps a little more light can

be focused on its activities, perhaps it can be subjected

to closer Congressional serutiny, n maybe even the public
will be given an opportunity to appraise, to some degree
at least, its performance. If so, the public gai’ might
well be worth $46 million and. mote.

hE ee eS

rill BOOKS

~ 0 Os wes

;

SOONER OR LATER one is asked
the question, and sooner or later one
has to muster up, for one’s own sake,
an answer to it. Of course the first
answer is, “Because I enjoy them,”
but that is insufficient, even for one-
_ self. “What is the use of it?” people
want to know. “Why should we
bother?” Anyone who believes that
the novel does provide more than a
momentary enjoyment, and can teach
us what no other art form does, has
to argue his case. And when he reads
some of our fattest and most authori-
tative critical quarterlies, he cannot
help feeling at times that in order
to argue his case he has first to
rescue the novel from those who
think of themselves as its warmest
if friends: from critics who are so in-
volved with it that they never ask
the outsider’s honest question.
Ours is an age of specialization, as
everybody knows; and everybody
knows, too, that the only way to
win respect from other specialists is
by showing them that one’s own
specialty is just as special as theirs.
But respect is something very dif-
ferent from attention, and it is at-
tention first, and attention always,
that the critic should be trying to
_ gain for the work he is discussing.
It seems to me that one obvious way
for the serious critic of fiction to gain
this attention would be to make it
plain that his specialization is not
all that special and private, after
all. Indeed, one of the first answers
to the question, “Why read novels?”
is that in an age of specialization the
novel remains singularly un-special.
So far from this being anything for
critics or novelists to be ashamed of,
it is one of the glories of the form.

DAN JACOBSON, a South African
novelist now living in London, is the
author of Vhe Price of Diamonds,
A Dance in the Sun and The Zulu
and the Zeide. His American journal,
N o Further West, has recently been
t pee! m England. a

it is to be practically a 0

Why Read Novels?

Dan Jacobson

The novel really is knowledge: the
recorded knowledge of the states of
consciousness of different men at dif-
ferent times. For most of us, for most
of the time, one kind of knowledge
or way of knowing excludes every
other; we know abstractly or we
know intuitively, we know sensuous-
ly or we know mentally. But the
novelist, ideally, knows simultane-

ously what we know only in alterna-
tion, and within any single work he
is able to deploy one isn of knowl-
edge against another, to imply one
when he is writing about others, to
remind us of the others when we
would prefer to read only about one.
In his creation of character, the
novelist is continually shifting, mov-
ing, comparing, remembering, uniting
his knowledge. The characters in
a novel are the novelist’s individual
foci of consciousness; they, ultimate-
ly, are what the novelist knows, and
the greater the novelist the more
people he will be able to create and
the more he will know about each
one of them.

Already, here, we can see why the
novel is so supremely important in
this “age of specialization,” when we
feel the multiplication of abstract
“knowledge” of all kinds to be, not
liberating, but frightening and dis-
couraging; when every publisher’s
crammed list and every learned
journal is an invitation to us to give
up the struggle for consciousness,
with the feeling “It’s too much, it’s
beyond me.” The novelist—to put it
very simply—can remind us again
and again that what is important
for us to know, outside our special-
ties, is not too much, is not beyond
us. The novelist cannot be expect-
ed to know about the latest de-
velopments in physics or medicine,
say, but he can be expected to know,
as he has known in the past, what it

is to be a physicist or a doctor. The
novelist knows, or should niow, what

store to us that sense of community
which nowadays is broken not only
by racial and ideological strife, but
also seems to be shattered anew
by every advance that is made in
thé accumulation of knowledge about
the physical world.

THE help of the novelist is invalu-
able, too, in our consideration of the
abstract programs or ideologies which
some people feel it is the novelist’s
duty to have no truck with, others
that it is his duty simply to make
enticing. The novelist must under-
stand the attractions of ideology, if
only because so many men live by
ideology; but as novelist he knows
that any abstraction has its real
life and importance within the in-—
dividual men who are affected by it.
If for a moment the novelist should
forget this, then he is no longer im-
parting to us the knowledge which
we ask from him. We say that he has
become a propagandist; but there is
another way of expressing it, which
seems to be more useful here—and
that is to say that such a novelist
has become as ignorant as the char-
acter he is creating; he has allowed
his conscioustiess to become as
shrunken and constricted as that /of
the ideologue, Consciousness again
is the key word: the novel is about
consciousness, about the kinds, de-
grees, the modes, the states of con-
scicusness which men have experi-
enced. What the novel alway strives
for is a total consciousness, a. total
illumination of the experience which
it describes. And as readers, we have
to judge the novel by the extent to
which it enlarges or falls short of our
own total awareness of the fullness
and variety of life.

However, the novel does more
than “enlarge” our consciousness,

more than show us how different we

are from, and how similar to, other —
people—vital and restorative though
that work is. The novel also gives”
pomt and dipectos to our conscious-
ness, in the ey act of enlarging it
The best of indicating what is”
meant here-is giving an example; a
and one «anna er better sgiinee to

caine
ia

Bt select one’s example from Tolstoy.
The greatness of Volstoy resides pre-
He cisely in the truly astonishing range
and depth of the knowledge he brings
to bear (and forces us to bear) upon
each of his characters.

When one begins reading Tolstoy
one at first misses the particular per-
sonal timbre that agitates the pages
of most other novelists; one wonders
at his peculiar mildness and placidity
of tone; one wonders how he seems
able to say such very damaging
things about his characters without
seeming to hold anything against
them. Take the opening scene of
War and Peace, Mlle. Scherer’s fa-
mous soirée, and the description of
Prince Vassili Kuragin within it—
how he speaks “from habit, like a
wound-up clock, saying things he
did not even wish to be believed”;
how he accedes to the request of
Boris Drubetskoy’s mother, not be-
cause he wants to do her a favor, but
because he feels it would be more
trouble not to accede; how he takes
Mlle. Scherer’s hand at an important
moment in their conversation “and
for some reason bends it down-
wards,” as a way of imparting signifi-
cance to what he is saying. In all
this we see the man emerge, from
the top of his “perfumed, shining
bald head” to his court stockings
and slippers. But it is not the won-
derful clarity and absurdity of the
detail to which I want to draw at-
tention, nor the economy and frank-
ness of Tolstoy’s means of display-
ing this detail, before our eyes, with
no legerdemain or fuss of any kind
—it is the calmness of his tone. He
doesn’t seem to mind that Prince
Kuragin is an old bounder, sponger,
hypocrite, bully and liar; and at first
his not seeming to mind is disturbing.

Every other novelist we know
would mind; we think how Dostoev-
sky might have writhed, Dickens

have hated. Tolstoy simply lets the
old man go on his way; and as Ku-
ragin begins in the novel, so he con-
tinues throughout, lying, bullying,
sponging. He is a minor character,
and nothing very much happens to
him, but by the end of the novel
we know exactly what he is—and
my point is that we know Kuragin
not only through what has been writ-

2 |

might have jeered, Lawrence might >

et ty: MCE
ty ele

ten about him, but also because we

know what has been written about all
the other characters. We know, be-
cause Tolstoy knew, all that Kuragin
has missed, being what he is: how in-
capable he is of ever attaining the

va he, ee @ 4
because in point

y a Pe ee ae
of fact, as we have —
seen with Kuragin, nothing at all
need “happen” to a character in any
obvious, overt sense, and yet he can
be placed for us within a moral
scheme. If we are to talk of reward

states of intense consciousness that
are suffered or enjoyed by Andrey
and Pierre, Natasha and Princess
Marya. Kuragin, the creature of his
society, 1s one-tenth alive, barely
conscious, deaf, deprived, inferior.

and punishment, we have to say that
the novelist dees not (or should not)
punish his characters; they punish
themselves, being what they are: he
does not reward his characters, they
reward themselves, being what they
are. The novelist knows them, better
than they know themselves or we
know ourselves; he knows them fully, -
he illumines them to our inward
view. And there are as many ways
of doing this as there are novelists
and novels: Moby Dick is as dit-

PLOT is usually thought of as the
great moral agent within a novel,
what happens to a character being
the judgment that is passed upon
him. This is true enough, as far as it
goes, but it does not go far enough;

The Maiden Shrouded as a Deer
(After an early Swedish ballad) ;

A deer ran through the dark forest,
A glitter of gold on her breast.

“You may shoot the hart, the roe,
But let the golden hind go,”

The mother said, “Or shoot the sun,
But let the hind that’s golden run.”
The boy shouldered his cunning bow
And walked into the wood’s shadow.

When he came where the leaves were dim
The hind played lightly before him.

He dropped his bow across his knee:
The hind was hidden by a tree.

He braced his bow against his foot:
The hind vanished beside a root.

He held the bow before his thigh:
The hind was moving in his eye.
Into the shade the arrow fled
And shot his own sister dead.

The boy threw off his gloves, and kneeled
To flay the carcass he had killed.

He cut the quarry at the throat
And touched his sister’s golden coat.

He flayed the gold hind, head and neck,
And found his sister’s golden lock.

He flayed the flank, and still shining
There was his sister’s golden ring.

He cast his knifé down on the earth,
And said, “The old woman’s word was truth.”

Against himself he bent his bow;
His heart received the straight arrow.

The cranes fly high over the wood,

Winging the south, gone home for good,

But who can fly from sorrow is blest;

And yet she wears a golden breast. ;
He Bo al ‘Tuomas VANCE Cher s ce
3 wo nh We ate vad tok A i

ferent from: War and Peace as either
is from The Portrait of a Lady, but
they are all great novels, great acts
of consciousness.

I cannot help feeling that when
people prophesy the demise of the
novel they are looking forward to
the demise of more than a single art
form; they are half-hoping that the
sort of power which is the novelist’s
will go out of existence. They no
longer believe (or want to believe)

that it is possible to try to know
the human truth of every situation
in which people find themselves; they
resent the novelist’s claim that we
can be known, and shown, in our
weakness and strength, through all
the changing forms of our changing
societies. If it is true that the novel
is dying, then so too is modern man’s
ambition to know the truth about
himself. If the novel lives it will be
because that ambition lives still.

Real Gardens for Real Toads
Ceorge P. Elliott

SOME OF the greatest works of fic-
tion have been realistic in mode,
more have not been; indeed, until
a little over two centuries ago, real-
istic fiction scarcely existed in the
world; there were romances, tales,
satires, sagas, allegories, legendary
histories. And though the great tra-
dition of British fiction has been
predominantly realistic, the best
American fictions have until quite
recently nearly all been romances.
Yet realism in American fiction is
now so important that novel, that
loose. word, usually means realistic
novel; and, unconsciously perhaps
and unjustly certainly, all sorts of
fictions are measured by the alien,
dominant, but not superior standards
of realism, which standards are them-
selves by no means perfectly clear.
In this essay, I am going to look
at eight recent books of realistic
fiction, with the intention both of
clarifying the term a bit and also of
suggesting how the form best uses
one of its essential components, a
society.

I take it as axiomatic that in any
work of such fiction a character is
defined to a very considerable extent
by his social behavior. This means
that the society in which the char-
acter moves has a well-defined yet
subtle code of conduct intimately
understood by the author. An addi-
tional part of the author’s intention
in such a fiction is to figure forth
the customs of that social world. He

does not do this out of a sociological

_ GEORGE P. ELLIOTT is the au-
thor of Parktilden Village aoe :

no other writer has se
for a long time: he ade

Wake Up, Stupid. By Mark Harris,
Knopf. $1.45.

Goodbye, Columbus. By Philip Roth.
Houghton Miffin. $3.75.

The Return of Ansel Gibbs. By
Frederick Buechner. Knopf. $3.75.
The Great Prince Died. By Bernard
Wolfe. Scribner’s. $4.50.

The Magic Barrel. By Bernard

Farrar, Straus, and
Cudahy. $3.75.

Pursuit of the Prodigal. By Louis
Auchincloss. Houghton Mifflin.
$3.75.

Mrs. Bridge. By Evan S. Connell, Jr.
Viking. $3.75.

The Body’s Cage. By Benjamin De-
Mott. Little Brown. $4.

Malamud.

impulse, but out of a zeal for rep-
resenting the world as he sees it; and
he does this less by typifying than
by looking as closely as he can at
particular persons, at individuals. In
this mode of conceiving, in the mode
of realistic fiction, an individual
cannot be sharply defined except as
seen obeying, violating, evading, in
some way reacting to the customs
of his society. Among contemporary
short story writers, J. F. Powers
beautifully exemplifies this mode;
his best stories would be quite un-
thinkable without the ways of the
Church for him to define his char-
acters within and against. Among
recent novels, By Love Possessed
seems to me notable in portraying a
clearly defined and defining society
of credible persons. The literary flaws
of the book are egregious and notor-
ious, but Cozzens does one job which

class both in their private lives and
in their ruling. For this the novel
deserves more honor than it got from
the left hand of literature, though for
its flaws it deserves less than it got
from the right.

An example of what happens when
a writer takes his characters out of
a social structure almost altogether
and yet persists in treating them
quite realistically, may be seen in
Jack Kerouac’s fictions. They are
painfully repetitious and formless;
this shortcoming 1s not at all because
Kerouac lacks talent, for. any one
episode may read like a part of some-
thing very good; it derives, at least
in part, from his using a technique
one of whose essential qualities he
contemns. An author does far better
to use techniques other than real-
istic when he is not primarily inter-
ested in character portrayal. Imagine
Saul Bellow’s gigantic Henderson (a
rain king in strangest Africa) ren-
dered in the realistic, Manhattan
mode of Seize the Day — that would
have been a misery to behold.

I BELIEVE that the success or fail-
ure of each of my eight examples is in
good part, though of course not en-
tirely, measured by the degree to
which the characters are seen and
rendered as a part of their society
and also by the degree to which that
society itself is adequately rendered.
This does not mean that “social
consciousness” is required of a fic-
tion writer. It does mean that he
must know — not have. theories
about, but know — the society in
which his story takes place and that,
insofar as social differences and cus-
toms are thematically important in
his story, he must be true to these
themes and develop them within and
as a part of the very texture of the
fiction.

As an example of a novel which |

is thin in good part because its
society is meagerly rendered, take

Wake Up, Stupid by Mark Harris. It —

is full of high spirits and horseplay;
the author’s catching and mockin,

of all sorts of prose styles (the book —

is in the form of letters and re

is flawless; his characters are ee

and the world they inhabit resem=_

bles a part of the contemporary

world. Yet there is more wrong wi
the book than the weak gimmicked-

aig

+ oe
¢

up, last episodes. Finally, I think,
this English professor and his ac-
quaintance do not live in the United
States in the middle fifties but, by
: a process of exclusions and emphases
Mf iD in an implausible society abun as
A uncomplicated as that of Tom Sazo-
eh. yer. So clear-cut a world was all
right for the boy’s fantasy, but not
i for this man’s book. Had the story
ee been more purely a farce, this ob-
jection would not stand up. But when
Ny motivation and custom are as prob-
able as they are here, then, for ex-
cellence, the society must be prob-
oo able too — which is to say, far nastier
and less coherent than the one in this
Mat) book.
Wee ie Goodbye, Columbus, the long, am-

In the ruins of a cathedral

ia and lying on the crazed flagstones
a bell overthrown and cracked
exposes its rusty clapper

with wind-lifted cassock
and in the crumbled sacristy
1 three or four rascals in caps
ae, take the collection

All this is going on in England

as well as the death of Lewis XVI

but he keeps his hat on his head
to guard the Holy Ghost within
which is the spirit of contradiction

No
present of it to the butcher
who will forget his dead parakeet

and go back to killing cattle
with a big mallet

thinks William Blake
with his mind on something else

the wedding

A beauty

pure as red wine
and innocent as Spring

ie a butcher cries like a calf over the death of a bird
|

reminding one of a large obscene priest

es on the occasion of the marriage of Heaven and Hell
partly in honor of the French Revolution

The bridegroom is known as William Blake
He is quite naked and altogether correct

When anyone asks — Spirit are you there
that dove invariably replies with an engaging smile

When the wedding is over William Blake will make a

We are not to be compared with a bird

which is neither more nor less than the spectacle
of a dazzling girl invited by someone or other to

and who is really lovely and just as naked as he is

thinks William Blake a beauty of a radiant calm

And he gazes at her because he desires her
at and she gazes at him because she desires him:
when there appears a big Barbary duck |

a ; ; , f

first collection, provides an example
of a story which comes to Jess than
it might have done chiefy because
the author did not adequately de-
velop the very social themes upon
which he based his story. Among
his other virtues, Roth has a good
eve for the details of class distinc-
tions, and the promised and promis-
ing theme of the story has to do
with precisely these distinctions. A
poor boy, through whose eyes we
sce everything, falls in love with a
girl from a nouveau riche family.
The girl and her family are portrayed
with a careless care that succeeds
admirably in evoking them both
severally and collectively, but the

Weddings and Banquets

(From Paroles, by Jacques Prévert)

eee , OT
bitious title story in Philip” ‘Roth’s ;

a ohh F
Pers reer rede Me oP

boy is represented as ‘peng
tached and ironic an observer that
whether he marries her or not doesn’t

matter very much to the reader — ©

and it must matter in a story as
good as this one started out to be.
Worse, the true, social, defining
theme of the story gives way to a
frivolous plot. A contraceptive de-
vice becomes the plot issue without
in any serious way fulfilling or even
becoming a part of the main social
theme of the story. The author, hav-
ing demonstrated his powers of come-
dy and realism, settles for being chic,
“daring” and safe.

I do not mean to imply that the
presence of a lot of society or of
conscious social themes will in them-

playing a tune of all times and places on his barrel organ

and the wedding begins
the wedding proper

as William Blake precisely states
because there are some things so clumsily

and so badly said

Is it for the Mass that you say that

asks an old man with the head of a prophet or bishop
and a most argumentative air

But William Blake is a gentleman

a nice man as they say in England

and has no wish to discuss with a bishop

the wedding day of Heaven and Hell

and who in any case suspects

that this is also the day of his own wedding

seeing that the girl is so enchanting
and that he loves her beyond all doubt
and that she probably loves him too
He is therefore quite content to say

to the man with the head of a bishop or a prophet or
a safety-pin

“As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves
to Jay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on

the fairest joys.”

Well then on with the music
We'll speak of the Mass some other time
And since he has said On with the music

the music goes on

and behind it the dazzling girl

who smiles at William Blake
because he once said

“Prisons are built with stones of law, Brothels with

bricks of religion.”

_ And she gives him her arm
and everything else along with it

and who is happy now

but William
~ William ‘

ae
y ae

so de- —

"
ral

CS eras

FSS PC ee aes

Ries: make a novel. Frederick

“Buechner’s The Return of Ansel

Gibbs encompasses the social spec-
trum — schematically. But the trou-
ble is just this: the writer makes you
far more aware of his careful con-
structions than of people acting in a
world. Gibbs himself is a New York-
er of almost the highest social class
and with a long and honorable career
of government service. His daughter
and his old religious mentor work
with the lowest social class, in East
Harlem. At the end of the novel,
Gibbs has gone to see the President
and has been appointed a member
of the Cabinet, the daughter is en-
gaged to be married to a successful
television interviewer, and the old
mentor has just learned that the
baby of one of the women in his
parish has died from being eaten at
by a rat. The book’s liveliest char-
acter, however, is none of these but
a TV expert at manipulating the
masses, who also manipulates Gibbs.
To be sure, insofar as he is part of
Buechner’s construction project, he
is no more interesting than any of
the other figures; but occasionally,
when he is allowed to escape from
the project, he comes to life as a

‘man who is thoroughly and un-

consciously a part of society and is
defined by it. He is unanchored and
his social conscience is about one-
tenth as big as anyone else’s in the
novel, but perhaps it is just because
his personality can elude Buechner’s
heavy seriousness that he gains some
fictional vitality. The weight of so-
cial-worker grimness is, in the long
run, fictionally worse than the fri-
volity of a Mark Harris.

NOR will an overt political theme
in itself give a realistic novel the
sense of society which it must have.
On the contrary, the very presence
of so much social theorizing may
vitiate the feeling of a society being
lived in, just as a political character’s
‘motives tend to become thin be-
cause schematized and impersonal,
better suited to symbolic or stylized
treatment. Bernard Wolfe’s The

Great Prince Died is, to my knowl-

edge, the best recent example of a
political novel. Because of its main

action, the assassination of Trotsky,

: ae PP
_ the book has considerable documen- _
- resin oF

—

N ere 1s 4 . al 3

tary value:.it illuminates, in eminent-
ly readable form, an event worth
knowing about, and it provides po-
litico-psychological insights into
Trotsky of a kind that, so far as I
know, have not been bettered. But I
do not know of one assassination of
a historically important man—Cae-
sar? Lincoln? Lenin?—which has
been happily incorporated into real-
istic fiction; its actual symbolic den-
sity makes it intractable material for
a novelist. As for historically dense
symbols: even the supreme Tolstoy
did far less well with Napoleon than
with the imagined Dolohov, Andrei,
Natasha; he did better with the his-
torical but relatively unimportant
Kutuzoy, whom he was free to make
into his own symbol.

The fictional thinness of the per-
sons of The Great Prince Died de-
rives also in good part from the
fact that all but one of the important
characters are in a country in which
they are strangers and with whose
ways they have little vital connec-
tion. They are cast-offs and refugees
from various societies, all of which
are conceptualized for us but none
of which are felt as being there, nor
do the characters form a micro-
cosmic society of their own. The
rather similar collection of char-
acters in Cummings’ The Enormous
Room composes a sort of society;
partly this is because the displaced
people have no ideology to relate to
at the expense of their relating to
one another, but also, I believe, it
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try to build these theories into the
structure of his story. Too often, the
characters of such a story will be re-
lated to ideas about society more
than to one another, and it is a rare
author whose characters are made
passionately real by means of their
theories. | would not say that it can-
not happen. It is possible for a writer
to create his characters in good part
through their ideas (Naphta and
Settembrini in The Magic Mountain)
and it is possible for a novel to sur-
vive its writer’s explicitly imposed
social theories (War and Peace);
but both are rare, and risky to try.
It is more promising as well as more
conventional to go at it less sche-
matically — to tell a story of love,
intrigue, discovery, hatred, which is
defined and directed by the society
the characters move in, so long
as the author understands it in his
muscles more than in his theories.
To a novelist, society is like sensory
experience and the body’s workings,
there for him to use toward a literary
end,

NOTHING is harder than to have a
clear, steady and sound idea of what
society is and what it should be. I
must speak for myself: I realize that
I could not define the word to any-
one’s satisfaction; like many, I some-
times in desperation identify society
with the state — whence horrors
ensue. The word “democratic” as
applied to American society has
ceased to have any more independent
meaning than the word “united” in
United States. We have no good
analogy by which to comprehend
our society. It is not a body whose
head is the President, nor an army,
nor a corporation, nor any sort of
religious body, nor any sort of ma-
chine. The commonest analogy is
to an organism; but which sort of
organism? A tree? It is not mobile
enough. A Portuguese-man-of-war?
No centralization. An eagle, as the
dollar says? Too small. One of the
dinosaurs? That sounds pretty good
— a vast, bewildered, terrifying,
vegetarian, self-extinctive creature.
Yes, it will serve. Our new totem:
the brontosaurus.

American society is there and we
without thinking about it know some
of its workings, which is good for a

348

novelist; but we (or at least I) can-
not embrace it in one system of con-
ceptions, which is poor. Jane Aus-
ten was able fully to comprehend the
small society she knew and created,
and Balzac is the exemplar of a novel-
ist who re-created in his fictions the
large society he knew. These two
could do this because they were
superb novelists, but in good part,
surely, their task was made_pos-
sible by the coherence of the worlds
they lived in; at least those worlds
were generally conceived as being,
and I think were, far more coherent
than American society is or can be
conceived as being in our century.

Perhaps this very difficulty in con-
ceiving American society coherently
helps account for the importance in
contemporary fiction of the theme
of alienation. In any case, while some
of the fictional characters you come
across nowadays are pretty well out-
side any social scheme, on the bum
with the beats, a lot more of them
are in various sorts of social organiza-
tions and yet do not feel in them.
They don’t necessarily hate their
family, whether the family they were
born into or the one they created by
marriage, but they do want to be
shed of it or are so already. They
don’t much like their work and do
not feel a sense of community with
their fellow workers. They are with-
out church. Solitude means nothing
to them, loneliness all. They collect
in coffee houses, in the Army, at
games, wherever, and feel all the
more alienated for the falseness of
the community they are in. Sooner
or later, these characters, or their
authors for them, are likely to get
around to asking “Who am I?” —
that question which can hardly be
answered unless you are in a strong
social, moral order, and which is not
likely to be asked if you are in one,
But the reasons for the characters’
alienation are seldom made very
clear. Often it is suggested that they
are too fine-grained and_ sensitive
for the Winesburg-O they were born
into, and frequently they belong to
a minority group. But there is more,
I believe, to this social illness than
sensitivity or being a Negro; what
more, it is for writers to investigate
in their fictions.

For literature, alienation has a

complementary themé in false com-—
munity. Just as very many Ameri-
cans do not feel that they belong
to their society, so a writer, unable
to place his characters adequately’
in America, may be tempted to place
them in an imaginary or inadequate
society which he treats as the real
thing. What happens to people who
are in or create or try to get out of
such false communities as the Ma-
rine Corps, Bohemia, Standard Oil
of New Jersey, a mass movement, an
egalitarian utopia? That is a legit-
imate and fascinating subject. But
the writer will spoil his story if he
mistakes the false community for a
true one, togetherness for love. In
the lower echelons of fiction, Her-
man Wouk in The Caine Mutiny
does this; much higher up, Bernard
Malamud sometimes does it too.

MALAMUD’S celebrated collection
of short stories, The Magic Barrel,
surely deserved to be honored. His
special mixture of prose styles, his
lightness, humor, sympathy, gentle-
ness, his way. of seeing, all are of a
richness and humanity which oblige
true respect. Further, his vision is
special and penetrating, so that it is
profitable to read these stories to-
gether; something in them adds up.
Although only one, the title story, has
both the density and the elegant
balance which all his stories seek as
their perfection, reading them all
acquaints you with a writer whom
you owe it to yourself to know
more than piecemeal.

One of the things he can do most
admirably is to set his real toads
in real gardens; that is to say, he
substantially places his characters,
most of whom are poor Jews, in their
family, their neighborhood, their re-
ligion, their city (usually New York),
their nation. In the one crashing
failure of the volume (“The Lady
of the Lake”), the protagonist is
taken out of this country, and what
is worse, out of a large city, to a
dreamy Italian lake. There, to win
the dreamy girl, he denies his Jew-
ishness. No city, a false toad, a half-
imaginary garden — in choosing
these, Malamud violates his own
best gifts. At his best, however, he
remains true to his talent, and com-
municates, with real poignancy, the

The

ATION |

dis Van fp A ee eo

rr -

‘sense "oF his charactee alienation
from the great society and of their
difficult finding of a true (and often
brief) community, usually in reli-
gious experience.

But because the actual world does
not provide communities of any size
and social consequence which fill
Malamud’s need for a true commu-
nity, he is sometimes tempted to
leave the actual world for a sort of
false community. This is especially
apt to happen toward the end of a
story; the most startling instance of
it is the last sentence of his second
novel, The Assistant: “At Passover
he became a Jew.” The kinds of
people Malamud creates best are
those who act upon their selfish im-
pulses and can also repent of their
sinfulness and atone for their sins,
who care that God is there, whose
suffering is seen by themselves as
purgative. He might have created an
imaginary community for them; in-
stead, to the consternation of the
reader, he invents something which
he calls “the Jews.” For a while, I
thought his Jews were the historical
Jews—Jewry—and they seemed to
be; then, as things began shifting, I
wondered if his Jews were really
Judaism, but that was too abstract
and theological; then, I thought he
meant suffering mankind, a mystical
society of sufferers. But no, he seems
to mean all these and perhaps some-
thing more. Another possible inter-
pretation intrudes itself—that Mal-
amud means literally that only a
Jew can be fully human, that is to
say, can sin and suffer livingly, and
that anyone who wants to be wholly
a man must become a Jew.

A similar presumption has given
various kinds of Christianity a bad
name in the world, Calvinism a while
ago and Catholicism still, and it is
true the Jews do think of themselves
as the Chosen People, a_ risky
thought. I would hate to think that
a writer of Malamud’s gentleness and
wisdom should entertain so obnox-
ious an attitude; but I should be
hard put to it to refute such a read-
ing of his fictions. Surely it is true
that many who suffer purgatively
are not what is commonly meant by
Jews, and many are, and many ac-

tual one like pmany actual non-

just destroyingly, without benefit,
damnedly; nor is it impossible for
a writer to distinguish among these
classes of men. If Malamud had been
a Jew in a wholiy Jewish (or a Chris-
tian in a wholly Christian) society,
his literary trouble would never have
arisen. As it is, our unconceivable
and incoherent society has been es-
pecially hard on him.

I TURN now to three novelists who,
it seems to me, know and have treat-
ed with reasonable success the so-
ciety in which their characters live.

The first is Louis Auchincloss,
whose special world is that of the
highest social class, much money, and
not so much power as formerly. If
there is one social theme he might
develop more thoroughly, it is that
of the ways in which this class deals
with the economic and political pow-
er it inherited and has now lost, al-
lowed to slip away, or sometimes
tries to recapture. However, within
the fictional comedy of manners,
which pretty much is his chosen
form, he is the best since the early
Marquand. He sees the world of
the New York rich with a satiric
and meticulous eye; he is a real pro
at the difficult craft of constructing
and developing a plot; he controls
his characters and their actions with
a firm, steady hand. Purswit of the
Prodigdl is nearly first-rate of its
kind, though not quite. The protag-
onist moves from the old-fashioned,
staid, respectable world of his Long
Island family and his first law firm
to Greenwich Village and a law firm
which seems to him not hypocritical
in its chicaneries; then, through re-
marriage, he moves halfway back to
his origins. He hurts others and 1
hurt; he discovers as much of him-
self as he can, he is defined, within
a society which he is intimately a
part of, a recognizable and in some
ways fairly important segment of
actual American society.

But such a form demands of its au-
thor an absolutely, unrelentingly firm
discipline, cold, impartial, morally
right; and rather more often than
is good for his book, Auchincloss re-
laxes into such shoddinesses as spite
against a character (especially the
protagonist’s first wife) and a certain

banality of style (especia in some

of the social conversa

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to me that all he lacks as a novelist
of manners is adequate control over
the form he has. chosen, a. difficult
form, it is true, but proved to be
sound.

In Mrs. Bridge, Evan Connell has
set himself a modest but difficult
task: to make a true-to-life portrait
of a woman, but to do it in the man-
ner of a mosaicist. He has laid 117
small, hard, bright chapters, not one
of them conventionally satisfying in
a narrative way, in so elegant a pat-
tern that the whole portrait is a
marvel. Some of the details are weak:
his irony is occasionally obvious and
his hatred sometimes excessive or
excessively present; once, his pathos
comes too easily. But the cold, exact
method holds the reader away from
Mrs. Bridge, who is the entire focus
of attention in the book, so that these
small imperfections do not bother the
memory; the total effect is right. And
the author defines Mrs. Bridge al-
most entirely within and by her so-
ciety. This is the domestic world of
bourgeois Kansas City in this cen-
tury, and Connell’s presentation of
that world is deadly accurate both
in detail and in depth. If you were
born thirty or forty years ago into
a respectable middle-class Protestant
white Middle-Western family, then
Mrs. Bridge was a neighbor of yours
and maybe is your mother.

BENJAMIN DeMOTT, in The
Body’s Cage, so beautifully illustrates
my final main point that I am in dan-
ger of over-valuing it. After which ca-
veat, I feel free to say I was de-
lighted and absorbed by the novel
just as a book to read. DeMott has
learned something of Faulkner’s
method of withholding and distribut-
ing information in a novel, but being
primarily realistic in his style and
having his own taut voice, he has
not been ensnared by Faulkner’s
rhetoric or themes or (except for
one servant) characters. In a word,
he has learned from the master, not
become a Faulknerite.

The first two sentences announce
the book: “Kimball did not know
much at first. Only that Mrs. Chi-
thero, their mother’s lady friend who
prayed people well instead of tend-
ing them with medicine — only that
she came to live in their house.” The
main theme is Kimball’s discovery

of his family, his father and himself,
and his gaining with that knowledge
power to control himself. This dis-
covery 1s made necessary and pos-
sible as the result of the vengeful
Mrs. Chithero’s use of Christian
Science to damage Kimball’s father
through Kimball’s mother and sister.
The action takes place in a town in
the Northeast from before World
War I up inte the depression, and,
just because of the nature of the
conflicts among and needs of the
central characters, parts of the whole
community are involved in the novel.
There are pillars of society in the
book, doctor lawyer minister judge,
but none behaves otherwise than his
counterpart would have behaved in
real life; they are individuals, not
types. There are no social issues in
the book, and not even the author
seems concerned with changes and
quirks of social custom. Yet every
character belongs absolutely to the
community they are all in. Their so-
ciety is one of the understood condi-
tions of their acting and not a thing
to be looked at analytically, satirical-
ly, proudly, in any detached way at
all by them, the author, or the reader.

And this, it seems to me, is the
best possible: use of society in real-
istic fiction. Samuel Richardson, one
of the fathers of such fiction, wrote
at a time when the family unit had
contracted, the middle classes were
increasing in power and size, and the
Industrial Revolution was getting
under way. But he didn’t know any
of these things by these terms. He
knew them better than any historian
of society now can know them, but
not conceptually; he knew them in

his chest and knees and pen-holding
fingers; such of that knowledge as
pertained to what was happening in
his novels infuses them, the rest 1s
absent.

The purpose of a realistic fiction
is to create in the reader’s mind the
illusion of real people doing possible
things in a society which is part of
the actual world — the imagined
texture of natural experience. To
create this illusion, DeMott knows
as Richardson knew, talk about such
matters as the War, Prohibition, or
the depression is apt to be far less
important than presenting the be-
havior of a socially ordinary family
when the minister comes calling un-
expectedly, or a grown boy’s reaction
to a reprimand at the dinner table
from his harsh father before an out-
sider, or a timid girl’s way of allow-
ing a man beneath her to court her.
It is by such ways, far more than
through conceptualized social prob-
lems, that people actually know one
another, even in our mixed-up,
hyper-self-analytic, social-theorizing
age; and it is certainly by such ways
that a reader best knows the char-
acters of fiction.

Law is the clothes men wear

Anytime, anywhere,

Law is Good-morning and Good-

night.

In good realistic fiction, the possible
corners for theories of society to fit
into are few and far between (I do
not count Dostoevsky’s novels as
being primarily realistic): but so-
ciety itself and its ways, accurately
and complexly realized, is every-
where felt by the reader as naturally
as the time of day.

The Snowfall

The classic landscapes of dreams are not

More pathless, though footprints leading nowhere
Would seem to prove that a people once
Survived for a little even here.

Fragments of a pathetic culture
Remain—the lost mittens of children,

And a single, bright, detasseled snowcap—,
Evidence of some frantic migration.

The landmarks are gone. Nevertheless
There is something familiar about this country.
Slowly now we begin to recall

The terrible whispers of our elders
Falling softly about our ears

In childhoo

a ae oes
ee Bl te

de ee A

, never believed till now.

Donatp Justice

“

John

The two preceding essays have
considered the virtue and the art of
the novel. John Berry’s notes deal
with the practice of the novel.

During the years when he was
writing Krishna Fluting (his first
novel and winner of this year’s Mac-
millan Fiction Award), Mr. Berry
kept by him “a big, red spiral-bound
notebook with the word ‘Live-wire’
printed on it in what looks like live
wire.” In all he made 400 entries—
from which the numbered paragraphs
below are selected—“in emergencies
when I was disconnected, short-
circuited or temporarily dead,”

Submitting these notes some weeks
before the book was published, Mr.
Berry wrote: “I’m quite aware that
it may seem presumptuous to open
archives before an event, especially
one that may not be very notice-
able.” To the editor it seems that the
insight these self-addressed memo-
randa give into the state of a mind

3. I.F. says my writing is “objective,”
from the outside, unlike his. Says he
can’t get into my characters. (That’s
O.K. He’s a nice guy, but obsessed with
idea of getting into. Come to think of it,
his characters don’t defend themselves
very Weil.) ...<

8. C.P.S. says you gotta have Action,
Suspense! That seems sort of cold-blood-
ed, going at it backwards, like the sex
in his novels. Ethical duty to be lustful,
show you’re a kind of man. Note, all
yr stories have some action, suspense
and a central problem. The setting helps
create a sense of danger, the unfamiliar,
unexpected, hence the atmosphere of
legend, myth, miracle.

12. Keep building up these damn notes
day by day, & before you know it the
novel will be under way. Organize for
a 2-year expedition into the Interior.

17. Each character should be bang!
with some detail of speech, character,
action, appearance. Li Po, Scaliger. Artis
Poeticae est non omnia dicere, Faulkner
contrary. L. H. Myers very contrary.

23. Make a General Outline (half a
page perhaps), then a less general Out-
line, then try—or think of trying—a di-
vision by chapters. Don’t worry too
much about chapters, though; maybe
you'll just want to write right through,

vember 14, 1959

Notes of a Novelist

Berry

engaged upon a large creative project
removes any taint of preswmption.
In any case, the event has now oc-
curred and Krishna Fluting has been
qudged by others to be worth its au-
thor’s travail.

The central character of the novel
ws Peter Bruff, whose father was a
Quaker missionary and whose mother
was a Hindu. During the time of the
book, he is preparing to kill a man-
eating python; the hunt has brought
him back to a place and to relation-
ships which force him to resolve di-
lemmas within himself that stem
largely from his mixed heritage. As-
pects of this conflict are personified
im three women: a Tibetan primitive,
a Quaker from Pennsylvania and the
sister of his dead Hindu friend. The
action—of event and of the mind—ts
presided over by Krishna, the danc-
ing god, and by the snake which 1s
held by the people of the Himalayas
to be the god’s instrumentality.

as you would in a long short story or
novella. Or you may just (right now)
do a brief outline, & commence.

25. The role of omens: Consider cer-
tain minor & ambiguous incidents, such
as the herd of great, evil, gangling cam-
els that swooped down on me in the
desert near Ahmedabad & I thought I
was a goner, & the little naked black
cannonball demon 2 feet high herding
them with a tiny switch, saving me for
further maneuvers by the All-India
Orientalist Conference. Also the black
dwarf who chased the black rooster
through my hut, the night before the
Evil One’s visit.

28. Re Peter: I read somewhere
Freud’s (or another mind-doctor’s) say-
ing: The mark of an immature man is
his determination (sic!) to die for a
cause; of a mature man, his desire to
live humbly for a cause.... Banal as
it is, this may be a clue to P’s crisis of
maturity.

30. . . . Henry James has one hell of
a time suppressing his intelligence. One
of the great struggles.

33. Better to err on the side of sim-
plicity in this novel, if you got to err.
You can always complicate it afterwards,
but you can never simplify what you
have knotted. (What God hath. . . . only
Alexander.) oe

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34. Consider admirable novels like
Catcher in the Rye. They disclaim edu-
cation, culture, “intelligence” even. Emo-
tion & motion are what’s what. Keep yr
folk moving, uproot em, don’t let em
settle, they might get to thinking. They
might think what you think,

5. I.F. had a point when he said the
women in one of my stories talked high-
falutin. Beware abstraction, brittleness,
sophisticated dialogue. Let em talk about
concrete things in which ideas are hid
but not deliberately, just inevitably. Like
possible babies. Try to show where your
characters live.

45. ... About ideas, be like a bank.
Only make loans to a going concern.

53, Descriptions of characters: People
look exactly like what they are—it’s only
a matter of being able to read them
exactly,

71. How to proceed: Type out yr first
draft recklessly, with majestic haste.
Profusely, without economy.

73. If you could publish chapters sep-
arately, as they get written, it might be
a sign that the book ain’t integrated.
In this book no chapt. will stand by
itself. Too bad.

86. Consider it this way: In yr Ist
Draft, write the parts that interest you
most, that intrigue, stimulate, amuse
you. This way, certain advantages:

a.) You'll have staked out yr claim,
made the leap, built the bridge or....
Framework. Then it will need just
minor work to complete it.

b.) Patchy, it will have big spaces in
betw. scenes where ideas for action,
talk, relatings (thought of in the later
stages of the work, in the maturity
of yr experience of it) may be insert-
ed to yr heart’s content.

c.) You'll have done the big job be-
fore you’ve gone stale.

94, After you have got the blood flow-
ing in the veins of the thing, you can
get a /ittle bit abstract (that’s a part
of it). Takes a strong blood to support
thought. I.e., the thing has to be indu-
bitably alive before it can think.

99. Keep in mind Wuthering Heights
& Forster’s comments on Prophecy. The

underlying passion & mystery, not so

much careful detail. Even confusion is
permissible. The “humanity” is the great
thing.

101. Hard to keep from blurting out

ceyerybody’s motives at once. Don’t do

that, because motives change in the un-

folding & can’t be really known till the

end. They come out in actions. Cagey
does it.

105. Yr impulse so far has been to
pose problems & solve them energetically
on the spot. This is a short-story habit.
I have detected it several times. Must
learn to be very leisurely, to play wait-
ing game, to let the answers come as it
were reluctantly. You don’t seem to real-
ize that there’s a Novel on.

115. “Expansion. That is the idea the
novelist must cling to. Not completion.
Not rounding off but opening out.”
Forster, Aspects of the Novel. Thinks

The Fox
(From the Welsh of Davydd ap
Gwilym)

Yesterday, with Ovid’s course

In mind, I stood awaiting
(And woe on him who doesn’t)
My lover under the trees.

Her waywardness made me weep;
Then I saw when J looked up

An ape-shape where least welcome,
A red fox—no friend of dogs—
Sitting there on his haunches

By his den, like a tame beast.

My expensive bow of yew

I took in my hands and aimed,
Meaning, with a long arrow,

Like a brave man, to shoot him.
Attempting a shot, T pulled,

But not fully past my cheek—
Alas, the cruel misfortune!

My precious bow snapped in three.

I was angered, not frightened,
By this fox, this paltry bear;
This lover of fat chicken,

Of silly fowl, and bird flesh;

No follower of the horn,

Harsh his own ery and carol;
Red-cheeked across stony ground;
Ape-like among stupid geese;

A scourer of the meadows;

A dog-shape searching for geese;
Focus of rooks on the ridge;
Glowing leaper of acres;

Signal for crow and magpie,

Like the prophesied dragon;
Outrager, chewer of plump hen,
Brower bial fleece, flesh of fire;
Piercer of the carth’s shut door,
Lantern for that unlit cell;

A bronze bow on weightless feet,
And his jaw like bloody tongs.

Not easy to follow him,

With his home leading to hell;
Direly may he be captured,

He heads the field i in pursuit;
Fierce his rush, leaper of gorse,

Leopard, a dart at his arse.

“itl a
ato A

( ee c B 4 i -
wy! i i e4 vt bi
ve ‘ , f

Pattern (form) achieved at expense of
“humanity” of the novel. “The face of
Prophecy is towards unity, whereas fan-

tasy glances about.” Quotes Sta. Caterina
da Siena, * ‘The sea is in the fish &, the
fish is in the sea.’

131. Kipling despised & had no under-
standing of the Bengali, knew only the
Northwest & the Muslim, nothing of
Hindus, the great relativists. Forster a
bit thwarted by Bengalis, too, though
he never judges. D.H. Lawrence might
have understood them if he’d been in a
mood to kick against their Saxon oppo-
sites—cf. his satanic sensibility in the
poem about the Estrucans w_ their
“drooping” noses & slinky feet, lovely,
supersubtle chaps (vs. those American-
Roman bastards). I was once a Bengali
for about 20 minutes. It was delightful,
prob. unique in history. Then all of a
sudden they remembered that I had no
proper color or caste & belonged to a
bloody out-group. i I am very grate-
ful.

141. At this point I begin to have
grave doubts. Have just re-read A Pas-
sage to India. It is essentially a book, &
within the book is essentially a theme:
a platonic love-affair between two men,
Aziz and Fielding—love, estrangement &
reconciliation, all that. (Far-reaching
friendships always romantic.) The forces
of India & England are marshalled be-
hind each of them, betraying them.
There are two sides, & one set of go-
betweens (the Moores, Irish-mystic,
volatile). At the end of his great book,
I, prophesies marriage between Kast &
West, to occur about now, now that the
British have gone... . Try again to have
a clear conception of what yr novel is
about. It is true, it takes up where For-
ster’s book left off—‘Revelation,” in this
special sense. The problem then was
“understanding” of brown & white un-
der the British. (This concept of under-
standing is fundamentally romantic, in
my opinion, It means Jove, which exists
only between individuals, and they're
going to have it or not have it, and to
hell with groups. Groups can’t love,
they can only prevent love.) Now the
British have cleared out, where is this
intermarriage, the next step? Hens’ teeth,
& snaggly! Sex don’t bring people to-

gether necessarily, Your book
about people, not to demonstrate a
thesis.

146. Went to see Borst last night, laid
my Problems before him & Madame,
Among other things, they said you gotta
rip out that secondary plot of Tino &

Rosiére, & Jim Chen, relegate them to.

foils. The. secondary plot is another novel

Ot novelette i in itself, (B. is very ghe

paras me gad

a N A’ ric ND

when he is right. He is like Montaigne.)
Conclusion: Do the whole damn thing
over again. But take a good look & see
whether this may be yr chance to revise
what you’ye got, since the flow is shut
off anyway, for the time being.

147. This is the first note towards re-
construction after painful discovery that
the novel was going wrong. Hold mirror
to its. mouth, see if it fogs up.

150. India nearly destroyed England.
Destroyed her as a great power, anyway:
Educated her, made her subtle, mellow
—honeycombed, “shot through, rotten
with intellect,” as Spengler says. The
usual case of youth “corrupted” by age.
It takes a barbarian to rule, or some one
with a streak of barbarism in him. A
truly enlightened man would never pre-
sume to govern others, because he would
he sure to see his adversary’s point &
betray his constituents, wards or what-
ever. And would he presume to govern
himself? If anyone. Probably by some
sort of compromise, laissez faire. . . .
What an effort to rule India! Poor In-
dians now! That climate weakens both
the Will & the Idea.

164. At this point it is necessary to
make a new General Outline, followed
by new Chapter Outlines. That is, you
must re-tell yr story before re-writing it.
This writing must fit (Procrustes) a
crude, central, barbaric force which
drives the plan—a simple plan, based on
Dante—sex, service, spirit. The Three
Who Neither Come Nor Go. (But Bau-
delaire, Journaux intimes; “Il y a de la
charité dans l'amour d’un homme intel-
ligent pour une femme béte, comme il y
a de la pédérastie dans l’amour du méme
homme pour une femme intelligente.”’)
Actually all three women are present in
every part, as all 3 modalities of con-

sciousness are simultaneously present in
life.

204. I think Chanchal upholds the
position of Dr. Aziz, that there can be
no union of spirit between East & West.
. . . Peter & Indira do achieve union,
both physical & spiritual, they do under-
stand each other, because they are su-
perior in human scope. That is my an-
swer to Aziz. (And my opportunistic
idealism, probably—i.e., I am callous, I
don’t care a damn about East & West,
just individuals; but I think I’m right in
the idéa.)

210. Liliu binds him through the
power of the flesh, Irene binds him
through the power of idealism, but In-
dira alone truly seduces him, because
she conférs freedom upon him.
236. I can’t think of a woman with-
‘ovember 14, 1959

out seeing her as beautiful somehow.
Men too. I marvel at them. This is a
limitation. (How come evil doesn’t ugli-
fy everybody? No, but Monica is pretty
ugly, & so was the Familiar Stranger.)
L.H. Myers, The Root and the Flower,
likes beautiful women & noble men. I ad-
mire his perfection, but can’t just can’t.
We have different ideals. Myers is the
connoisseur of subtle gradations, thought-
processes, textures, all the sensory ca-
resses. He is explicit about everything,
searching souls like Murasaki, turning
their pockets inside out; “universal” like

Mabun Das. He tells us absolutely every- ©
thing. .. . One thing we have in com-
mon: an invented India; only he’s cagier
than I am—puts it way back in the time
af Akbar, so old India hands can’t say
“That isn’t the way it is at all!” But
there’s Kafka’s Amertka.

241. Stalled again on p. 100. Too le-
thargic to get interested in Chapt. XI
or any future Chapters indicated, having
exhausted everything in my imagination.
It is finished. Abstractly it is finished.

So do this:

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Chapters in as much detail as you can
summon up at the time without too
much discomfort. Then you will have a
succession of pious receptacles nicely
lined up & waiting for your moods &
juices if any ever again. The Muse of
Prose. Ugh.

243. Waiting for the Muse might not
be a bad idea at that. You are not a
diurnal machine. Why do you have con-
niption fits every time the machine (a
fiction) shuts down? No perspective. J
general you are producing. Tease, titil-
late, wait....

250. The Python motif has become a
unifying, deepening force. I have confi-
dence to continue.

251. Jim Chen, American, is crypto-
Confucian. He & Irene the Quaker are
both exponents of the Middle Way, 1.e.,
ethics. Big diff. though. The Chinese
never could get into a trance.

256. Beware of wisdom! Characters
cannot bear very much reality. Foolish
authors make wise characters.

258. Dickens trusted his characters,
loved them, gave himself to them with-
out reservation. They gave him a work-
out, but never betrayed him.

267. The home stretch, first draft. I
am excited now that the ending is so
dramatic & ties the whole together so
beautifully. It will be a fine book, well
made, good form, though not tragedy. .
OK, this is the situation now: Excited
by prospect of it whole. Have trouble
writing it. Why? Changes in character
& story have occurred as Draft 1. pro-
ceeded, making inconsistencies. | am in-
hibited from writing at this late stage
of Draft 1. because I see how my con-
tinuing inventiveness has made for these
inconsistencies to be resolved in the next
draft, & I feel that whatever I write now
will also be subject to change when I do
the next draft. I have no confidence—
the process is one of sliding panels, al-
ternatives, unexpected directions, the un-
predictable. ...

273. What happens to Irene is com-
parable to the fate of Paphnuce in 7'hais
& to that of the Preacher in Rain; the
Saint brought low by creature-love. She
is high, she falls far. A tiny flaw... .
Wish I ed help her, but I can’t.

298. “It may be said to live like a
soldier but not as a soldier, figuratively
but not literally, to be allowed to live
in short symbolically, spells true free-
dom.”—Thomas Mann, Felix Krull.

“Tl n’existe que trois étres respectables:
le prétre, le guerrier, le poéte: Savoir,
tuer, et créer.” Baudelaire, Jowrnaux in-

NG purpose in copying d dow wn | :

~ nonsense & all, 1s this: The novel has to —

do with Freedom. These two quota-
tions, esp. Mann’s, connect Ritual
with Freedom. Mann’s is a profound
& original insight. Take it further—as,
e.g., towards the Gita, which prescribes
dharma as the ritual wherein alone we
are free. (Cf. Hegel, to will the laws
that govern us, or wotever—that don’t
sound so good, matter of fact, unless
you inyent ’em first & reserve the right
to change yr mind.) Baudelaire’s quip
reminds of the triad, Vishnu, Brah-
ma, Siva. To what extent are these 3
functions represented in the 3 women?
(Is there an Allegory in this tale? That’s
bad. Inexcusable self-consciousness, if so.
Watch out.)

306. Ford Madox Ford in The Good
Soldier manages control by staying off
the subject, putting off his revelations
impossibly, letting them drip out a bit
at a time; avoids intense scenes (not
always). The language is of a low grade,
purposely, so it won’t run away with
him, because his one purpose is to per-
fect the big form, the whole novel.
(There is a man who knows how to keep
prose & poetry separate.) Beauty, wis-
dom, perspicacity, etc. wd have unbal-
anced it, made ungainly knobs. So he
purposely keeps his material weak,
tractable, in order to manipulate it,
keep it all of a piece. (Flaubert too?)
What I want to learn from The Good
Soldier, that splendid book: Subordinate
& stretch out all info about the past, till
it saturates the present.

310. What has Krishna accomplished?
He has drawn out the true natures of the
people involved, without reducing their

ill imitab Je f corr D) exi so there what
you see, a number WF Ciehas made ex-

plicit. Seeing it is one thing, understand-
ing it is another. Sometimes mutually
exclusive. Don’t be too eager to under-
stand. Never get rich that way. Prema-
ture wisdom hard to shake.

329. Liliu is really rather insane. This
may explain her peculiar charm & the
dificulty you have in getting into her
skin, also her evil (aggressive afirmation
of her subjectivity, uncommunicable,
Old Night), & why P must leave her.
Can’t you use yr own psychological ex-
perience to understand her? Paranoiac?

Women damn hard to understand—got

to keep reminding yourself they’re wom-
en, not odd men. Maybe easier to under-
stand an abnormal woman. Freud. Or
maybe you miss the point, wie am ersten
Tag. Look & love, don’t strain your
brain. Be impressionable & you can’t go
wrong.

332. Doldrums. Try to get new im-
pulse by considering Part III as a sep-
arate action (almost)—the Snake Shoot
—building it up—ACTION!

333. This book ain’t like Green Man-
sions like that guy said it was. It’s a
beast-hunt, a dragon-shoot, like Moby
Dick, like The Old Man and the Sea,
though not as pure a book by any
means. If there’s allegory in it, I hope
it isn’t clear to anyone. (Maybe I'll al-
low myself to think about that some
day.) Myth a denial of allegory. No
arguing with myth.

334. Easier to write than not write,
the discomfort being there in either case.
More exactly, it is harder, it is more
painful not to write than to write.

Accusers and Pardoners

iV.

“RADIX MALORUM EST CUPI-
DITAS,” said the Pardoner who
rode with the Canterbury Pilgrims.

“The root of evil is conformity,”
say many popular books of the last
decade — White Collar, The Lone-
ly Crowd, The Status Seekers and
several others with titles that stick
in the mind like slogans.

Surely both these precepts are

dandy and familiar, their origins im--

peceable and their favorable recep-
tion guaranteed. Before Emerson
said it, others were telling Americans
to be self-reliant. We’re still grate-
ful for any help we can get in iyinE

Cassill

Nevertheless we recall that a pur-
pose lurked and twisted under the
moral covering of the story told by
Chaucer’s Pardoner. A second look
at his tale showed him to be a prime
apologist for the Prince of Darkness.
Other examples, even some drawn
from our secular democracy, could
show that a tyranny over the mind
has no better allies than those who

R. V. CASSILL is a novelist and

short-story writer. Five of his stories
appeared in Fifteen by Three (New
Directions). Mr. Cassill teaches at

Columbia University and The New

times. up to this ideal. School for Social Research.
7 - = The Narion. |
WY ota aD Lt Mit as Doh eae

REZ ae

CRESS

- ER T ar ys Ge

sell easy answers to hard questions.

So a second look at the new books
that bid us flee conformity may be
in order, just to make sure that their
purpose is as good as their moral.

SUPPOSE a voice, not exactly
from heaven but from a respectable
elevation, were to charge us, “You
have sinned against passion and
truth . . . against Eros and Pallas
Athena, and not by any heavenly
intervention, but by the ordinary
course of nature those allied deities
will be avenged.” We know there
are secular Pardoners on hand, false
critics, who would prompt us to an-
swer, “I admit I’ve been doing a lit-
tle togetherness on the sly. I con-
formed!” Or to confess, “I was a
Mom!” But whoever told us we could
cop a plea with the watchful gods, or
with the ordinary course of nature,
for that matter?

Suppose some foreigner (denied
“intellectual responsibility” by the

- Partisan Review troop, but still able

to watch from a vantage point)
should remind us, “President Eisen-
hower has counted in tens of millions
the innocent victims of the Rosen-
bergs; each of you feels already dead
in some future war; these are the
deaths which demanded death. . .
for the ones who stole the atomic
secret,

“Unhappily, when seen from Eu-
rope, you do not appear to be either
innocent or dead... .”

If, after nearly seven years, that
pricks conscience too painfully, we
can always agree with Norman Mail-
er that “The Rosenberg case was
boring.”

Why not cop a plea? If we doubt
that the gods exist, why shouldn’t
we doubt that the ordinary course of
nature exists or ought to excite our
mterest?

I have no wish to categorize a
group of writers that includes C.
Wright Mills, David Riesman, Alan
Harrington, A. C. Spectorsky, Wil-
liam H. Whyte, Jr. and Vance Pack-
ard as all being secular Pardoners.
Some of them do considerably bet-
ter service than peddling as relics
the thighbone of a great idea or
pieces of the veil worn by the Found-
ing Fathers.

I would only like to suggest that

November 14, 1959

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356

all these authors (except perhaps
Mills) represent a “style of think-
ing,” to use Karl Mannheim’s phrase;
and, by making some observations
on that style, raise the question of
whether these pooks are really in-
tended to heal us.

A style of thinking is partly de-
finable by its exclusions, by the
mere citation of ideas which are,
witnin its limits, unthinkable. And
we must remember, first of all, that
these books come to us in the matur-
ity of a social process in which ideas
have been treated as commodities —
and where, as a consequence, that
which becomes unsaleable becomes
presently unthinkable.

TAKE an idea from a moralist on
the grand scale for an example.
“What if my whole life has really
been wrong?’” asks Tolstoy’s Ivan
Ilyich. The “‘very justification of his
life held him fast and prevented his
moving forward, and it caused him
the most torment of all.” That’s
hard, as Faustus said of the divine
laws, but The Lonely Crowd can
reassure you that Ivan Ilyich’s pre-
dicament need not be yours. Ivan,
we read there, was an “inside dope-
ster.” Do not be an inside dopester
and the laws will soften for you.
But if I should think that mad
old Tolstoy meant you and me to see
ourselves in Ivan and to believe that
only in death could we transcend
the already fatal formation of our
lives — then, after the private shud-
der is mastered, I would note that
such an idea of transcendence is not
to be found on sale in the non-fic-
tion on our Better Book counters.
Suppose that Alan Harrington,
whose central moral image of “the
crystal palace” is lifted from Dosto-

evsky’s Notes from the Under-
ground, had also taken the thorny

paradox of that story, had pictured
himself as being “a spiteful man”
like the. Dostoevskian narrator who
wants to stick his tongue out at
any and all enduring palaces of the
ideal. What Foundation would subsi-
dize a book by a spiteful man? What
sane publisher would sponsor it?
But, with the spite removed ftom
the original formula of the idea, Har-

“Life in the Crystal Palace (Knopf,
$4.50), published this month,

he oes ast
ee

rington’s book lies comfortably on a
Procrustean bed that could only
reach the knees and elbows of Dos-
toevsky’s terrifying riddle.

Suppose the author of The Lonely
Crowd had identified his ideal of
autonomy as immorality. Nietzsche
says proudly enough that “autono-
mous and moral are mutually ex-
clusive terms.” That kind of pride
is no more saleable than spite.

Suppose that Mills had based The
Causes of World War III on the
hard thesis that it is already too late
to prevent the holocaust. (He says
it isn’t if enough of us avoid the pit-
falls of the tragic view. If we “‘trans-
cend” ourselves. )

Unsaleable.

Unsaleable first of all to the keep-
ers of the Procrustean bed — editors,
publishers and foundations. But no
doubt they are right in assuming,
too, that untrimmed ideas are un-
saleable to that public for whom they
act as entrepreneurs. How many peo-
ple would pay to go to bed with an
idea bigger than themselves? It
would be undignified, and to pay for
the privilege of yielding dignity has
become unthinkable, has it not?

By noting certain exclusions, then,
we may infer that the style common
to the books of popular sociology
is one in which a premium 1s placed
on communication — after certain
great ideas that were once or some-
where communicable among men
have become unthinkable. In turn
this means that communication
tends. to be the sounding of already
familiar signals (shibboleths — or
slogans flattering the preconceptions
of the book buyer) rather than an
attempt to reveal what is generally
unknown in our novel situation. It
is symptomatic of the wish to com-
municate at all costs that certain il-
lustrations, allusions and authorities
have been kept in service in most of
the books I am talking about. The
novel Kitty Foyle becomes a tired
old work horse while a hundred bet-
ter novels about life in these states
are never drawn upon at all. “The
Protestant Ethic” (hiss!), Dr. Dich-
ter (the Fu Manchu of Motivation-
al Research), 1984 (otherwise known
as the Book. of Revelations), and
well-surveyed Park Forest keep re-
appearing like popular recipes in the

The Navion

pret
ak be sks raadiedt y various publish
ers. One is not surprised to find i

The Status Seekers the same fess
than oracular quote from Saint
George Orwell’s Coming up for Arr
that Mills used within the first few
pages of White Collar. But it might
be really surprising to find any of
them tackling — for example —
Faulkner’s story “Golden Land”

Dreiser's novel The Bulwark in dis-
~ cussing the history of conscience in

twentieth-century America.

Is there, in the present system by
which we disseminate ideas, an iron
law to the effect that success in
communicating what no one needs
very much to be told means obscur-
ing what is truly needed? I don’t
know. But I think it unreasonable
to expect, in this situation, that we
will soon find a book of social anal-
ysis in which a concept like tran-
scendence has more scope than C.
Wright Mills gives it. (I believe that
Mr. Mills intends the term to mean
“working harder for peace and social
justice.” That is, of course, a decent
idea as well as a saleable one. But it
is also a fair example of what con-
firms and narrows the secularization
that he announces and, at his con-
_ venience, deplores. )

If such limits to the style of think-
ing as I have suggested are indeed
he broadest we can expect in this
field, the individual reader is left
the task of separating, with less than
common tolerance, what is whole-
some there from the cheap pardons.
Salvage depends on rejecting out of
hand the merely pious pretense that
ery book “on the side of the angels”
has power to heal the anxieties to
which it is addressed.

Surely it must be plain that the
anti-huckster huckster is no more an
ally in the good old cause than the
plain huckster. That the former has
no tangible goods to sell does not
mean that he is disinterested. If you
get a sound pair of shoes in the bar-
gain, it may be better to“buy beau-
tiful feet” (The Hidden Persuaders)
at the behest of some journeyman
advertiser than to buy from a super-
ficial critic the conviction that now

persuasions. J

rons V er m piers

know where to look for the hid-
Meade ‘native must mea

ance Packard like some of he thing, that the Sp

to the great feast of social science
jargon and stolen the scraps. He will
ety (more like the Summoner of
the Canterbury Tales than the Par-
doner, perhaps) “depth,” “manipu-
lation” and “status claim” in a most
entertaming if unenlightening way.
Between. scaring you with how
awlully much Dr. Dichter knows
about you’ and reassuring you with
his own dichter-frethcit, he will take
you a very short trip for your money.
I think he is fun when he gets off a
line like “The New England aristo-
crat clings to his cracked shoes
through many re-solings and his old
hat.” You can hardly buy “your
Declaration of Independence,” as the
publishers advertised it, cheaper than
by forking out for The Status Seek-
ers.

Spectorsky’s The FExurbanites 1s
entertaming, too, and funny by in-
tent. Mr. Spectorsky knows that the
language and the posture of the so-
cial scientist can be structured into
an amusing artifice. The Exurbanites
is a new kind of novel without a
hero, swift, satiric, detached, laying
no particular claims to realism, but
affording a considerable measure of
aesthetic satisfaction.

IT SEEMS to me, though, that we
can take The Organization Man by
William H. Whyte, Jr. as seriously
as it asks to be taken. Its opening
definition of “the Protestant Ethic”
on which the author must have in-
tended to structure his thesis is, seri-
ously, a stunning piece of social his-
tory-into-journalism legerdemain. I
presume that his definition and “au-
thority” for it were squeezed from
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism.

From large scholarship and an at
least fruitful bias, Weber tried to
show “whose intellectual child” was
the rational thought of capitalism.
There ‘is absolutely no question of a
“chicken or the egg” riddle in Web-
er’s essay. But Whyte recklessly tries
tq riddle with the truth, writing,

“Whether the Protestant Ethic pre-

ceded capitalism, as Max er

consequence. le. bos

paketh and oie )

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mit adultery ... sell whatever thou
hast and give to the poor and thou
shalt have treasure in heaven.”

Milton, Weber, Jesus Christ, Thou
shouldst be living at this hour, when
a little education has become so per-
missive a thing!

Still, it may be carping to point
out that Mr. Whyte started to build
his edifice on the sands of a mis-
representation. Most of his opinions
would seem to be a matter of taste
rather than a consequence of prin-
ciple or reason, and hence so lacking
in fundamental coherence as to make
a skeletal thesis unnecessary. When
he discovers for himself that the ma-
terial he has chosen contradicts what
he wants to show, he says (p. 183,
Anchor ed.) that he is “happy” it
does. Could anyone ask for a softer
sell than that? He has a lot of ideas
that all men of good will in his: posi-
tion would certainly wish to espouse
—like, all the colleges are going to
hell because there’s a bunch of edu-
cationalist nuts down on the hiberal
arts; like, you have no real privacy
in an architectural monstrosity such
as Park Forest; like, a man mustn’t
Jet any one organization take over
his soul. You may not agree with
Mr. Whyte’s recollection that when
he got out of college in 1939 the
world scene was much brighter than
it is in our organized times, but if
you're an organization man who feels
that his crystal palace is just an air-
conditioned bureaucracy after all,
you’re bound to like Whyte’s earnest
admonition to “fight.”

It must be reported that he quali-
fies his inspirational cry. You must
fight—but not too hard.

Perhaps what the Moloch corpora-
tions needed was a sort of spiritually
tasteful gymnasium where a man
could go a few fast rounds, work up
a nice sweat, and not show any
marks afterward. Perhaps, in 7'he
Organization Man, they’ve got one.

Radix malorum est confornutas!
One of the motives for decrying the
general conformity of Americans 1s—
as any waiting-room spread of popu-
lar magazines will evidence—to help
the great mass-media artists behind
the scenes sell “non-conformist” per-
sonalities: Jack Paar, Alexander

King, Jack Kerouac, Mike Wallace,

Mort Sahl, Joseph Welch Marlon
358

Ve e
oad Paes

in, (7

it ihe

-“<_3

The Reviewer to Himself r

Hold it a second, Oracle! Just contemplate

The lesser verses of ‘The Great —

As, Yeats’s “To Ireland in the Coming Times”
With its “fries, dancing under the moon,”
Its “footfalls,”’ and its “Druid tune,”

Or Hardy’s “Lady Vi” and its pretzel-bent rhymes
(Hardy invented the word “elbowment”
In despair of finding a rhyme for “moment”’),

Or, speaking of rhymes, Coleridge’s

“

rich” and “bitch”

And his two worst lines (O Genius, where thy spark? ):
“Ts the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.”
I do not mention Auden’s “intolerable neural itch,”
Eliot on Christmas, Cummings on Reds,
Wordsworth on donkeys, Hopkins on newlyweds,
‘Housman on “lads” all buried or hanging by their necks,
Or Millay, all shattered with shudders and shivers and Sex....

Oracle, remember, should your typewriter grow acidic,
‘The Muse flames and fades at whim, asks clearance of no critic.

Brando. And as H. Marshall Mc-
Luhan has pointed out, if you find
a tendency flourishing in the popular
culture of this country, you will find
it also prospering among the intel-
lectual elite. In The Lonely Crowd
we read, “Surely the great mass-
media artists, including the directors,
writers, and others behind the scenes
who ‘create’ and promote the artists,
make an important contribution to
autonomy.” If any other contempo-
rary guiding force receives equal
praise in the book, I am sorry to say
I did not find it, though travel
agents, hotel men, resort directors,
and interior decorators are conceded
potentially comparable virtue. “My
effort . . . has been directed to clos-
ing the gap generally believed to
exist between high culture and mass
culture,” the author says. When I
saw in which direction he meant to
close this same gap I ran back to
my peer-group—friends and neigh-
bors—begging “Other-direct me.”
That Mr. Riesman is serious in his
valuation of these on- and off-scene
heroes of culture seems to bé sug-
gested by his persistent habit of de-
scending from skillfully managed and
colorful generalities to illustrate the
particulars of American life as they
were shown in some formula film.
“It’s the inner life that counts,”

FE. M. Forster used to.say. And he

used to say, “Only connect.” But I
think the glazed vocabulary of The
Lonely Crowd precludes a connec-

pre, mC TLC
y a WL 2 i Mi ha

M. L. RosentHar

tion between the inner life (be it
only stupid pain or angry frustra-
tion) and the social gesture. “The
inner-directed person has early in-
corporated a psychic gyroscope. . . .”
The other-directed person’s “control
equipment, instead of being like a
gyroscope is like a radar.” Certain
colleges “turn out” more artists and
scientists than others.

The point of mentioning these
mechanically derived metaphors is
not to show that Riesman mistakes
symbol for substance. He says, “The
metaphor of the gyroscope . . . must
not be taken literally... . The inner-
directed man can receive and
utilize certain signals from outside.
. . . His pilot is not quite auto-
matic.”

The point is that this style (of
language, of thought) meshes flaw-
lessly with the styles educed by ad-
vertising or the mass-media gen-
erally, and is absolutely inconsistent
with the traditional conceptual lan-
guage of humane letters. This style
is perfect for adding a flourish of
highbrow interpretation to Jerry
Wald’s movie derivation from The
Sound and the Fury but would be
helpless as a Univac if engaged to
interpret Faulkner’s original.

No wonder that progressively Mr.
Riesman must find us progressively
apathetic. To paraphrase Mannheim,
“His stylé measures what it is able
to measure rather than what we
want to know about.” His thought,
f The Narion—

}

encumbered in such language, cannot
accommodate the pathos of real peo-
ple any more than it can imply their
individual wisdom, folly, or resent-
ment of the institutions that have
failed to shape a spiritual life for
them. He contrives a sociology of
wind- “up toys—very ingenious, but
ingenuity is easier when responsi-
bility to the subject is cast aside.

He builds his case on an appear-
ance of apathy that many have
noted. But is our well-fed, over-
stimulated, frustrated populace apa-
thetic? Could it be? Or is it only
unresponsive when the wrong de-
mands are made of it? It is a terrible
and dangerous thing to judge Philo-
mela by her silences.

IF we looked through another
peephole than Mr. Riesman’s we
might see that owt there, on the in-
visible end of the TV circuits, in the
voiceless pits of theatres, or reading
The Lonely Crowd, people are mak-
ing cruel fun of “the great artists.”
They may be out there sharpening
their gully knives.

Probably not. No cry of “Out with
your gully knives!” is likely to be
heard from a citizenry outraged by
the thinness of its cultural soup.
Spiteful children may scribble the
signature of their disaffection on the
posters by the masters of the pop-
ular arts, but overt rebellions of good
or evil are hardly conceivable at
this late date. Even the famous re-
volt in Hungary prospered (if that
is the right word) far more as propa-
ganda in the mass media than it did
in the streets of Budapest.

Individual or collective, rebellion
is almost certain to be subsumed in
the machinery of power where ideas,
like actions, are compounded into a
homogeneity that has already out-
lawed a host of precious human pos-
sibilities.

The only chance of transcending
this homogeneity must surely be in
discovering the extent to which it
has deprived our individual lives of
significance, facing up to our pe-
culiar tragedy. I believe that C.
Wright Mills knows that this must
be done. “It is one great task of so-

cial studies to describe the larger -

economic and political situation in
terms of its meaning for the inner

ber 14, 1959

life and external career of the indi-
vidual,” he wrote some years ago in
White Collar. 1 think he has made
large contributions to this task. But
I think his very anger, his well-
meaning zeal, prevent him from
seeing it through. He turns back and
minimizes the task he defines—be-
cause he is afraid that men will sit
down and fold their hands in despair
if they perceive the tragedy and fu-
tility of their lives.

I do not think that is so. My ex-
perience says it is not so. Yeats’s
Lapis Lazuli says it is not so, and on
the level of simple factual statement
about the nature of man (aesthetic
considerations aside) I trust what
Yeats says and do not trust Mills.

Yeats says that men, “if worthy
their prominent part in the play will
not break up their lines to weep”
whatever the prospects of their prac-
tical success. I think that order of
truth explains and encourages all
men who, in their different ways,
may be trying to prevent another
war or the further impoverishment
of our social life. On the other hand,
Mills can only encourage those who
agree with his program and can ex-
plain, at best, only a few dubiously
practical steps for achieving it.

It does not help to call those who
admit or express the tragic view
“the literary counterpart of the cult
of objectivity in the social sciences”
—as Mills does, making the latter
sound worse than it is—or to say
paraphrastically “they are betrayed
by what is false within them.” This
is to make bad poetry out of good
and leads straight on to the rant,
self-righteousness, and the internal
contradictions that mar his books.
(For an example of the latter—he
tries to pin “responsibility” on the
“Irresponsible men” of the power
elite, an undertaking that would re-
quire not only a more precise lan-
guage than his but a theory of pow-
er in the modern state which he fails
to provide. )

In The Causes of World War JIT
he says, “To ask and answer the
question ‘What is to be done?’ is not
enough. We must also specify who
is to do it.” That seems reasonable
enough, but then, proceeding as if
to specification, he specifies—the
United States. Following this specifi-

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a
a

cation which is no specification at
all, he offers eighteen “guidelines” by
which it, they or we might press for
peace. Among them is this”: . . . the
United States should . . . offer to
share fully the costs of ... an inter-
national fleet of airliners for the use
of scientists, intellectuals, and ar-
tists. . . .” That’s a delightful pre-
scription, but I see little more reason
to suppose that it would foster peace
than that the United States or any
of its specific branches or groups of
citizens would make such an offer.
The emptiness of his argument at

i F arte

oe a aun SiN X ae’
7 } , baila

such turns serves only to discredit

his thesis that reason can master fate —

and reminds us again that reason can
never seize remote goals until it has
mastered the proximate.

Even so, there is a genuine and
stalwart poetry in Mills at his best.
The poetry is in the pity if nowhere
else. And if one is exasperated —
by his growl and overstatement
(“Macy’s hurts Mr. Mills,” some-
one said), it seems likely that his
anger defines the area in which we
may hope to claim our transcendence,
even when his thought does not.

The Salinger Industry

George Steiner

WRITING in The Nation in March
1957, Mr. David L. Stevenson ex-
pressed surprise at the fact that
Salinger 1s “rarely acknowledged by
the official guardians of our literary
virtue.” He can now rest assured.
The heavy guns are in action along
the entire critical front. Salinger’s
unique role in contemporary letters
has been accorded full recognition:
Salinger is probably the most avid-

ly read author of any serious pre-
tensions in his generation. (Arthur

Mizener, Harpers, February, 1959)

There are, 1 am convinced, millions
of young Americans who feel closer
to Salinger than to any other writer.

(Granville Hicks, Saturday Review,

July 25, 1959)

The only Post-War fiction unani-
mously approved by contemporary
literate American youth consists of
about five hundred pages by Jerome

David Salinger. (F. L. Gwynn and J.

L. Blotner, The Fiction of J. D. Salin-

ger, University of Pittsburgh Press,

1958)

Obviously, crities are interested to
find out why this should be so.
Salinger has caught with uncanny
precision the speech and thought-
rhythms of the young. “The talk of
his characters is, so to speak, righter
than right” (Hicks). He can make
a kind of poetry of “the simplest oc-

GEORGE STEINER is a writer and
political journalist at presemt attach-
Princeton University. Mis
Tolstoy or Dostor
ed by Knol PA

casion,” giving the shapes of art to-
the swift, raw, undigested materials
of urban and college life (Mizener).
The crisis of a Salinger fable makes
the reader aware of how we are
“members all of the lonely crowd”
(Stevenson). Salinger is the spokes-
man for the corner-of-the-mouth re-
belliousness of the postwar genera-
tion; he expresses the “Ivy League
Rebellion of the Fifties” (Maxwell
Geismar). He speaks for the non-
conformists who resist the old be-
trayals of rhetoric and illusion. As
Ibsen would put it, he rejects the
false “claims of the ideal” (William
Wiegand, Chicago Review, II).
One might have thought that that»
was more than enough to account for
the success of a good minor writer
with an audience which is, by any
traditional tokens, largely illiterate.
But no. Where the Higher Criticism
is at work more portentous issues
are invoked, Writing in the Western
Ilumanitics Review (Spring, 1956),
Professors Heiserman and Miller tell
us that The Catcher in the Rye be-
longs to an ancient narrative tradi-
tion, “perhaps the most profound in
western fiction”:
It is, of course, the tradition of the
Quest. We use the medieval term be-
cause it signifies a seeking after what
is tremendous, greater than the love
of a woman, . . . Holden’s Quest
takes him outside society; yet the
grail he seeks is the world and the |

is full of love... . sive Finn
ve Mi issiy pi and | ati end

—F

aye

“west beyond Arkansas. The hero of

The Waste Land had Shantih, the
peace which passes human under-
standing. Bloom had Molly and his
own ignorance; Dedalus- had Paris
and Zurich. But for Holden, there is
no place to go.

In the course of exegesis, Salinger’s
young lout is also compared with
Alyosha Karamazov, Aeneas, Ulysses,
Gatsby, Ishmael, Hans Castorp and
Dostoevsky’s Idiot, and always rath-
er to his own advantage.

WITH Salinger firmly enthroned in
the critical pantheon, the gates were
open to the happy hunt for literary
influences and analogues. In the
American Quarterly (1X, 1957), Pro-
fessor Edgar Branch rightly pointed
out the extent to which 7'he Catcher
is related to Huckleberry Finn. “Hol-
dén is truly a kind of latter-day,
urbanized Huck.” Fair enough, and
the comparison itself is high praise
for any modern novel. But we plunge
deeper: “Salinger’s viewpoint also
draws upon a mystical sense merely
inchoate in Mark Twain’s imagina-
tion” (poor fellow); it has an “awe-
some relevance to our collective
civilized fate.” A piece by Martin
Green in the Chicago Review (Win-
ter, 1958) starts out more modestly.
Green shrewdly observes that there
is between the heroes of Salinger and
those of Kingsley Amis a suggestive
similarity. Both, as Kenneth Tynan
had seen earlier, reflect angry youth
and an abdication from politics and
idealism. But again, the summits
beckon:

Modern literature — the literature
of Hemingway, Faulkner, Robert
Penn Warren, Greene, Waugh, Mc-
Cullers, Bowen, Buechner, etc. — I
trust is now over. I trust that in these
two new writers we see at last a

positive, life-giving alternative. . . .
- Salinger also creates life.
In’ short: Salinger’s tales are

“comic masterpieces” (Charles Kap-
lan, College English, XVIII, 1956),
and they may safely be compared
with the classic in literature. The
scholarly apparatus which such stat-
ure implies is also forthcoming. Pro-
fessors Gwynn and Blotner provide

a “Check-List of J. D. Salinger’s Fic-

_ tion” and a list of “Critical Studies
of Salinger's Rien They devote

the delights of sheer len

, bat saat Wg! a
Bi cles i oe

learned monograph to their man
and come up with a pronouncement
which caps the entire Salinger In-
dustry:

The problem he [Salinger] has set
himself in this last period is no less
than the utilization of transcendental
mysticism in satiric fiction, something
(as far as we know) never attempted
before by an American writer, and
by only a few in Western literature.

Roll of drums; exeunt Cervantes,
Chekhov and other lesser souls.

In themselves, all these pomposi-
ties and ex: lege rations are of no great
importance. But they do point to
some of the things that are seriously
wrong with contemporary American
criticism.

First of all, they get Salinger’s
work badly out of focus and could
do him a great deal of harm if he
were so misguided as to read them
(most probably he does not). Mr.
Jerome David Salinger is neither Mo-
liere nor Chekhov. He is not yet
Mark Twain (and by a long shot).
Why should he be? He is a gifted
and entertaining writer with one ex-
cellent short novel and a number of
memorable stories to his credit. He
has a marvelous ear for the semi-
literate meanderings of the adoles-
cent mind. He has caught and made
articulate the nervous,, quizzical,
rough-edged spirit of the moment.
He very obviously touches on major
or traditional motifs: the failure of
the bridges that are meant to link
young and old, the mending power
of a general, non-sexual love between
human beings (something between
friendship and compassion). “For
Esmé—With Love and Squalor” is a
wonderfully moving story, perhaps
the best study to come out of the
war of the way in which the greater
facts of hatred play havoc in the pri-
vate soul. “The Laughing Man” and
“Down at the Dinghy” are fine
sketches of the bruised, complicated
world of children. But neither holds
a candle to Joyce’s Araby or to the
studies of childhood in Dostoevsky.
a late, Salinger has begun parodying

linger. His most recent chronicle
of the Glass family is a piece of
shapeless self-indulgence (The New
Yorker is notoriously Tength).T to

h). The

writer himself, moreover, is interest-

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Name

Fh UE certs lentes cecericsesraricoretevetbetls ee

COVA ae ene. Ateiten 4,

ing. He has adopted a T. FE. Law-
renee technique of partial conceal-
ment. He does not sign books at
Brentano’s nor teach creative writ-
ing at Black Mountain. “I was with
the Fourth Division during the war.
I almost always write about very
young people.” That’s about all he
wants us to know.

Salinger’s virtues account for part
of his vast appeal. But only for part.
The rest is less exalted. The young
like to read about the young. Sal-
inger writes briefly (no need to lug
home a big book or something, Lord
help us, not available in paperback).
He demands of his readers nothing
in the way of literacy or political in-
terest (in my time, college bull-ses-
sions raged over Doctor Faustus; but
that meant having heard of Hitler
or Nietzsche or being dimly aware
of a past writer called Goethe). Sal-
inger flatters the very ignorance and
moral shallowness of his young read-
ers. He suggests to them that formal
ignorance, political apathy and a
vague tristesse are positive virtues.
They open the heart to mystic in-
timations of love. This is where his
cunning and somewhat shoddy use
of Zen comes in. Zen is in fashion.

People who lack even the rudiments
of knowledge needed to read Dante
or the nerve requited by Schopen-
hauer, snatch up the latest paper-
back on Zen. “Salinger’s constant al-
lusions to the Bhagavad Gita, Sri
Ramakrishna, Chuang-tsu, and the
rest are only efforts to find alternate
ways of expressing what his stories
are about,” says Mizener. I wonder.
They are more likely a shrewd in-
sight into the kind of half-culture
which the present college generation
revels in. Twelfth-century madrigals
are bound to come soon into the lives
of Franny or Zooey or the late
lamented Seymour.

THESE are the main facts. Why is
literary criticism so determined to
get them out of proportion?

First, there is a matter of lan-
guage. Having added to the legacy
of Germanic scholarship the jargon
of the New Criticism, many Ameri-
can academic critics are no longer
able to write with plainness or un-
derstatement. They have a vested
interest in the complex and the sub-
lime. (Hence Messrs. Heiserman and
Miller’s capitalized Quest and their
pious statement, “We use the medi-

Snow Storm

(From the Russian of, Boris Pasternak)

Here in this suburb where not a single

Foot dared step, where only storm and wizardry
Dared be, here in this circle of madness

Where the snow, like a slain man, slept profoundly,—

Wait, wait, in this suburb where not a single
loot dared step, where only storm and wizardry
Dared be, for a stray, broken thong of harness
Whips at the window suddenly.

I see blackness outside, and where are we?

This place may be in Moscow or in the outskirts

Or beyond the bridge or elsewhere.—(It is midnight;
A chance walker recoils in fear from me.)

Listen in this lost place, where not a single
Foot dared step, where soul-murderers meet,
O storm whiter than linen, listen to your

Lipless and voiceless herald,

the aspen leaf!

Toss about and knock on all the gates;

Peer everywhere and whirl up from the cobbles,
—This is not the city or the midnight you suppose;
You too are lost, O messenger of sorrow!—

You have whispered to m
In this suburb, where not
I am like you... . I have

— This is not the city or the

ne, and with cause. e

single man... . ‘
len from the road:

a oH ‘
me % .

ee Ti,

p u
“

eval term.”. . .) A new, probably
rather minor achievement comes
along, and at once critical language
soars to sublimity. The result is a
serious devaluation of critical coin.
If one writes about Salinger as do
Gwynn and Blotner, just how is one —
to write about Cervantes or Tur-
genev! The entire sense of discrim-
ination between values which should
be implicit in a critic’s language goes
lost.

Secondly, there is a matter of eco-
nomics. The young assistant or as-
sociate professor must publish in
order to get advancement or to ob- |
tain one of those Fulbrights, Gug-
genheims or Fords which mark the
ascent to Parnassus. Now suppose
he is still faintly alive and does not
care to write yet another paper on
imagery in Pope or cancel-sheets in
Melville. He wants to test his critical
sense against a contemporary work.
He does not know enough French or
German to write about European
masters, What is he to do? He turns
to the American scene. The giants
are no longer about. Faulkner is
making tape recordings and Hem-
ingway is adding further gore to
Death in the Afternoon (surely one
of the dullest books in our time).
Along comes a small though clearly
interesting fish like Salinger and out
go the whaling fleets. The academic
critic can do his piece with few foot-
notes, it will be accepted by critical
reviews or little magazines, and it is
another tally on the sheet of his
career.

American literary criticism has be-
come a vast machine in constant need
of new raw material. There are too
many critical journals, too many sem-
inars, too many summer schools and
fellowships for critics. One is re-
minded of the ambitions of Marcia,
a character in the New York Herald
Tribune comic strip, Miss Peach.
Asked what she wished to become
in life, the little brute answered, “A —
critic.” And whom would she criti-
cize? “Every man, woman, and child —
in the United States.” There has |
never been, and cannot be, enough —
good literature produced at any given
moment to supply a critical industry
so massive and serious. The imme-
diate past, moreover, has been a
classic period for crities, With Eliot,

Py i

J
ao

wee

Pound, Leavis, Edmund Wilson, Tril-

ling, Blackmur, Tate and Yvor Win-
ters in the field, just how much use

is there in writing yet another essay
on Dante or Shakespeare or Yeats?
The quarry of greatness having been

: exhaustively mined, younger critics
turn their big guns on to the smaller
targets.

All this has serious consequences.
There is, at the moment, a gross de-
valuation of standards (the Cozzens
ecstasy of a few seasons back is a
case in point). If criticism does not
serve to distinguish what is great
from what is competent, it is not car-
rying out its proper task. If it con-
spires to suggest that transcendent
values are made articulate in any-
thing quite as loose and glossy as
the maunderings of Zooey, it is be-
traying its responsibilities. Of course,
Salinger is a most skillful and original
writer, Of course, he is worth discuss-
ing and praising. But not in terms
appropriate to the master poets of

the world, not with all the pomp and >

circumstance of final estimation. By

all means, let us have Esmé, Dau-
mier-Smith and all the Glasses. But
let us not regard them as the house
of Atreus reborn.

The Rain

All night the sound had
come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon,

so often? Is it

that never the ease,
_ even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

_ something other than this,
something not so insistent —

am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

_ the getting out

of the tiredness, the Pits cuadaee the

oe Sémi-

lust of intentional indifference.
Bewet > I ay

4 "he

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12 GREATS

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SONG OF PEACE

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The RLS Factor
R. S. Baker

SINCE World War II, and particu-
larly since the advent of the Eisen-
hower Administration, the nation’s
thinkers have been nearly unanimous
in their declarations that: (1) U.S.
values have undergone a significant
shift, and (2) that shift has been
for the worse. The emergent image
of the New America is one of a com-
placent military matriarchate, dedi-
cated to moralism and muscle-flex-
ing abroad and compulsive consump-
tion of goods and services at home.

A good many of these critics place
the genesis of the new values in that
vast conglomeration of artifacts and
practices called popular culture. Bor-
rowing methods from the anthropol-
ogists, the “armchair” (as opposed
to “slide-rule”) camp among sociolo-
gists, and the myth-and-ritual school
of literary criticism, the “pop cultch”
analysts have treated us to elaborate
explorations of the hidden signifi-
cance of Mickey Spillane, hit song

lyrics, Little Golden Books, Lvl
Abner and Orphan Annie, soap
operas and the barbecue rites. of

Suburbia.

While I have no quarrel with their
proffered image of the national de-
cay, I do take issue with finding its
locus in current mass culture. These
gentlemen have been barking up
twigs that won’t bloom for yet an-
other half-century. As an antidote

to their flagrant anti-historicism I
offer a discovery of my own, the

RLS Factor.

Among us discoverers there is a
tradition of recording with honesty
and ee the exact circumstances
of the Great Find. One recent eve-
ning, overcome by sudden rebellion,
I told my wife I would read to our
eldest son rather than wash_ the

From Paul Eluard, Itzik

Paperback $1.35

New York 11, N. Y.

dishes. He brought me a tome known
to him only as “the bwown book”
and, after mumbling through a few
pages, I was stunned by the enor-
mous significance of the slim volume.
Such ecstatic moments are known
to but few men; I felt much as
Hitler must have felt when stumb-
ling upon The Protocols of the Eld-
ers of Zion.

The book, of course, was Robert
Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden
of Verses. | propose to demonstrate
that within its few pages lie the
roots of current U.S. policies foreign
and domestic, our domination by
feminine values and, above all, the
tone of present national life. If such
claims appear ridiculous, the reader
is urged to consider the following:

1, The generation now in power—
persons holding the top positions. in
politics, finance and communications
—consists of men between the ages
of fifty and seventy.

2. Their primal mythologies will
therefore date from the period be-
tween the late 1880s and 1914.

3. A Child’s Garden of Verses,
since its publication in 1885, has
been the most popular children’s
book in the Anglo-American world.

The Stevenson’ Weltanschauung
consists of a set of. neatly interlock-
ing values, each one of which has an
obvious parallel in contemporary
American life. We may begin with
RLS’s blatant optimism, his patent
failure to deal in limitations and the
tragic sense of things. The world of
A Child’s Garden (like our own “of-
ficial” one) is one in which every-
thing is understood and :all errors
are remediable, and constant Joy 1s
the only permissible emotion. This
is expressed in “Happy Thought,”
here presented in its entirety:

The world is so full

of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all
be as happy as kings.
The sheer “number of things” rather
R. S. BAKER, who teaches English
at Oregon College of Education, has
been a printer, seaman, Army in-

structor and medical editor,

The Nation

“ mes 1 ¥

ae * i,

ey
defines the fragmented offer-
ings of TV programing and the con-
tent and make-up of the major
weekly magazines. And our frantic
pursuit of an ever-elusive happiness
has as its primary mode the acquisi-
tion of “things” on a quantitative
rather than qualitative basis, Nat-
urally, to be as happy as kings we
must blink away the various un-
pleasantnesses that insist on arising.
As RLS put it in a letter to William
Archer, “A propos, you are very
right about my voluntary aversion
from the painful sides of life.”
Such a morality fits hand-in-glove
with a piety of the rigor expressed
by Stevenson’s “A Thought”:

It is very nice to think

The world is full of meat and drink
With little children saying grace

In every Christian kind of place.

This could well come from a news
release bearing a White House date-
line. And it is but a short slide from
religious to national smugness, in
which wealthiness is next to godli-
ness and each may be a route to the
other. Appropriate texts could be lift-
ed from anywhere within the annual
cascade of business speeches, but I
prefer RLS’s “System”:

Every night my prayers I say,

And get my dinner every day;

And every day that I’ve been good

I get an orange after food.

The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,

He is a naughty child, ’m sure—

_ Or else his dear papa is poor.

_ This not only explains our new
gimmick-centered materialism (we
call invest in tail-fins or their equiva-
ents because no one wants to be
thought naughty, or cares to have—
t be—a poor papa), but also speaks
ess on recent U.S. foreign policy.
Tt may be true that isolationism is
a dead issue, but in the subtle shift
| in self-image from victim to victor
Uncle Sam has retained a sense of
his absolute difference from lesser
breeds without the law. In the past
‘decade this has taken on a close re-
‘semblance to the hauteur of England
‘in the imperialist 80s. But what
‘should we expect from a generation
‘raised on “Foreign Children”?
. Little Indian, Sioux or Crow
- Little frosty Eskimo

Garden: Stevenson consist

Little Turk or Japanee,
O! don’t you wish that you were met

After a grudging admission that
something can be said for the exotic
foreign way of life, the poem throws
a neat clincher:

You have curious things to eat,

I am fed on proper meat;

You must dweil beyond the foam,

But I am safe and live at home.

It is (or should be) a truism that
nations that have become ruling
powers have a way of accommodat-
ing themselves to militarism. Our
method is to sheathe the sword in
the crocheted scabbard of domes-
ticity. When our occupation troops
land, they bring with them all the
comforts of home, including wives,
kiddies and P.X.s that look just like
the department store on Main Street.
(I find it instructive, for example,
that the only major recent hassle
over the posh Air Force Academy
concerns not curriculum nor candi-
date selection but drapes.) Through
such strategies we convince ourselves
(if no one else) that we are only
playing at being soldiers. But this
should be no surprise to Stevenson
readers. In the preface to the Bio-
graphical Edition of his Collected
Poems, RLS’s wife, Fanny, admits
that “His choice of the profession of
literature was an acknowledgment
that his health would not admit of
his becoming what he wished to be
most—a soldier.”

When it is so much sheer fun to
play soldier, war becomes not an ex-
tension of politics but a substitute
for it. Stevenson once complained in
a letter to Sydney Colvin, “Tacitus,
I fear, was too solid for me. I liked
the war part; but the dreary in-
triguing at Rome was too much.”
Isn’t brinkmanship the natural re-
sort for a diplomacy that shrinks
from “dreary intriguing,’ that pre-
fers to divide the world into friend
and foe, to shrink it to the pleasant
dimensions of the garden of RLS’s
grandfather at Colinton Manse?

The avoidance of “dreary in-
triguing” is linked to a deeper im-
pulse toward disengagement from the
strife-torn earth itself. David Daiches
has noted the habitual “view from
above” that runs through A Child’s

ently di-
mh:

cr
.

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“... a call to those who believe in
the law of Love as contrasted with
the use of violence.’

—DON MURRAY. . . Hollywood
A Docudrama
WHICH WAY THE WIND
by Philips C. Lewis

Noy. 27—International Touse,

Iri.,
HOO VRAVOEALIS OTN, WY. ososcnsnan Ape

Sat.. Nov, 28—Little Theatre,

Adelphi College, Garden City, N.Y. $2.
Sun., Nov. 20—Ridgewood, NiJ. cucu BQ.
CURTAIN 8:40 P.M.
American Friends Service Committee
GR 3-5998

Ry OP as oe

minishes the world by viewing it
from the safe remove of a treetop,
a soaring swing, or a tower. I be-
lieve a similar impulse is behind our
passion for air travel, our attach-
ment to terms like “summit” and
perhaps the rather irrational drive
to put a man into orbit.

And when sheer height does not
bring about the desired detachment
from the hurly-burly of actual life,
a retreat to the “Land of Counter-
pane” will. Semi-invalidism as a way
of life is another recently added facet
of American public life. One has only
to think of how discussion of health
reports on a host of leaders from
the President on down has replaced
sexual and fiscal scandal as the hot
topic for gossip at the political cock-
tail party. Granted, it is a natural
outcome of human physiology that
the fifty-seventy age group will
be approaching or within the period
of chronic illness. But whereas the
former practice was to conceal dis-
ability, the Stevenson-schooled pow-
er elite comfortably accepts the role
of invalid. If we had a national god-
dess, our artists could appropriately
limn a young-old Uncle Sam fast
a-bed, surrounded by toy soldiers,
having fun-and-games under the
watchful eye of a maternal figure
closely resembling the tender-tough
Stevenson nurse, Mrs. Alison Cun-
ningham, the beloved “Cummy” to
whom RLS dedicated A Child’s Gar-
den of Verses.

A fruitful area of inquiry might
be opened up by asking just why
the Stevenson book: occupies the
central position rather than, say,
Pinocchio (written about the same
time) with its emphasis on truth-
telling, on the palpable evil in the
world and its powerful push toward
attaining responsible manhood.

But it is RLS’s book that we are
stuck with, and I have by no means
exhausted this rich mine. Voluminous
glosses could be written in exe-
gesis of any small poem in_ the
Stevenson book. But that is a job |
leave to the professionals. They could
well begin with the poem that con-
tains in essence the past American
decade, “Marching Song”:

Bring the comb and play upon it!

Marching, here we come!
Willie cocks his highland bonnet,

ad d OTe

| os wa wr ri

i “ee ae

Johnnie beats the drum.

Mary Jane commands the party,
Peter leads the rear;

Feet in time, alert and hearty,
Kach a Grenadier!

All in the most martial manner
Marching double-quick;

While the napkin like a banner
Waves upon a stick!

Here’s,enough of fame and pillage,
Great commander Jane!

Now that we’ve been round the

village,

Let’s go home again.

Let the “pop cultch” boys drop
their comic books, turn off their TV
sets and employ their superb tools
on the RLS Factor. There is man’s
work to be done, exploring the sym-
bolism of “napkin,” demonstrating
how the vigorous verb-clusters are
subverted by the poem’s form and
structure, and explaining just why
Mary Jane commands the party.

THEATRE

Harold Clurman

THE “miracle worker” in William Gib-
son’s play of that name (The Playhouse)
is Annie Sullivan, whose indomitable pa-
tience makes an articulate woman out
of a little unruly bundle of energy, a
deaf-blind-mute child named Helen Kel-
ler. The story, which pictures the first
steps in this process of conversion, 1s
fascinating; the theme—the triumph of
faith supported by fierce will—is_ in-
spiring. The play is a kind of documen-
tary written in an intelligently popular
vein; it holds one’s attention throughout.
It is primitive theatre; its aim is moral
and its means are bare action. The most
effective scene is wordless: the struggle
—slapping, clawing, wrestling—between
Annie and little Helen, who fights like
a demon against the discipline of table
manners. The audience is excited and
amused; it also learns something.
Except for their religious purpose, the
‘early morality plays were rarely much
better. The psychological “lining” which
Mr. Gibson has provided for his play
Annie’s background and notes on the
kind of folk Helen’s parents
merely sufficient to situate the action
and saves the play from seeming clini-
cal. The sort of primitive action that
this play possesses is the root from
which theatre began: 7he Miracle Work-
er is therefore fundamentally sound, But

are——IS

The Nation —

it is dangerous to mistake the theatre’s
root for its flower.

The ptaduction has been skillfully
ditected by Afthut Penh. There are
three outstahding performances. Anne
Bancroft (as Annie Sullivan) rhost im-
pressively commands what is sometimes
termed “actors’ faith’: the capacity
completely to identify herself at each
moment with what she is representing.
Patty Duke (as the child Helen Keller )
is brilliantly arresting as well as appeal-
ing; while as her mother, Patricia Neal,
in a rather difficult role (it might have
been played by a more fragile woman),
wins’ us by a selfless devotion to her
task and by innate power.

JULIE HARRIS is one of the finest
actresses we have. Her present vehicle
The Warm Peninsula by Joe Masteroff
(Helen Hayes Theatre) carries her
bumpily—or perhaps I should say she
rides it cheerily. It is about the pre-
nuptial adventures of a plain girl from
Milwaukee. It is like what I suppose a
Trie Confessions story to be or the
average TV tale.

I disqualify myself from any verdict
on Take Me Along (Shubert Theatre),
the musical made by Bob Merrill, Jo-
seph Stein and Robert Russell from
Eugene O’Neill’s Ah! Wilderness. Not
every critic is suited to serve as juror
in every case. I shall merely report
that several reviewers liked the show
(more or less), some were pleased by
its tunes, nearly everyone was delighted
with the tap dance because it was
performed by such unlikely gentlemen
as Walter Pidgeon and Jackie Gleason.
I was surprised to hear Eileen Herlie
sing as well as she did, (although it can-
not be said that there are any. voices
in the show), and I enjoyed Robert
Morse as O’Neill’s adolescent.

There are no harmful ingredients any-
where in this production (though I was
bored by the Beardsley ballet) and
Peter Glenville has directed it commend-
ably—but there is a certain tradition
of homespun rural Americana (Booth
Tarkington’s time) which is simply not
my bottle of sarsaparilla. There is, how-
ever, a large public for it.

The “illustrated” reading—it is not a
play—which Paul Shyre has made of
John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. (Martinique
Theatre) should interest many readers
of this journal. It interested me.

It was hardly to be expected that
such complex material as the famous
~novel contains would be made into a
wholly coherent dramatic text. What
remains of the novel in this reading,
through the use of Dos Passos’ lyrical
journalese, is the nostalgic glint of the

original. But “nostalgia” is not the ex-
act word for the feeling the performance
communicates.

The novel dramatized a chaos which
cofiveyed a total impressioh of bitter
melancholy, a sort of jangled regret, a
doom with a jeering tinkle of bells.. The
effect of the reading, in which the per-
sonal stories are very briefly limned, 1s
more satiric, almost shaming. The chron-
icle of America, from the McKinley era
to the early depression days of 1931,
is presented as a panorama of gigantic
waste. The U.S.A. emerges as a country
of unbounded innocence, idealism and
energy chewed and ground to death by
monstrous machine invented by
an idiot genius for exhibition in a uni-
versal Luna Park. ’

What can all this mean to the youth
of our day? The “machine” is not so
different now, but we have made our-
selves “comfortable” in it. It hums on
its well-oiled tracks like a twelve-thou-
sand-dollar motor car. It is now called
the “human condition”—instead of the
inhuman condition. U.S.A. struck me as
a derisive hoot from the more perky
past—a razzberry guying its audience
and perhaps its original author with the
memory of a time when it did not seem
improper to be angry.

The participants in this reading—
William Windom, Peggy McCay, Lau-
rence Hugo, Joan Tetzel, William Red-
field, Sada Thompson and their director
Paul Shyre are all to be congratulated
for an incisive and varied presentation
of a new ‘kind of entertainment.

some

MUSIC

Lester Trimble

NO MUSICAL organization ever ar-
rived in the United States or on the
stage of Carnegie Hall with a larger
fund of good will awaiting it than did
the Philharmonia Hungarica. These were
musicians who had escaped Hungary in
1956. We had all read of the Austrians’
efforts to care for the refugees from
the uprising and, in typically Austrian,
music-loving style, to give special at-
tention to the needs of the musicians,
many of whom had abandoned even
their instruments in their flight. Word
then came that these men (and a few
women) had formed themselves into
an orchestra, that they were touring
in Europe, and that they wanted to
come to the United States. Finally, with
the help of the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, the Ford Foundation and the

PLAN NOW

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Rockefeller Foundation, here they were.
The Philharmonia Hungarica is a
small orchestra: too small. To have only
eighty players, considering present-day
requirements for woodwinds and brasses,.
gives an orchestra a string section that
is bound to be out of balance with the
rest of the group. Moreover, there were
only ten first violins, eight violas, but a
bass section somewhat large for this
arrangement. Thus, there was disbal-
ance not only between the string section
and the other choirs of the orchestra,
but within the string section itself. This
disbalance could be adjusted very easily,
and I think it should be, if the Phil-
harmonia Hungarica intends to func-
tion as a major orchestra. If there are
not enough Hungarian string players
available (an unimaginable — circum-
stance), persons of other nationalities
should be hired. The small number of
musicians needed to balance the group
could not possibly change its national
character.

INDEED, it is on the point of national
character that I think the directorship
of the Philharmonia Hungarica should
be extremely careful. This orchestra
wants to maintain itself as an animate
protest against the suppression of the
Hungarian revolt and the continued
Soviet domination of the musicians’
homeland. As a major part of its reper-
tory, therefore, it intends to highlight
works by Hungarian composers. In prin-

hes ow.
why anybody. thought Berlioz’ trashy —
Rakoczy March had turned respectable
and could be used as an encore.

In addition ‘to being mystified about
the choice of music, for the concert,
1 do not understand why Zoltan Rozs-
nyai, the young conductor who organ-
the orchestra and who has been
directing it in Europe, was not on the
podium. At the request of the orchestra,
Antal Dorati, the Hungarian-born di-
rector of the Minneapolis Symphony,
has been acting as some sort of general
director for it since 1957. But since
Dorati did not form the orchestra, and
cannot possibly be responsible for such
intimations ,of musical personality as it
possesses, it seemed inappropriate that
he, rather than Rozsnyai, was entrusted —
with the American debut.

As things stand, Rozsnyai remains an
unknown quantity insofar as the musical
community of New York is concerned,
and Mr. Dorati has shown himself to —
be a far less able conductor than I had
imagined him to be. His direction of
the orchestra did nothing to draw from
it any special quality or quantity of
sound, nor did it delineate the sense
or style of any of the music in a note-
worthy way. I cannot escape the idea
that the group would have played just
as well if almost anybody capable of
beating time had been in front of it.

No piece of music on the program
was really difficult to play. The Men-
delssohn. Symphony, the Rossini Over-

ized

ie ciple, that is fine. But I would doubt ture, and the Rakoczy March are play-

} hr TELL FREEDOM, by Peter Abrahams. 5

a Moving story of a Negro’s childhood in that the repertory of first-class Hun- ed by student orchestras everywhere.
| B. Africa SEM HD: CREE READ) ORD garian music is large enough to sus- And a conductor who does not perform
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a a lea a ey er ey a eee we

evamnnsense mem iaesaneraneer oper massnnssaers snncevenstsenas vee senaeeven oa Po aneaesensanenanenth

Liszt is dated; nobody is, or should be,
interested in hearing much of him. There
is Bartok — and who else?

Certainly, there can be neither musi-
cal nor propaganda value in playing
second-rate Hungarian music, which is
what happened on the Philharmonia’s
United States debut. Kodaly’s Peacock
Variations may be instrumentally color-
ful, but its substance is hardly arrest-
ing. It might have been written by the
composer in a moderately interesting
ten minutes instead of a boring twenty-
five. Bartok’s Divertimento for String
Instruments, also on the program, is
a far better work, but so definitely a
minor one in the Bartok catalogue that
I cannot for the life of me understand
why it was programed on this occasion,
No more can J imagine what Rossini’s
“Ttalian in Algiers” Overture was doing

~on the concert; why, among the multi-

tude of works available from the Ger-
manic repertory, Mendelssohn’s ubiqui-
tous “Jtalian” Symphony had to be
chosen (an attack of Italianitis?); nor

ancing the fugal entries in the Men-
delssohn is not earning his salt. The
Kodaly piece can be made to sound
brave with little effort: when a com-
poser makes all his violins play in
unison, there can be no difficulty in
finding the main idea, nor in making
it sound. But the test of a conductor
is in subtler passages that permit nuance
and require care in their adjustment.
The Philharmonia Hungarica is not
only a new orchestra, it is a young one.
T would judge the average age of its
members to be about twenty-seven. In
its general sound, therefore, there is
much of the resilient and trusting en-
ergy of youth. But as an ensemble, it
has not yet found a catalyst to turn
it into the splendid instrument it might
be. With a few more strings, a broader
musical philosophy (and nothing is so
revolutionary, nor such good propa-
ganda, as a belief just in music itself),
and a conductor of the very first water,
this group could surprise the Western

world, IT hope some day it does. 4
an “A . i WE C N AT 1 N

Crossword Puzzle No. 841

6
10

11
12
15
16
17

20
22

By FRANK W. LEWIS

Ser oP Mee.
BEEBE es
Be
oe Joo
a eT
re eee
Beene
a
ee
eee eee

ACROSS
1 down, 20 across, 14 down and 8
down WPTHOHC, as a paternal

e ieyter .(b, 2; 8,5, 2, 5, 3,5, 2; 3, 6,
2,3, 10)

This man got sat on! (4)

You ean’t say it’s nothing to sneeze

about, but we got angry about it.
(7)

His ‘n’ Her sort of wine! (7)

Talk about an operatic hero! (4)

Lets put it around the place that’s
decked to mark a celebration! (3,9)
Neither here nor there, but it might
blow inside. (7)

Left one company shortly, but it
might lead to the heart of 13. (7)
Listener, not now however, of all
the dirt. (7)

See 1 across

Unable to get a moment with the
singer? (10)

Obscure the sound of aspersion? (4)
Herbs found in the Corinthian cap-
ital. (7)

Is the cat stretched out on deck,
perhaps? (4,3)

University where more than one is
put up on a challenge? (4)

Put on airs, in a way? You would
have to come first in case of a seiz-
ure. (10)

DOWN:
See 1 across

2 Steady, but not like a Guardsman.
(7)

3 Turned out? Not in Indian style! (4)

4 Rather bumpy bend leads to 2’s con-
clusion. (7)

5 Tunes that end with a cheer could
be uplifting. (7)

7 Place where an_ expedition
upon crude oil? (7)

8 See 1 across

9 Did they keep the 11 type in the

rear cells? (9)

See 1 across

18 Moved fast, somewhat like the stock
of 9. (One might go completely
through things this way.) (7)

19 I’d scorn to be Hitler’s perfect type.
(7)

20 Not so constant by comparison. (7)

21 The author of “Capitols to Investi-

gate.” (7)

Not a very big portion of pie. (4)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 840

ACROSS: 1 and 11 The Party of the
First Part; 10 Tampa; 12 Countless;
18 Datum; 14 Protuberance; 19 Bank
director; 22 Expel; 24 Corkscrew; 25
Car nivora; 26 Usual; 27 As dead as a
Dodo. DOWN: 2 Humbug; 3 Plastered;
4 Reflector; B Yards; 6 Feted; 7 Hear t
ens; 8 Stick; 9 Stumped: 15 Backroads;
16 Riot squad; ie Absence; 18 Inspires:
ee oe 21 Ground swell; '23 Loire; 24
ou

came

ae 68

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Government vs. Labor

~ SHOULD LABOR BE COERCED?

William Hammatt Davis

THE NEW LABOR BILL

| Benjamin Aaron

tk OK kK kh hk

— MICHIGAN'S SCAPEGOAT GOVERNOR

B. J. Widick

LETTERS

at. Readers’ Reaction to
‘The Shame of N. Y.’

[Copies of “The Shame of New York”
may be obtained from The Nation, 333
Sith ‘Ave. N.Y. 14, N.Y. Enclose
payment with order as follows: I copy,
50c; 10 copies, $4; 50 copies, $17.50;
100 copies, $30. Rates for larger orders
on request. — Ed.|

Dear Sirs: 1 am absolutely overwhelmed
by the magnificent job you did in “The
Shame of New York” (October 31).
It was the best piece of work of its kind
I have ever seen and in seventy years

I have seen a lot.
HersBert AsBury

i, New York City

, [Mr. Asbury’s The Gangs of New
York, published in 1928, remains one of
the classics in tts field and established
the authors enviable reputation as an
observer of mumcerpal America. — Ep.]}

im Dear Sirs: “The Shame of New York”
is fascinating — an excellent job!

Jacos K. Javirs

i. U:S. Senator (N.Y.)

ca Washington, D.C.

: Dear Sirs: Fred Cook and Gene Glea-
, son have amassed a revealing series of
*- disclosures which add up to a serious
a indictment of both the administration

and the citizens of New York... .

While I am not personally familiar with
many of the details, I do recognize a
great deal in the article.

I hope the disclosures will increase
citizen participation in ADA and other
organizations working toward a better,
more efficient municipal government.

Ropert J. SCHWARTZ
Chairman, Americans for
Democratic Action

New York City

: Dear Sirs: | should like to thank you
for presenting the moral and ethical
“pathology” of our city. While
exposure is not tantamount to a cure, it
does, however, make the search for one
imperative. More than ever I feel that
your journal is the conscience of our so-
ciety, and men like Cook and Gleason
the bearers of our “super-ego.”

4 Natuan Epstein, M.D.
New York City.

Dear Sirs: X superb article. ... indispen-
sable to the understanding of the
ghoulish processes of American big-city
politics. Congratulations!
BENJAMIN WEINTROUB
[editor, Chicago Jewish Forum
Chicago, 1h. eo Pe ® Te
Mn MAD
mals

\ L. * 6
es ea D Oee , 3 i a ial oo

Dear Sirs: Congratulations on your
“Shame of New York” issue! It is in
the best “Stefiins” tradition and more
to be admired. The powers today are
behemoths compared to the tinhorn pol-
iticians taken on by the muckrakers
of the past.

Let us hope that, stories like this and
the FBI issue (Oct. 18, 1958) prove an
inspiration to an otherwise apathetic
press. —

SEYMOUR KERN
Beverly Hills, Calif.

Dear Sirs: Vm a reporter and my breed
is not inclined to write “letters to the
editor.” But in the case of “The Shame
of New York,” I can’t hold back my
feelings.

I can only recall two or three occa-
sions in my life when I was as deeply
impressed by a reporting job. It was
simply magnificent. I’m proud to be a
Nation subscriber.

Ep DeveriLt
News Director, KFSD

San Diego, Calif.

Dear Sirs: Despite my agreement with
most of the facts in “The Shame of New
York,” I must dissent from the con-
clusions. I agree that the Democratic
Party deserves a large share of the
blame for some of the conditions de-
scribed by Cook and Gleason... . I feel,
however, that the authors attempted to
prove too much. Intentionally or other-
wise, they create the impression that
New York is caught in a giant con-
spiracy of corruption—a_ conspiracy
among Tammany Hall, big business,
gambling syndicates, “the mob,” City
Hall, Carmine De Sapio, unscrupulous
real-estate dealers, Robert Moses, Mike
Quill, a dishonest police force and Syd-
ney Baron. This is standard muckrak-
ing technique and makes the solution
quite simple: “Throw the rascals out.”
Indeed, this is the final conclusion of
the article, which urges the election of
reform Democrats and a Seabury-type
investigation by Governor Rockefeller.

But the conspiracy theory is not sub-

‘Shame of New York’
on TV Panel Show

“The Shame of New York” will be
the subject of debate on David Sus-
kind’s “Open End” program = on
Channel 13, WNTA-TV, Sunday, 10
P.M., November 22. Fred Cook and
Gene Gleason, authors of the ar-
ticle, will participate in the program.

Channel 13 can be tuned in al-
most everywhere in the New York
metropolitan meas, ys

cee hat 7 §

.o- ee

hs .
. % ‘

“1

' stantiated by factual allegations. Is it

fair, for example, to link Robert Moses
with Tammany Hall and Carmine De
Sapio? It is a complete misunderstand-
ing of Robert Moses’ operation to link
it with politicians or any political party.
He is the most powerful individual in
our city because for years he has created
the impression of the incorruptible pub-
lic servant standing above politics. He

(Continued on page 381)

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
369 @

ARTICLES
371 @ Should Labor Be Coerced? j

by
WILLIAM HAMMAT'T DAVIS
373 @ The New Labor Bill
by BENJAMIN AARON
377 @ Michigan’s Scapegoat Governor
by B. J. WIDICK

379 e@ Are Librarians Censors?
by DONALD BH. STROUT

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

382 e The Sense of a Decision

by W. S. MERWIN

Stains on the Common Law
by Cc, H. ROLPH

In Pursuit of a Civilized Society
by Y. Ti. KRIKORIAN
An Isle of Greece
by RICHARD BLMAN
Art
by FAIRFIELD PORTER
Theatre
by HAROLD CLURMAN
Crossword Puzzle (opp. 388)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

George G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, Editor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Bditor
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Musie

383 @
384 @
386 @
387 @

388 @

Alexander Werth, Duropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Nov. 21, 1959. Vol, 189, No. 2+

The Nation, published weekly (except for omh
sion of four summer issues) by The Natio
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A. by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
New York 14, N. ¥. Second class postage pald
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Information to Libraries: The Na is indexed
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i care | |

BW YORK, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1959
OLUME 189, No. 17

THE

NATION

EDITORIALS

‘lime Marches On

Veterans Day was celebrated in strange fashion this
ar. On this anniversary, dedicated to the dead and
ving veterans of our wars, it was announced that in
e forthcoming NATO maneuvers German and Amer-
ean divisions would serve under command of General
Jans Speidel, formerly of the Wehrmacht. It is no
mnger called the Wehrmacht; in its latest incarnation
t is the Bundeswehr. The name is not very important;
Fis still the German army — an army which was nearly
ictorious in two devastating world wars, in both of
hich it killed a good many Americans. In the second,
at Malmedy, it also massacred some.

- But it would seem that we must be reconciled to the
new West German-American entente and, as a corollary,
9 NATO’s becoming: increasingly a West German-
metican partnership, at least until such time as the
Germans can strike out on their own. The superna-
tional character of NATO, and the restraints on Ger-
n rearmament, are fast going by the board. The
est German navy requests destroyers larger than the
000-ton maximum now specified, in order to accom-
, its NATO mission of controlling the western part
| of the Baltic in the event of war. For the present, mis-
si e-armed 4,500-ton vessels will satisfy the West Ger-
“Mans. They are not likely to remain satisfied very
long. Another request of theirs, which, like all West
erman military requests nowadays, is certain to be
| granted; is for authority to manufacture their own
| acoustic mines. Bonn is already permitted to manufac-
‘ture Hawk anti-aircraft missiles. By 1963, West Ger-
ny is expected to have 1,000 jet planes of the latest
‘type. The restrictions designed to prevent runaway
rman rearmament still exist on paper, but General
uris Norstad, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe,
sin favor of letting the Germans make about every-

thing. The bans are outdated, in his view.
Tn Hebe fal de Gaulle’s view, it would seem that
: NATO itself is outdated. First he sent French NATO
divisions, without NATO authority, to fight in Al
: a. Then he withdrew the French fleet from NATO
|} command. He forced Norstad to remove American
ft from French bases because he — de Gaulle —
1 not accept American jurisdiction over American

nuclear. weapons. Now, in an important policy speech
before the French Staff College,.de Gaulle has an-
nounced that. an integrated Atlantic Pact has had its

“association” with its

day. France will consent only to
allies and. will fight only its own wars, “using 1ts men
and its material, on its soil. [France]. must defend it-
self, by itself and its fashion.” West Germany is a more
complaisant ally, at least for the present, and the liai-
son between the Bundeswehr and our forces is bound
to become closer and closer. Any American veterans
who are squeamish about this had better keep their
mouths shut. Time marches on.

The Stee! Strike Is Historic

It is always hazardous to write chapter headings for
future historians. Nevertheless, we venture the state-
ment that the current steel strike will be characterized
by future labor historians as the event which marked a
decisive reversal of the generally favorable environment
which labor has enjoyed since the early thirties. From
Roosevelt’s first inaugural onward, American labor —
despite many setbacks and some of the harshest strug-
gles.in its history — steadily gained strength relative
to management. In the post-World War II years, some-
thing approaching equality of bargaming strength may
actually have been achieved — for a brief period. But
tke countertrend which has set in with the steel strike
will, in our view, continue for some years to come. It
is, therefore, logical that sections of industry should
seize on this moment in labor’s history to clamor for
direct, coercive governmental intervention in industrial
relations. In effect, Big Steel is attempting to set the
clock back — by decades. Unfortunately, it will not be
the ripe wisdom of W. H. Davis (see article on page
371) that is likely to prevail when Congress reassembles
in January, although his thinking may well influence the
discussion, as it has on other occasions. It is the politi-
cian’s growing realization of labor’s weakness, not its
strength, that will motivate demands — and this in an
election year — to replace Taft-Hartley with still more
restrictive legislation. If the deterioration in labor’s posi-
tion is not to continue — and in our view this position
is already dangerously weakened — the Administration
should insist that management and labor, under gov-

e
»

ernmental auspices if necessary, promptly formulate
long-range policies designed to cushion the effect of
other trends that are currently un-

automation and

dermining labor’s strength.

Infestation of Hornets

At a civic luncheon in New York last week, Robert
Moses compared himself to Aristedes the Greek (better
known among classicists as Aristedes the Just); Baron
Haussmann, the architect of Paris, and Archie Moore,
the relatively indestructible prize fighter. In the same
expansive tone, the Great Planner characterized his
critics as “professional vomiters and mud-throwers,”
maggoty-brained chairmen of moribund civic societies,
rattlesnake journalists, junior bloodhounds and un-
licensed sleuths. He said that the excellence of his Title
I program could not be appreciated because of an at-
mosphere made murky by “old vegetables, rotten eggs
and dead cats.” He denied that he suffered from de-
lusions of grandeur and assured his hearers that he did
not intend to beg for sympathy.

This virtuoso imitation of a man infested by hornets
is gratifying: it enlivens the daily press and it demon-
strates that Mr. Moses has again run out of arguments
to defend his schemes and strategems. Despite the show
of frenzy, the Supreme Builder retained a shred of
sobriety that restrained him from naming, and giving
publicity to, his temerarious opponents. But we hope
that the references to rattlesnakes of the press, junior
bloodhounds, etc., are at least in part allusions to The
Nation’s recent special issue, “The Shame of New York.”
We believe that Mr. Moses has in effect endorsed the
findings of that report when he ts forced to retreat to
the hackneyed barricades of vegetables, eggs and cats.

This Time the Man

The five-man committee of Norway’s Parliament that
is charged with the duty of selecting nominees for the
Nobel Peace Prize has of recent years been faced with
an increasingly difficult task. Diogenes looking for an
honest man had an easy task by comparison with the
committee’s effort to find someone genuinely, and ef-
fectively, devoted to the cause of peace in a world
which has been preoccupied with wars and arms races
for the last fifty years. Often, in half-acknowledged de-
feat, the award has gone to some well-meaning states-
man. In selecting Philip Noel-Baker, however, the
committee has chosen a man who not merely deserves
the award, but who has earned it through years of
consistent, intelligent, unselfish dedication to the cause

of peace and disarmament. (See “Research Drives the —

Arms Race,” by Philip Noel-Baker, The Nation, No-
_ vember 22, 1958). It is typical. of Noel-Baker that he
. onsets, have announced that his prize money would be,

b ed on

ore ae
¢

devoted to furthering the cause of peace and that he
should have accepted the award as having been made
“rather to a cause than a man.” But—Noel-Baker to
the contrary — the point about this year’s award is
that it has gone to the man, not the cause.

Professional Wrestling

Hollywood has an ingratiating trick which consists
of wrestling with its better instincts in the newspapers
and reaping a pious reward at the box office. This week
Happy Anniversary is doing excellent business in New
York because, last week, the Production Code Review
Board, the industry’s own censorship machine, refused
the film a seal of approval for a period of several hours.

The picture, starring David Niven and Mitzi Gaynor,
involves pre-marital intimacies and the censors felt
that the principals did not make sufficiently clear their
regret for this reckless behavior. The Seal was forthcom-
ing only when United Artists agreed to insert the fol-
lowing enigmatic remark into the sound track. Mr.
Niven is speaking:

I was wrong, I never should have taken Alice to that

hotel room before we were married. What could I have

been thinking of?

The British actor is in London at present and was there-
fore not available to recite the words, so the producers
turned to Allen Swift, formerly of the “Popeye” tele-
vision program and apparently a skillful mimic. Prob-
lems of synchronization were avoided by having the
lines pass through Mr. Niven’s mind, as it were, at a
point in the film where he holds his head in his hands.
Richard Meyer, the film’s editor, is now flying around —
the country to insert copies of the postscript introspec-
tion in fifty other released prints. It seems a great deal
of work for the purpose of driving home the less than
startling notion that engaged couples do well to avoid
hotel bedrooms — but there can be no doubt that it
is good for business. Happy Anniversary is now being —
wittily advertised as filmed in Sinemascope; The New
York Times describes it as “more an offense to intel-
ligence than to morality.”

Soft

In the wake of the quiz scandal and the unsettled
steel strike, the nation is undergoing one of its periodic
searchings of its collective conscience, and political men-
tors offer the customary advice. One of these counsellors
is, in the uncouth phrase of Time, “Democratic Presiden-
tial candidate Jack Kennedy” (Time knows perfectly
well that Senator Kennedy has no plans to be selected,
and that he goes about the country making speeches
Ms of an irresistible desire to enlighten his fellow-—

_ “The harsh facts of a) matter are pug ;

pee — eel ni

ae 4
5 es

says Non-Candidate Kennedy. “We are in danger of
losing our will to fight, to sacrifice, to endure. The slow
corrosion of luxury is already beginning to show.” As
a self-made young man, Mr. Kennedy is an authority
on the Spartan virtues.
the question is, whom is he addressing? If good living
is bad for the citizen, the higher up one goes, the worse
) this must be. It would seem, then, that Mr. Kennedy
' must be bawling out the heads of the great corporations,

And he may well be right, but

who do their sacrificing with six-figure salaries, bonuses
and pensions, and who
their appeals to the lesser citizens not to forget their

can outdo even Kennedy in

heritage of guts and grit. But if deeds as well as words
are called for, there is no great rush, on the part of
these foremost beneficiaries of the free-enterprise sys-
em, to give up their corporate or private aircraft,
hunting lodges, posh conventions or other perquisites.

It is always the lower middle class which is to sacrifice
what it hasn’t got, and pull in its belt to the last notch.
rue, the fat cats are few and their cumulative sacri-
fice may not be enough to save us, yet they could set
an example. The country is waiting.

What oe Are Thinking

A perspicacious visitor can tell a country much about
itself: witness de Tocqueville, Lord Bryce, Ambassador
JusSerand and others. Not the least of an honorable line
Ris President Séku Touré of Guinea, a small African coun-
ry which recently resigned from the French community.
Mr. Touré revealed the basic reason in one of his
speeches; the white colonists did not come to Africa to
develop its resources nor to civilize its people, he said;
they came to take over. And take they did, until there

SHOULD LABOR BE COERCED?

was nothing left for the aborigines except the right to
work for the newcomers. Mr. Touré said and did other
uncommonly sensible things. In a white country, he did
not forget that he was a Negro, and he insisted on meet-
ing “sons and daughters of Africa,” as he called them.
He also insisted on visiting at least one Southern state.
Thus put on the spot, the State Department selected
North Carolina. Governor Luther Hodges did the job
handsomely at a state dinner, at which Negroes sat
next to whites without damage to either race. In Los
Angeles, Mayor Poulson, on his best behavior, heard
Touré declare that “There are no complexes within us.
We look eye to eye and consider all men brothers, of
The visitor
spoke with some impatience of the world outside Africa
being divided into two camps

whom we have neither shame nor fear.”

“with pa more ad-
This theme
was picked up by the Los Angeles Tribune, which re-
ferred editorially to the “senseless ideological struggle
between Russia and the United States,” which, it said,
“does not exist for any of the black African leaders,
save that puppet President of Liberia, William S. Tub-
man, who still calls the United States ‘the mother coun-
tE Wace 2c;

It must shock Americans to learn that to vast popula-
tions the Cold War is a pain in the-neck. But it would
be wise for us to consider the possibility that in this
respect such neutrals as the Guineans see more clearly

vanced than we, worried about doctrines.”

than we do — not because they are inherently wiser,
nor more imbued with good will toward their fellow-
men, but simply because their technological backward-
ness has saved them from becoming involved in a strug-
gle which, if continued, can only result in universal
disaster.

oe William Hammatt Davis

AS THIS IS written, we are in the
first week of the enforced eighty-day
renewal of collective bargaining in
e steel industry. The dispute may
settled by agreement in that
ighty-day periads Yet we do not
know, for sure, that it will be set-
tléd; that the health and safety of
the country will not again be threat-

ILLIAM HAMMATT DAVIS, a
a wv ew York attorney, was chairman of
he National War Labor Board,
1944 45; director of the Office of
Economic Stabilization, 1945; and
as served on various federal and
e labor ae boards.

ened by a renewal of the strike in
this vital industry.

Whatever the event may be, the
part of wisdom is to give calm and
objective consideration and discus-
sion, during this relatively relaxed
period between now and January
26, 1960, to what the government
should do if agreement by collective
bargaining is not achieved and the
strike is renewed.

The perilous thing about the Steel
case is the breakdown of collective
bargaining; the fact that employers
and their employees in this basic
industry are not able to agree on a

contract of an ee :

aie eb)”

It takes little insight to recog-
nize that contracts of employment
reached by “collective bargaining,”
1.e., by processes of mutual persua-
sion, are the very heart and soul of
“tree enterprise.” If employers and
employees cannot agree, there is no
enterprise; if they are forced to work
without agreement, there is no free-
dom. The development of collective
bargaining in “free enterprise” has,
moreover, been a crucial factor in
nullifying the basic assumption of
Marxist philosophy—that an indus-
trialized society was doomed to make
the rich richer and the poor poorer
until ultimately the apes would

371

: ; ‘=
i aa A: i en 8) ie a. > a

Se Se

AS a a SS FT

oan

; rt OMS ag emg?

be overthrown by violent revolution
of the “have nots.”

But there are even deeper values
in collective bargaining than these
economic ones, fundamental as they
are. The establishment of conditions
of employment by agreement, central
as it is to free enterprise, has a
broader significance. It is the mani-
festation in industrialized societies of
the pregnant fact that in the life of
mankind creation is the victory of
persuasion over force. It thus reflects
the transcendent aim of civilized life.
Without a directing aim, the life of
man sinks to self-indulgence or re-
lapses into senseless repetition. The
growth of civilization depends upon
the development of order in the af-
fairs of men by reasonable persua-
sion. The tool of that development
in our free-enterprise system is col-
lective bargaining.

Thus, although compulsion can
have a benign effect insofar as it
establishes behavior essential to so-
cial welfare, yet it is always accom-
panied by the baneful effect that it
stops the progress of civilization. It
must, therefore, be limited to the
very minimum essential for the pres-
ervation of the social structure.

It is upon such limitation of com-
pulsion that the development of ado-
lescents into adults depends. We
grow in character and dignity not
by compulsion in our relations with
one another, but by reasoned agree-
ment. The knowledge of good and
evil and the freedom to choose the
better and reject the worse, with
which we are uniquely endowed,
here comes into play.* Reverence for
the dignity of man rests on these—
his nobler qualities. It is upon them
that we rely for the liberty of thought
and action through which we visual-
ize the upward adventure of life on
earth.

With these thoughts in mind, let’s
turn to the immediate concrete ques-
tion: What is to be done if failure of
collective bargaining imminently im-
perils the social structure?

*J trust that no one will miscon-
strue the tone of this remark to mean
that the writer is unaware that Screw-
tape and his associated minions of evil
are always around, with their unrea-
son, coercion, hatred and fear. That is,
of course, our problem. It calls upon
us individually for reason, freedom,
understanding and courage.

372

In such an emergency, responsi-
bility falls upon the constituted au-
thorities, who must have the power
to end the emergency by action. The
first and immediate requirement is
resumption of the interrupted pro-
duction.

Our question then becomes: How
can production be restored with a
minimum of compulsion and with
maximum preservation of those fun-
damental principles of liberty which
underlie our democratic society?

Government, if it is to preserve the
values of voluntary agreement, must
not take sides in the dispute. This
basic need exposes the inadequacy,
in the absence of voluntary accept-
ance by the disputants, of govern-
mental intervention by compulsory
arbitration or by fact-finding boards,
with or without the power to make
recommendations. Compulsory ar-
bitration destroys free collective bar-
gaining and undermines free enter-
prise. Fact-finding boards cannot
avoid suggesting, merely by re-
citing the facts, the course that
should be followed to resolve the dis-
pute. This concentrates the force of
public opinion, in its presumably
agitated state, upon the solution in-
dicated by the report. It thereby
imposes on the parties an overwhelm-
ing pressure of coercion, whether or
not they approve the board’s report
and whether or not it represents a
wise solution. It was to guard against
such coercion that the Railway La-
bor Act, approved by the parties
before Congress enacted it, expressly

anes St. Louis PoReDIE ateh
What of Our Big Country

) Pal sia

provides that neither party would
be compelled to accept the recom-
mendations of the fact-finding Presi-
dential Board which the Act estab-
lished. Only in time of war has a
governmental body in our country
been given power to impose its de-
cisions on the parties to a labor dis-
pute; and even then the power was
given to a tripartite War Labor
Board which was in itself the result
of mutual agreement between indus-
try and labor and a notable manifes-
tation of collective bargaining in a
time of national emergency.

MY CONCLUSION from consider-
able experience and from these con-
siderations is that, in the absence of
a real and immediate national emer-
gency, the government ought to in-
tervene in labor disputes only at the
request, or with the consent, of the
parties.

What, then, should the action of
the federal government be when the
breakdown of collective bargaining
im a basic industry like steel imperils
the national health or safety?

Firstly, it must enforce immediate
resumption of production.

Secondly, it should, in its resort to
force, hold on to the traditional prin-
ciples of liberty that underlie our
society.

The restoration of production.
Emergencies interrupting essential
production have often occurred,
usually locally, in service occupa-
tions such as food, fuel and utilities
(heat, light and power, transporta-
tion). Such emergencies have com-
monly been ended by action of the
local authorities. We now know that
such an emergency can be created by
the breakdown of collective bargain-
ing between powerful labor and
management organizations in an es-
sential industry of which the greater
part is covered by contracts between
organized industry and organized
labor,

To my mind—and I am now
speaking 1 in general terms rather than
in terms of specific provisions of a
law designed to support emergency |
action by the President—resort}
should be had, for the purpose off,
immediate restoration of production,}
to the common law principle of the},
posse comitatus (power of the coun-
ty). In such emergencies, the con-
a

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i oa canallnlia a

stituted Bachorities™ are ‘aathed: with
the iw to call on all members of
the community to come to their aid.
Every American knows what a “sher-
iff's posse” is. The application of
that principle to the Steel case would
prec: the President to call upon
all employees in the steel industry—
all production employees and_ all
managerial employees — to resume
forthwith their duties in the industry.
Indeed, the President might well be
empowered to call upon any quali-
fied citizen to aid in the production
of steel.

By analogy to the accepted com-
mon law principle of the posse comi-
tatus, all citizens would be obliged
to respond to the calls made upon
them. I think it is abundantly clear
that no injunction addressed in gen-
eral to either one side or the other
would be necessary. And I am equal-
ty sure that an injunction addressed
to one side and not to the other
would do more harm than good to
collective bargaining. And collective
bargaining is, after all, the thing we
would be trying to re-establish. The
inadequacy of the one-sided injunc-
tion is abundantly shown, as has be-
come very clear in the current public
discussion, by the history of the

Fgh F ce ee aA
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eighty-day injunction under the
Taft-Hartley Act. '

Such an enforced removal from
the domain of free enterprise, by gov-
ernmental intervention, of an in-
dustry or a substantial part of an
industry incapable of collective bar-
gaining, should be thought of, I be-
lieve, as a temporary conversion to
public use of the otherwise incapaci-
tated private property of the persons
involved; an exercise of the power of
eminent domain within the provisions
of the Fifth Amendment. This pri-
vate property would include, of
course, the labor of the production
employees, the services of the mana-
gerial employees and the physical
properties of the industrial groups
involved. The enabling law should,
I believe, require that the President,
before this exercise of eminent do-
main, must proclaim a national emer-
gency and immediately report the
situation to the Congress.

The Fifth Amendment would call
for “just compensation.”

Just compensation. It may be as-
sumed that the compensation of
everyone concerned would continue,
at least temporarily, on the basis of
the wages, hours and working condi-
tions and the price structure existing

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when production was interrupted.
But under the Fifth Amendment it
would be incumbent upon the Presi-
dent or the Congress to establish
some “compensation board” | or
boards to investigate the situation,
hear the interested parties, and re-
port to the President whether the
existing conditions are, and continue
to be, “just compensation.”

What the Congress might do if
the action of the President did not
rather promptly result in a settle-
ment of the dispute would be a mat-
ter within the judgment of Congress
in each particular case and presum-
ably would depend upon the con-
ditions of that case. It would, I sup-
pose, be not general but ad hoc
legislation.

However, my guess would be that
if the procedure I have outlined, or
something like it, were known to be
inthe offing, the parties would speed-
ily recover their capacity to reach
agreement in collective bargaining.

And the American people would
have the satisfaction of knowing that
the procedure contemplated was well
within the principles of liberty en-
shrined in the common law and in
the Bill of Rights of our federal

Constitution.

THE NEW LABOR BILL ee by Benjamin Aaron

| FTER MONTHS of wrangling,

Congress has enacted a new law
‘which affects to a considerable,
though as yet unknown, extent the
internal affairs of unions, the activi-
ties of employers, union representa-
ives and consultants, and the gen-
eral conduct of labor-management
relations.

Signed by the President on Sep-
ember 14, the new law bears the
mouth-filling title, “Labor-Manage-
ment Reporting and Disclosure Act
Bem p tie ta ties 1 eg

‘BENJAMIN AARON, formerly Ex-
ecutive Director of the NWLB and
blic member of the Wage Stabili-
zation Board, is now Acting Director
f the Institute of Industrial Rela-
ns at the vi a “i California
(Lo Se

of 1959.” In common parlance, how-
ever, it is known as the “Labor Re-
form Act.” The latter designation is
misleading and is a product of the
intellectual fog that has obscured
much of the debate over the Ken-
nedy and Landrum-Griffin _ bills,
from which the LMRDA was fash-
ioned. Actually, in addition to regu-

lating the. conduct of internal union

affairs the new measure significantly
amends a number of Taft-Hartley

Act provisions affecting the conduct

of — collective bargaining. These

amendments, rather than the. highly

publicized “bill of rights” for union

members, constituted oe aaa

areas of conflict betwee an

and the opponents
A. Ang they re
changes i

Hartley Act since it was adopted in
1947, and in this respect organized
employers have scored a clear-cut
victory over their union opponents.

For organized labor the new law
marks another bitter defeat and
furnishes further proof that when it
comes to legislative package-hand-—
ling, union leaders are still appren-
tices. In this respect the Congression-
al battle of 1959 has its analogue
in the 1949 campaign to amend

Taft-Hartley. After President Tru- sy

man, solidly backed by labor votes,
scored his upset victory over Thomas

E. Dewey in 1948, union strategists | 5,
took the uncompromising position in
the next session of Congress that —
e Taft-Hartley must be repealed and —

the Wagner Act restored before any _
entice “sould be ‘given nie

amendments favored by the Adminis-
tration. Their insistence upon a “two-
package” approach proved to be the
first of many miscalculations of
strength that contributed to the en-
suing debacle, which culminated with
the Administration fighting to pre-
serve Taft-Hartley as a preferable
alternative to the new bill Congress
was prepared to adopt.

Again, this year, union leaders
turned a deaf ear to the pleas of
labor’s friends, in and out of Con-
gress, for support of a moderate bill
aimed solely at the correction of the
more flagrant abuses revealed by the
McClellan Committee’s investiga-
tions. Proponents of this approach
argued that the more complex and
controversial task of amending Taft-
Hartley should be undertaken sepa-
rately. The union strategists insisted,
however, upon a “one-package” deal;
they conditioned their support of the
Senate bill, initially sponsored by
Senators Kennedy and Ervin, upon
the inclusion in that measure of
certain “sweeteners” in the form of
Taft-Hartley amendments long de-
sired by organized labor. By so doing
they laid the groundwork for the
statute ultimately enacted, which is
anything but moderate in its regula-
tion of internal union affairs and the
activities of union representatives,
and which has tightened, rather than
relaxed, the Taft-Hartley restrictions
on labor organizing and bargaining
tactics.

THE legislative battle is not the
only loss the unions have sustained;
of more fundamental significance,
perhaps, is their failure to gain solid
rank-and-file support of the position
they have taken against the new law.
Although it subsequently returned to
haunt them, the epithet, “Slave
Labor Law,” which union leaders
applied to Taft-Hartley at the time
of its enactment, had .a_ powerful
influence on the rank and file; it
engendered a fear and hatred of the
law and helped to unite the great
majority of organized workers against
it. Today, however, the old shibbo-
leths will not do the trick. Occasional
references to the new law as a “killer

bill” have not caught on, and many
union members privately concede

that the statute contains a number
of worthwhile provisions. Indeed, a

374

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+ 2 i ‘ he

pio ;

¥ — i ay
— -

wy o

widely known and respected union
leader in California recently express-
ed the view publicly that if the
Landrum-Griffin bill (which was
even more restrictive than the bill
signed by the President) had been
submitted by secret ballot to mem-
bers of organized labor it would have
been adopted by a greater majority
than it received in the House of
Representatives.

THERE IS little doubt that the new
law strikes hard at a number of
undemocratic or dishonest practices
engaged in by some unions and their
representatives. Moreover, it estab-
lishes as part of the national labor
policy badly needed standards of
fairness and honesty in the handling
of union funds and in the conduct
of internal union affairs. The statute

SS SS

—

sets up guarantees with respect to
the rights of union members to equal
participation in union affairs, free-
dom of speech and assembly, reason-
able and uniform dues, initiation
fees and assessments, freedom
to sue unions and their officers,
and fair treatment in disciplinary
cases. These provisions are based on
the entirely defensible theory that
since union strength is grounded in
large part on statutory powers of
exclusive representation, the rights
of union members, as members, in
matters directly affecting their liveli-
hood must not be permitted to be
substantially less than their rights
as citizens. | fri 3

Yet behind all the pious declara-

tions in favor of more democracy

within unions lies a depressing failure

i Al a

; en a ats ent 4
on all sides to deal with one great
unresolved issue: the continued dis-
crimination by many local and inter-
national unions against racial minori-
ties, especially Negroes. The new
law does not include one specific
prohibition against these practices;
worse than that, no such proposal
was sponsored by any labor or man-
agement group, nor was the issue
sericusly debated in the House or
Senate. To talk of democracy while
deliberately avoiding a showdown on
the undemocratic and indefensible
practice of racial discrimination in
employment and collective bargain-
ing is to engage in the most repre-
hensible form of intellectual dis-
honesty.

Unquestionably, the most popular
features of the new law are the pro-
visions governing the handling of
union funds and regulating the ac-
tivities of union officers in positions
of trust. The principal technique
employed is disclosure. Every union
must file annually with the Secretary
of Labor a detailed financial report.
In addition, it must make the in-
formation contained in the report
available to each of its members and
must let any member who shows
‘Just cause” examine records neces-
sary to verify the report. Union offi-
cers and employees must also file
annual reports of all conflict-of-in-
terest transactions in which they or
their wives or children have engaged.
Theft or embezzlement of union
funds is expressly made a crime,
punishable by fine and imprisonment.

A further provision requiring the
bonding of union representatives or
employees who handle union funds
or property may have far-reaching
consequences. No bond may _ be
placed through a broker or with a
surety company in which any labor
organization or any union representa-
tive has an indirect interest. More-
over, officers. must be bonded in-
dividually, in an amount equal to
10 per cent of the funds handled,
and the surety selected must be an
American company approved by the
Secretary of the Treasury:

The net effect of these require-
ments, violation of which is punish-

able by fine and imprisonment, is to |

place great power over unions in the

hands of bonding companies and

The Nation
ts dN canis aa =

greatly to increase the costs of bond-

_ ing. Union officials predict that any
representative who has ever had even

_ a minor brush with the law will
have difficulty getting a bond. The
concern over bonding costs is re-
flected in a recent report by the
Teamsters, Formerly, that union paid
Lloyds of London 35 cents per $1,000
on a policy covering all officers.
Under the new law as many as 8,000
union officers may require individual
bonding by an American company
at a cost that may go as high as
$11.75 per $1,000.

The disclosure requirement also
applies to employers and _ labor-re-
Jations consultants. Each must re-
port annually to the Secretary of
Labor on all payments made or re-
ceived for the purpose of influencing
employees in the exercise of their
rights to organize and to bargain
collectively, as well as all transactions
with union representatives involving
conflicts of interest.

An ambiguous exception is pro-
vided in the new law for attorneys,
who, to the extent they serve as
advisers in labor matters, are subject
to the reporting requirements ap-
plicable to consultants. Information
“lawfully” communicated to an at-
torney in the course of a “legitimate
attorney-client relationship” need not

be disclosed.
THE NEW law also regulates in con-

siderable detail the administration of

union trusteeships and the conduct

of union elections. Statutory require-

ments with respect to the former

seem reasonable. They require

prompt reports to the Secretary of
Labor every time a subordinate labor
organization is placed under trustee-
ship, explaining the reasons for the
action taken by the parent organi-
zation and the conditions that will
prevail during the period of trustee-
ship. Related provisions are designed
to safeguard the funds of the “trust-
eed” local and the voting rights of
its members. Trusteeships establish-
ed according to the constitutional
procedures of the union and in con-
formity with statutory requirements
are presumed valid for eighteen
months; thereafter, the presumption
is reversed. Suits to restrain viola-
tions and for other appropriate relief
may be brought either by a member
4

November 21, 1959

Pi eee ee

or subordinate body of a labor or-
ganization or by the Secretary of
Labor.

The wisdom of the new regulations
with respect to union elections is
more debatable. The rules governing
the frequency and procedures of
elections are not unreasonable, but
related provisions, empowering the
Secretary of Labor, on the complaint
of a union member, to file an action
in federal court to have an invalid
election set aside and a new one held,
raise serious doubts. Union consti-
tutional procedures for the conduct
of elections vary widely; for most
federal courts the entire area is terra
incognita. Moreover, the Secretary
of Labor is vested with power to
prescribe rules for the conduct of
new elections ordered by the court,
and it may be assumed that these
will be applied uniformly. This is a
little like making everyone wear the
same size shoe. Finally, while in-
dividual union members may sue in
state courts to prevent violation of
constitutional election procedures
prior to the election, the only remedy
available after the election is the
one prescribed by statute. It is doubt-
ful whether this remedy will be
prompt enough in aggravated cases
to be of much use.

The provisions of the new law
amending the Taft-Hartley Act mark
the culmination of more than a
decade of hitherto frustrated efforts
by employers and unions to obtain
certain changes. Although employers
have won a clear advantage, the
amendments seem to contain some-
thing for everyone.

With respect to the complex prob-
lem of what to do about the jurisdic-
tional “no man’s land,” the amend-
ment provides only a partial solution
which may create almost as many

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problems as it solves. Under Taft-
Hartley, the NLRB was the only
agency empowered to decide certain
types of labor disputes. It refused,
however, to take jurisdiction of some
of these on the ground that their
impact on interstate commerce was
relatively inconsequential. Parties to
those rejected cases were thus left
without a forum in which to resolve
their differences. The board may
now, by decision or by published
rules, decline to assert jurisdiction
over certain classes of cases, pro-
vided that it does not refuse to
handle any it would have taken as
of August 1, 1959. Cases of the type
the board declines to take may be
heard by state courts or administra-
tive bodies.
This arrangement strikes a com-
promise between advocates of com-
plete federal pre-emption and sup-
porters of states’ rights. How much
of the problem it will actually solve
remains to be seen. Among the more
difficult questions to which the com-
promise gives rise are, first, whether
in a given case a state court or agency
must await a determination by the
NLRB that it declines jurisdiction,
or can simply decide that question
for itself; second, whether the state,
court or agency, if it takes jurisdic-
tion, will apply state or federal law;
and third, if states do apply federal
law, what effect their decisions, which
are bound to conflict in some par-
ticulars with each other, with NLRB
rulings, and with federal court de-
cisions, will have on the law and
on labor-management relations.
Unions have taken the biggest
beating in amendments tightening up
Taft-Hartley restrictions on picketing
and secondary boycotts. Organiza-
tional picketing within twelve months
after an NLRB election or after an

wall MY MMU Mll-

i " i i MN

HW
‘| Hl Th

375

employer has lawfully recognized an-
other union is prohibited altogether.
In other circumstances such picket-
ing cannot continue more than thirty
days unless the union files a petition
for an NLRB election, which the
law specifies must then be held
“forthwith.” Picketing for the pur-
pose of “shaking down” the employer,
rather than of achieving a legitimate
union objective, is made a federal
crime, punishable by a fine. of up
to $10,000, a jail term of up to
twenty years, or both.

The restrictions on picketing are
aimed primarily at those unions
which prefer to organize the employer
rather than the employees. They do
not impose unreasonable limitations
on free collective bargaining. Pre-
sumably, the definition of extortion-
ate picketing will be narrowly con-
strued; even so, the prescribed crimi-
nal penalty seems unduly harsh.

Amendments relating to “hot car-
go” agreements and to secondary
boycotts are more controversial, since
they have the effect of outlawing
what many regard as_ legitimate
weapons of economic competition be-
tween employers and unions. “Hot
cargo” agreements, under which an
employer agrees that his employees
need not handle goods of an “unfair”
employer, had a precarious status
even before the passage of the new
law. While they were not illegal and
could be enforced by peaceful appeals
to the employer to abide by them,
union attempts to enforce such agree-
ments by persuading employees to
strike or to refuse to handle the “hot”
goods were illegal. The statutory
amendment goes further and makes
it an unfair labor practice to enter
into express or implied arrangements
of this type, which are further de-
clared to be unenforceable and void.
Limited exceptions are made for con-
struction subcontracting and for job-
bing in the garment industry.

The Taft-Hartley ban against
secondary boycotts has not hitherto
included union pressure applied di-
rectly against a secondary employer
or the inducement of his employees,
as individuals, to stop work or other-
wise support the boycott. An amend-
ment in the new law closes the gap
by outlawing both practices.

For some unions, however, the
new law has a lining of pure silver.

376

Certain practices in the building and
construction industry, formerly un-
lawful, have now been legalized.
Thus, an employer primarily engaged
in that industry may now enter into
a contract with a union before any
workers have been hired on the job.
In states which do not have “right-
to-work” laws, union-security con-
tracts in this industry may require
employees to join within seven days
of employment, instead of the usual
thirty days. Contractors may also be
required to notify the union of job
openings and to give priority for em-
ployment. on the basis of length of
service in the industry or the area.
These provisions, taken together,
come about as close to legalizing the
closed shop in the construction in-
dustry as can be done without ex-
pressly saying so. On the other hand,
they are based on practices which
antedated Taft-Hartley and which
were never effectively eliminated.

ALL unions will presumably approve
of the drastic modification of the
provision in Taft-Hartley relating to
voting rights of strikers in NLRB
elections. That rule in most cases
made strikers ineligible to vote if they
had been replaced. During his 1952
campaign, President Eisenhower call-
ed this a “union busting” provision
and pledged himself to eliminate it.
The amendment in the new law does
not go quite that far, but it does
allow replaced strikers to vote in an
election held within twelve months
from the date the strike began.
Finally, the entire nation has cause
to rejoice over the amendment repeal-
ing the Taft-Hartley requirement
that union officers file non-Commu-
nist affidavits with the NLRB as a
condition precedent to their organi-
zation’s using the machinery of the
National Labor Relations Act. True,
the new law substitutes a provision
that convicted criminals or former
Communist Party members may not
hold union office or serve as labor-
relations consultants for a period of
five years from date of conviction,
completion of prison term, or resigna-
tion from the party. These latest
prohibitions have also been attacked
as vindictive and unfair, but they
have at least two enormous advan-
tages over the old one. First, the
criminal penalties for violation are

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applied only to the individual in--
volved; his union is not penalized for
his wrongdoing. Second, the law no
longer requires any person to swear
that he does not believe in a par-
ticular ideology.

ANY ATTEMPT at this time to
assess the impact of the new law on
the persons and institutions covered
by its terms is, of course, premature.
As in the case of Taft-Hartley, it will
take many years before the courts
determine what some of its provisions
mean. The draftsmanship is far from
elegant, and the law abounds with
ambiguous words and phrases. More-
over, since the bill finally adopted
by Congress was an amalgam of a
number of others and lacked a single
sponsor who could make a record of
authoritative explanations, as the late
Senator Taft did when the bill bear-
ing his name was being debated, the }
courts are not likely to get reliable
guidance from the legislative history
of the LMRDA.

With respect to those provisions }
in the new law aimed at curbing}
abuses uncovered by the McClellan}
Committee, the critical question is
whether they will effectuate their in-}
tended purposes. Legislating democ- |}
racy 1s an experiment at best, but
it 1s an experiment that should be}
made. Certainly, it should now be
considerably harder for dishonest per-
sons to loot union treasuries or to
further their own financial interests}
at the expense of union members.
That the stringent statutory controls
over union internal affairs will pro-
mote substantially more democracy
is a much more debatable conclusion.}
The bewildering array of forms to]
be filed, records to be kept and pro-
cedures to be observed may simply
enhance the power of the profession-
als im the union bureaucracy and
widen the gap between the member-
ship and those who make key. de-
cisions in their organizations. On the
other hand, many international un
ions have maintained discipline over

tices outlawed by the new law. With}
the relaxation of those controls, em-

Ya F es hs i i
“practices, of refusals to ratify “firm”
agreements reached by negotiating
committees, and of wildcat strikes.
Many of the administrative func-
tions under the new law are placed
in the hands of the Secretary of La-
bor, rather than in an administrative
agency. The way in which he exer-
cises the formidable of in-
vestigation and prosecution placed
at his disposal can mean life or death

pow crs

ey ae y et

to a union. The present Secretary
has already given unions public as-
surance that he will administer the
law fairly and without vindictiveness.
Even so, the wisdom of endowing
one man with so much authority is
open to question.

The Taft-Hartley amendments in-
cluded in the new law have been
flagrantly misrepresented as part of
the legislation needed to clean out

corruption and to establish democ-
racy in unions. They are nothing of
the sort, but they cannot be condemn-
ed simply for that reason. Their va-
lidity must rest on proof that they
were needed to redress a dangerous
imbalance of power between unions
and employers and that they have
not destroyed the basic equilibrium
of labor-management relations in this
country.

MICHIGAN’S SCAPEGOAT GOVERNOR .. 8.1. widies

Detroit
MICHIGAN’S problems may be
conveniently divided into (1) a cash
crisis, (2) a tax crisis and, most im-
portant, (3) a political crisis involv-
ing, among other things, the future
of the state’s educational system and
the personal political fortunes of
Governor G. Mennen Williams, once
considered a serious contender for
the 1960 Democratic Presidential
nomination.

Everyone here agrees that the
state is in a mess; the question 1s,
who or what is responsible? A propa-
ganda campaign has sought to lay
the blame on Governor Williams—a
campaign so blistering that even
some normally pro-Republican papers
have warned against its excesses. In
any case, objective observers tend to
discount the charges against the
Governor; as a Democratic New
Dealer, he has been re-elected six
times in a normally Republican
state, and his most consistent sup-
port has come from the labor and
liberal vote; it would have been sur-
prising if he had not made bitter
enemies among those who, in New
Deal days, would have been termed
“economic royalists.”

Rather more acutely than most
states, Michigan has been suffering
from a prolonged tax crisis. Since
1947, its population has grown by
more than 1,500,000; for most of this
period employment in the state has

B. J. WIDICK, who has written ex-
tensively on labor problems, 1s co-
author, with Irving Howe, of The
_U.AM. and Walter Reuther.

November 21, 1959

been dwindling. At the end of the
Korean War, in 1953, there were
221,000 defense jobs; at the close of
last year, there were only 30,000.
Growing decentralization and auto-
mation in the auto industry resulted
in a further drop in employment.
Then came the 1957-58 depression,
which probably hit Michigan harder
than any other state. Adding to the
difficulties arising from a growing
population and a dwindling income
is the fact that, by virtue of a state
constitution adopted in 1908, only
a third of the state’s revenues are at
the disposal of the legislature; the
remainder is earmarked for specific
purposes and cannot be touched ex-
cept for these purposes.

In recognition of these difficulties,
the legislature last year appointed a
Tax Study Citizens Advisory Com-
mittee, composed of experts from
universities, industrial and labor cir-
cles, under the chairmanship of
Frank E. Siedman. In its report, the
committee pointed out: “At the be-
ginning of the 1958-59 fiscal year,
the state deficit was $21,000,000 de-
spite a moratorium on all general-
fund capital projects for the last two
years. This, added to the estimated
deficit for fiscal 1958-59, including
the apparent deficiency in the school-
aid funds, meant that by June 30,
1959, the accumulated deficit would
approximate $100,000,000.” The re-
port discussed at length the regres-
sive character of the state tax struc-
ture: the typical taxpayer earning
less than $2,000 a year was paying
nearly 20 cents in state and local
taxes for each dollar of income, com-

« 7
+

ro 1 oe

» sgl

men , ae es SO

pared to the 6 cents paid by tax-
payers in the $7,000-$10,000 bracket.

The report ended with a series of
recommendations upon which the
Governor based a tax program which
he presented to the legislature on
January 3, 1959. The program pro-
vided:

J. A_ graduated _ personal-income
tax ranging from 2 to 6 per cent, ex-
empting most families with incomes
of less than $5,000 a year.

2. A levy of 5 per cent on corpora-
tion profits and of 7 per cent on
banks, building and loan associa-
tions and other financial institutions.

3. Reduction of corporation fran-
chise fees from their present yield of
$50 million annually to $5 million
(this would relieve the tax burden
on approximately 73,000 small busi-
nessmen ).

4. Repeal of the present levy on
“intangibles.”

The net effect of the proposals
would have been to raise an addi-
tional $140 million in revenue which
the Tax Study Committee had said
was necessary to achieve a balanced
budget. But the program never got
off the ground. The Detroit Times
greeted it with the headline: “Mich-
igan Income Tax Plan Dictated by
U.A.W.” (an administrative assistant
to Walter P. Reuther of the Auto
Workers had served on the Tax
Study Committee). Republicans in-
sisted that the way to meet the
state’s fiscal problems was simple:
increase the sales tax. The debate
so confused the issues that even
Democrats were dubious of the Gov-
ernor’s program until, in a personal

1 STP Ns

——

ney

ee =
BE Pace

+7 loka OV UN e A
appearance before the State Demo-
cratic Convention in February, he
explained that an increased sales tax
was not only of doubtful constitu-
tionality, but was clearly a “soak
the poor” maneuver.

THE REPUBLICAN National Com-
mittee got into the Michigan act
with a brochure entitled “Welfare
State Hits Bottom” which was so
partisan that the independent De-
troit News was led to say editorially:

For the disastrous economic poli-
cies the [Republican National] Com-
mittee attributes to Michigan, some
major responsibility lies with the
legislature. That body, the docu-
ment neglects to say, was completely
Republican-controlled until last Jan-
uary, and technically is still under
GOP management.

Michigan’s legislature, like that of
most states, is heavily weighted in
favor of rural areas: Wayne County,
which includes Detroit, comprises 40
per cent of the state’s population,
but is allotted only 20 per cent of
the state’s senate seats. Thanks to
this rural weighting, the GOP won
the upper house, 22 to 12, in last
fall’s elections; the lower house was
divided, 55 to 55. The GOP was thus
in a position to frustrate any tax
proposal it didn’t want. And the
only proposal it wanted was for an
increase in the sales tax.

At long last, the legislature suc-
cumbed to the hard core of GOP
state senators and approved a 1 per
cent “use” tax, despite warnings that
the levy was clearly a sales tax and
would raise the state sales-tax rate
above the constitutional limit. Last
month—after $14 million had been
collected at retail level under the
new law—the state supreme court,
by a vote of 5 to 3, threw out the
sales tax. The majority said:

The citizens of this state are under

no illusion. The tax payable upon a

retail purchase has been increased

above the 3 per cent rate despite the
prohibition in the constitution....

The GOP immediately pointed out
that the court’s vote was strictly
along party lines: five Democrats
against three Republicans. This may
have been a good propaganda point
for the Republican Party; it didn’t
help to solve Michigan’s financial
problems. At Lansing, the political

378

wine

Governor Williams

deadlock resumed, the Governor now
insisting that it was up to the Re-
publicans in the legislature to come
up with some new proposals, and
the GOP legislators insisting that
the responsibility was the Gover-
nor’s.

The latest turn of events threatens
the jobs of 7,500 state employees
(the state has already had trouble
meeting payrolls); thousands of stu-
dents face the loss of various kinds
of assistance they have been getting
at state universities; and the whole
educational system may be forced
into a retrenchment that could prove
disastrous.

HOW EXPLAIN the legislative
deadlock which has prolonged Mich-
igan’s financial crisis? Last April,
the political writer for the Detroit
Times wrote:

Some Democrats and Republicans
have joined hands in one of the
ugliest Lansing political conspiracies
seen here in years. A hard’core of
Republican senators are determined
to discredit Williams at any price.
They want to blast him out of the
1960 Democratic Presidential cam-
paign regardless of state suffering.

In clarification of Democratic
complicity in the anti-Williams drive,
the writer noted that “aligned with
the [GOP] opposition for the first
time are five politically hungry

Democratic senators who want to

insure their re-election, They look

ant) oe : mah
i Ws oo) ele ig Rew, ee

iC
C

Oe TT ee oe oe a ae
upon Williams as a lame duck- who
is bowing out of state politics after |

1960.”

The irony of the savage attack on
Governor Williams is that this year
no one except some GOP pundits was
taking him seriously as a 1960 can-
didate. Significantly, the U.A.W. in-
vited five Presidental candidates to
attend its recent Atlantic City con-
vention: Rockefeller, Nixon, Hum-
phrey, Kennedy and Symington.

BUT whatever blame attaches to
the GOP legislators at Lansing for
Michigan’s miseries, they don’t con-
trol the state party nor lay down
its policies. For this, one must look
into the executive suites of General
Motors and Ford. A few weeks ago
Will Mueller of the Detroit News
described the machinations of Ar-
thur Summerfield, a former G.M.
car distributor and now U.S. Post-
master General, to oust Paul Bag-
well as prospective GOP candidate
for Governor next year. Bagwell, an
able and personable teacher at Mich-
igan State University, ran unsuc-
cessfully against Governor Williams
in 1958, but did well enough to
assure his candidacy in 1960, or
so everyone thought. But Summer-
field didn’t like him, and recently
came to Detroit and proposed to the
top brass of Ford’ and General
Motors that he be dumped. General
Motors agreed, but Henry Ford, ap-
parently disliking the idea that the
Postmaster General, an ex-G.M.
man, should dictate Michigan’s next
governor, demurred. In the ensuing
argument, Ford won; and, according
to the News, the head of the Ford
empire then turned to Bagwell and
said, “We will furnish all the dough
that is needed for you.”

In the light of this incident, the
charges of bossism frequently hurled
at Michigan’s Democratic Party, and
against Walter Reuther as the al-
leged “maneuverer” of Democratic
politics here, ought of right to boom-
erang. But somehow or another the

‘ smoke-filled rooms of powerful Re-

publican string-pullers never get the
same kind of thorough airing in the
nation’s press that is accorded the
smoke-filled rooms of Democrats—or
trade unionists.

Meantime, the state can derive
some hope from the activities of

The Nation |

ean BMstors (manufacturer of the
Rambler car), who is apparently as
much a heretic politically as he is
in the automobile field. Romney,
who gained considerable stature lo-
| cally as head of a Detroit Citizens
Advisory Committee which did ex-

‘ae

collar work in waeke some é the

city’s school problems, is now set-
ting up a state-wide study of Michi-
gan’s tax and legislative needs and
of the advisability of calling a new
constitutional convention. With the
help of a group of university men
and independent businessmen, he

hopes to have a series of recommen-

dations ready by next year’s elec-
tions. How he and his Citizens Com-
mittee for Michigan fare against the
Arthur Summerfields of the GOP
should provide another interesting
chapter in this state’s turbulent po-
litical history.

oro

DAILY, in more than 36,000 school
and public libraries from one end of
the land to the other, librarians go
_ about the slow and often arduous
task of building library collections.

They are, as one writer has put it,

“trustees of the public’s right to
know,” plying their trade in “the
_market place of ideas.” Their public
_ranges the full span of man’s tradi-
_ tional seven ages, with interests and
_-needs as broad and far-reaching as
_ the limits of man’s knowledge. Their
_ libraries range from a single room to

_ great, multi-storied structures and

the sprawling branch systems of

_ metropolitan areas. Their work is un-

_ dramatic, unsung, often misunder-
_ stood, sometimes pilloried—and, once
vin a whilas praised. But on each of
them rests a traditional (and awe-
os) responsibility which unites
b

PRs

them in a common purpose — the
preservation, provision and utiliza-
tion of print for man’s information
and enjoyment.

The principles by which they work
are summed up in the Library Bill of
ights (later expanded somewhat in
the “Freedom to Read” statement of
the Westchester Conference of Li-
-brarians and Publishers): (1) that
aterial presenting all points of view
concerning the problems and issues
ip our time shall be provided to all
comers; (2) that in no case shall
material be excluded because of the
‘race, nationality, or political or re-
Higious beliefs of an author; (3) that

ol shall not be removed from

‘DONALD E. STROUT is editor of
} the Newsletter on Intellectual Free-
| | dom of the American Library Asso-

Phi

_ tional Office for Decent Li

ARE LIBRARIANS CENSORS?.

libraries because of partisan or doc-
trinal disapproval.

Thus, willy-nilly, the librarian is
right smack in the thick of contro-
versy. For these principles give rise
to problems of considerable magni-
tude. It must not be forgotten that,
aside from other factors, the simple
act of picking and choosing from
among the 13,000 or more titles pub-
lished annually in the U.S. alone in-
volves, in all except the very largest
libraries, also the act of rejecting,
either by default or design. And in
a climate where fears, pressures and
tensions often dominate, and where
the urge to conformity is everywhere
evident, the risk of a librarian’s be-
ing (to use a somewhat old-fashioned
phrase) “damned if he does and
damned if he doesn’t” is very real,

indeed.

The United States is a pluralist so-
ciety. Nowhere is. this pluralism
more evident than in the pressure
groups which seek to influence the
librarian — groups ' whose motives,
however well-intentioned, often lead
them into strange, if not indefensible,
ways. There are the “patriotic”
groups, like the American Legion,
the D.A.R., the V.F.W., the Minute
Women of the U.S.A., with their
manifest concern over things (includ-
ing books) “anti-American,” “pro-
Communist,” “pro-One World” et al.
There are the “citizen” groups, like
the P.T.A., the Citizens for Decent
Literature, Inc., and the variety of
local bodies, which in their concern
for the “protection of the young” set
off “anti-obscenity” drives by the
score. These, in turn, are joined at
national and local level by the
“church” groups: the Catholic Na-
enue

€

e by Donald E. Strout

the more recently formed Protestant
Churchmen’s Committee for Decent
Publications, and the myriad denom-
inationally-oriented organizations, all
similarly concerned with the reading
habits of the young. Then there are
the quasi-official state groups, like
Rhode Island’s Commission to En-
courage Morality in Youth, and Mas-
sachusetts’ Obscene Literature Con-
trol Commission.

Local police, city councils, county
attorneys, district attorneys, state
legislatures and their members, the
U.S. Congress and individual Con-
gressmen and, of course, the Post

Office Department and the Post- °

master General, serve to round out
the register of the forces whose moves
drastically alter, if they do not in-
deed shape, the climate wherein li-
brarians move and whereof they are
a part.

THE FREQUENCY with which
pressures from these and _ other
sources are brought to bear on li-
braries can never be fully known.
The cautious librarian quietly capitu-
lates; the conscientious, courageous
librarian stands firm—and, if the pres-
sures are prolonged, makes headlines.
Since 1952 (when the Newsletter on
Intellectual Freedom was started),
at least twelve libraries have been
under severe pressure to remove
“subversive,” “anti-American,” “un-
American,” “pro-Communist” or
“pro-One World” material from their
shelves: the Boston Public Library

and the Los Angeles school system, |

along with libraries in Kalamazoo
(Mich.), Adams (Mass.), San An-
tonio (Texas), Mt. Lebanon (Pa.),
Akron (Ohio), Punxsutawney (Pa.),
Woonsocket (R.I.), Orlando (Fla.),

379

Riverside (Calif.) and North Can-
ton (Ohio). In another four li-
braries (Illinois State Library; Gal-
ion, Ohio, schools; Charleston, W.
Va., Public Library; Queens Borough
Public Library), outside pressures
were directed against “obscene” or

“objectionable” books. In recent
weeks, libraries in the South are re-
ported under attack for fostering

“interracial propaganda,” among
them the Alabama State Library and
the Shreveport, La., Public Library.
Demands not to show Chaplin, “pro-
Communist” and otherwise “ob-
jectionable” films have confronted
librarians in Peoria (Ill.), Phoenix
(Ariz.), East Orange (N.J.), Glen-
dale (Calif.), and Hicksville (L.I.).

But the number of occasions when
libraries directly experience _ pres-
sures from the outside is far less
relevant than the fact that the pres-
sure groups exist, and that they are
strong and vocal. Their existence,
their strength, their vocalness serve
to engender a pervasive and spreading
climate of fear. Again, however well-
intentioned they may be, they are at
cross purposes with the library en-
terprise, at least as ideally conceived.
They are guardians not of the pub-
lic’s right to know, but of the pub-
lic’s right to know only the “right”
things. Their main aim, in its sim-
plest terms, is to protect and prevent,
rather than to provide.

These outside pressures, however,
whether successfully resisted or not
(and the record where known shows
that librarians do resist and are gen-
erally successful), constitute but one
of the two major components of the
selection-censorship situation. The
other major component is the li-
brarians themselves. Luther Evans,
former Librarian of Congress, com-
menting on the demands of pressure
groups vis-a-vis librarians, once put
it this way:

[This] is a very real danger and
it has caused many librarians through-
out this land to chisel a bit on the
doctrines by which they have lived
in the past. The amount of that
chiseling can never be known, because
so much of the evidence is locked
within the inner consciousness of
frightened librarians, This book, that
book, this pamphlet, that pamphlet,

this motion picture, that motion —

picture, is excluded from the selection .

380

is. feared
group in the community ...
be ready to pounce on the librarians
for choosing it.

process because. it some

may

A RECENT study (Book Selection
and Censorship; A Study of School
and Public Libraries in California,
by Marjorie Fiske, University of
California Press, 1959, $3.75) has
thrown considerable light on “the
amount of chiseling” referred to by
Mr. Evans by revealing not a little
of the evidence which is “locked
away in the inner consciousness of
frightened librarians.” In the course
of the study, 204 interviews took
place with school librarians and ad-
ministrators in forty-six senior high
schools and with librarians in forty-
eight municipal and county library
units located in twenty-six commu-
nities, representing library service to
a majority of California’s population.

Put in general terms, the Fiske
findings are shocking enough. A sur-
prising proportion of librarians re-
veal themselves as weak and timid in
the act of selection by practicing a
kind of ignoble and debased under-
the-counter censorship in deliberate-
ly avoiding the controversial. Far
the most frequent source of objec-
tions to controversial books, Miss
Fiske found, were not the library
patrons, not parents zealously pro-
tecting their children, but the li-
brarians themselves. Yet paradoxical-
ly, when complaints did originate
with patrons or parents, the libra-
rians have often stood their ground
and refused to take réstni¢tive meas-
ures.

_ Expressed | in snore endditic| coins,

late Pa gil: pa tet i

w ' d
rent me at

‘the findings are even more -disturb-

ing. Of the librarians interviewed,
18 per cent habitually avoided, and
another 41 per cent sometimes avoid-
ed, any material which, in Miss
Fiske’s words, “is known to be con-
troversial or which they — believe
might become controversial.” Nearly
one-third acknowledged that, at one
time or another, they had perma-
nently removed controversial mate-
rial from their collection. Miss Fiske
found that restrictions of various
sorts had been put upon the use of
controversial material in 82 per cent
of the circulating library units cov-
ered by her study. Over two-thirds
of the restrictions were in response
to objections from librarians them-
selves, or others directly connected
with the institution. When the com-
plaints originated within the system,
the controversial book was removed
or restricted in 85 per cent of the
cases; again, paradoxically, when the
complaints came from outside, the
book was removed or restricted in
only 44 per cent of the cases.

Miss Fiske’s enumeration of the
ways whereby a book is “restricted”
is illuminating. Most frequent meth-
ods: transfer the book to the li-]
brarian’s office; place it on the “re-
serve” shelf (so the patron has to}
ask for it); place it wnder the front
desk; place it behind the front desk;
place it in a locked case. Another
rather popular method, one gathers,
was explained by one librarian: “Oh,
I just put the book away for a while”
—the whereabouts of the “away” and
the length of the “while” not being
specified.

Some of what Miss Fiske reports
verges on the ludicrous. There was
the librarian who had President
Eisenhower’s freedom-to-read state-
ment pasted on the outside of a lock-
ed bookease. There was the librarian
who reported, matter-of-factly, that}
she found the little “Gift” stamp af
most convenient device for labeling
all controversial materials, whethe
the material actually was a gift or
not. The capper came when the li
brarian who “just put a book aside
for a while” led Miss Fiske to he

“aside” room. The room containe

2 000 volumes!

or otherwise restricting books was

“sex and obscenity” (46 per cent).
Next in order: politics (19 per cent),
profanity (10 per cent), race and
religion (9 per cent).

Miss Fiske documents her findings
with an impressive array of sum-
maries, analyses and cross-analyses
of data which are likely to prove of
greater interest to the librarian than
to the general reader. Of perhaps
more than passing interest to both,
however, is her treatment of “out-
side” pressures and their effects on
libraries in California. Here her find-
ings take on a brighter hue. She re-
ports only two book-centered “com-
munity conflicts” (i.e., wherein major
population segments were involved )
and only seven “public episodes”
(1.e., known to the community, but
not involying major population seg-
ments) since World War II. In one
of the two large-scale conflicts (Mull
Valley), a crusade to purge the
school library, led by a housewife,
was scotched by the librarian, a sym-
pathetic press and an outraged citi-
zenry. The other (Los Angeles) was
the scene of a bitter and prolonged
struggle over UNESCO in the
schools; and the libraries, along with
the whole educational system, suf-
fered a jarring defeat. Miss Fiske
concludes her account of these con-
flicts with these words: “A number of
both school and public libraries re-
acted to these conflicts with precau-
tionary or restrictive measures. These
actions, with very few exceptions,
were initiated within the school or
library system, without impetus from
the local citizenry.” And at this point
another paradox (the Fiske study
has many of them) emerges: though
the Mill Valley conflict was a vic-
tory for freedom to read, and the
Los Angeles conflict a defeat, it was
the Mill Valley incident which was
more often cited as justification for
restrictive moves in other libraries
throughout the state.

ONE would be grievously remiss in
taking leave of Miss Fiske’s study
without noting what she calls, in a
happy phrase, the “semantic conveni-
_ences” which librarianship possesses
in such Oe eee dismaying—
profusion. A “balanced collection”

was explained by her respondents in
a half-dozen or more ways; perhaps

| November 21, 1959

the most ingenious was, “You pro-
vide as much as you can of what
anybody wants.” A_ librarian must
be sure to read the books which are
“too good” (1.e., won’t circulate) or
“too bad” (i.e., risqué or politically
dubious) before selecting them.
“Controversial” is not only an ugly
word; it is at times a useful and con-
venient one to cloak a multitude of
less desirable ones. And in turn, there
are endless circumlocutions (or se-
mantic conveniences) for “contro-
versial”: “not suited to our collec-
tion”; “not: in good taste”; “not
appropriate’; and (from my own
experience applied often to Lolita)
“doesn’t fit in with community in-
terests.”” And the school librarian has
a couple of well-nigh perfect rea-
sons for rejecting a book: it either
“doesn’t supplement the curriculum”
or it “is at too advanced a reading
level.” The words “select” and
“screen”
preferred to

are, of course, much to be
“censor,”

which is (in

librarianship as elsewhere) a word
to be avoided at all costs.

The Fiske Study is a welcome one.
More and more of them are needed
to produce more and more of the
evidence locked up in that inner con-
sciousness of fmghtened librarians,
to uncover the myriad and com-
plex pressures operative inside and
outside the individual librarian and
to reveal the effects of these pres-
sures on the development of his phi-
losophy of book selection.

' Nothing could more strikingly illus-
trate how individual, and how dra-
matically contradictory, such phil-
osophies can be than the reactions
of two librarians who were pressed to
remove a book from their shelves.
One did; the other didn’t. Said the
first, flatly, “You don’t jeopardize a
whole institution for just one book.”
Said the other, saltily, “The question
is whether we are to be dictated to by
every Tom, Dick and Harry who de-
cides he wants a book removed. If
we are, there’ll be no end to it. We'd

just as well shut the doors right now.”

LETTERS t

(Continued from inside front cover.)

has been appointed and re-appointed by
reformers and regulars of both political
parties, honored by universities, praised
by the and civic organizations.
Only a few months despite the
publicity which the Title I mess had ih
already received, these supporters joined
in a chorus of praise on’the occasion of
the city’s postponement of Moses’ com-
pulsory retirement. Where were the
leaders of New York’s Democratic re-
form movement then? They were busy
campaigning against De Sapio.

The blame for Moses and Title I is
shared by the entire city and state —
by the liberals who drafted and sup-
ported an incredibly inept Housing Act
of 1949; by the Republican governors
who have given Moses state-wide power
and by Dembenstic mayors callous to the
needs of citizens pushed around by his
concept of progress; by the real-estate
people, architects and politicians who
profit from being in his favor; and, most
important, by a public which believes
that it is important to get something
done, regardless of what or how.

And who is to blame for Mayor
Wagner’s shortcomings? Have we for-
gotten so quickly that Adlai Stevenson,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman and
other noted liberals supported Wagner
when he ran in 1953, and that the re-
form movement sought Wagner’s sup-
port after the 1958 Buffalo convention?
Did not the citizens of New York elect
him in 1957 by the greatest plurality
ever achieved by a New York mayor?

The problems raised by Cook and
Gleason are enormous. They can be
solved only by the patient dedication of
New Yorkers to improving their neigh-
borhoods, housing, schools, playgrounds,
parks, hospitals and community serv-
Soa by the election of political leaders
at all levels who will respond to com-
munity needs; by the willingness of
high-caliber people to run for office.
We delude ourselyes by thinking that
the election of a group of so-called re-
form candidates or a state-conducted
investigation will solve New York’s
problems. A Rockefeller-conducted in-
vestigation would be geared more to
the immediate publicity impact than
for genuine civic improvement.

I do not know that there has been a
conspiracy of corruption at the top. I
do know that there has been a con-
spiracy of apathy at the bottom.

Norman Revricu

press
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BOOKS

The Sense of a Decision

PICKETT’S CHARGE: A Microhistory
of the Final Attack at Gettysburg.
By George R. Stewart. Houghton

Mifflin. 354 pp. $5.
W. S. Merwin
TAKING the Battle of Gettysburg

(July 1, 2 and 3, 1863) as the decisive
one of the Civil War, Pickett’s charge
on the third day was that battle’s de-
cisive maneuver and in many respects
its epitome. When the Army of North-
ern Virginia, under Lee, confronted the
Army of the Potomac, under Meade,
across a few gently rolling farms in
southern Pennsylvania, the Confeder-
ates had suffered no signal defeat. On
the contrary, during the two years and
more since the war had begun, they
had won or drawn battle after battle
until it seemed to many that the road
to Washington lay virtually open to
them. Even so perspicacious and sage
a man as Lee was convinced that a sin-
gle crushing blow would force the North
to capitulate, and he laid his plans ac-
cordingly.

This confidence and Lee’s appraisal
of the situation were basically un-
changed when, after two days’ fighting,
at around three in the afternoon,
Pickett’s command moved forward up
the gradual slope toward the Union
lines on Cemetery Ridge, the best part
of a mile away. Barely two hours later
that command has been flung back
from the ridge with more than 60 per
cent casualties, including almost all its
field officers—a loss from which this
important section of Lee’s Army never
recovered. The march into Pennsyl-

vania had been stopped and the Con-
federacy was receding from its high-
water mark, Lee lost the offensive that
day and never really regained it. In-
deed, his situation was such that the
best he could hope for, in the immedi-
ate future, was the chance of an organ-
ized and unharried retreat under cover
of darkness; a prompt and determined

Union counterattack might have com-

pelled him to surrender then and there.

According -to some military defini-
tions of the word, and certainly in its
usual and popular sense, “Pickett’s

W. S. MERWIN i is a poet whose work
has appeared frequently in these pages.
His latest collection of verse is Green
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Charge” was not a charge at all. For
that matter, insofar as a popular con-
ception of Pickett’s charge can be said
to exist, it is almost sure to be at vari-
ance with what happened on that after-
noon. In the first place, the advance
was carried out entirely by infantry. I
have heard it discussed as though it
had consisted of galloping cavalry, the
scions of the tidewater families of the
Old South, spurring forward out of
pure blind gallantry. There was gal-
lantry, and no mistake, but there were
very few horses. Only a handful of the
Confederate officers were mounted, and
they were exceptions who kept to their
saddles because of wounds or for other
particular reasons; Pickett had express-
ly ordered officers to join the charge on
foot. Nor did the Southerners rush
forward giving the shrill rebel yell.
Confronted with open fields, the slight-
est of cover, and a long way to go be-
fore they could reach the Union posi-
tions, they advanced at something un-
der a hundred yards a minute, keeping

parade-ground order over most of the .

distance. They were not in any nu-
merical sense at a disadvantage, either:
they had more artillery on the field
than their opponents, and their infantry
outnumbered that of the North by
nearly two to one.

WHEN it comes to Major General
George Edward Pickett himself, ambi-
guity in the end impedes history, though
the main drift seems clear. He was
popular; he was rather a dandy, with
curls hanging to his shoulders; at thirty-
eight he was madly in love with a young
lady in her teens, and he employed the
moments just before the charge in
writing her a love letter which he en-
trusted to General Longstreet when the
Jatter gave him the signal to begin the
advance. Then, having ridden with the
charge for about half its distance, he
stationed himself at a farm building in
order to direct the action from there.
This, as Mr. Stewart points out, was
correct behavior for an officer respon-
sible for nine brigades: he was sup-
posed to “exercise command from where
he could best observe the situation.”
And in fact he was well within range
of the Union positions. On the other
hand, when the going got really sticky a
bit later, he neg ed to ri forward
to lend his troy :

ant? the

believed that a massive drive at the
Union center just at this tices would |

- street,

presence, as presumably he should have
done; and later still, when the charge
had failed and the Union counterattack
was beginning, he turned from the bat-
tle and rode back to. the Confederate
lines. In the latter instance, indeed in
both, it has been argued that there was
nothing which he could have accom-
plished by maintaining closer contact
with his brigades. Even if that were
so, it is scarcely surprising that Pickett
was subsequently accused of every
shade of incompetence and cowardice.
Further, his later military career can
scarcely be said to do him honor. In
April, 1865, at Five Forks, his division
was cut to pieces and on that occa-
sion Pickett was not at the scene at all
but was away at a shad-bake. It was
near the end of the war; Pickett was
relieved of his command, but the scan-
dal was hushed up.

Still, “Pickett’s Charge” at Gettys-
burg did not turn out as it did because
of anything which Pickett did or failed
to do. He was merely carrying out
orders, after all, and up to a point at
least he did so perfectly adequately.
On the other hand, to a degree unusual
in military or political activities, the
responsibility for Gettysburg and _ its
outcome can be narrowed down to one
man: Lee. It was he, and he alone, who
decided to make a frontal attack on the
center of the Union line, on the third
day of the battle. Within certain limits
it is possible to reconstruct the circum-_
stances which must have prompted his —
choice of action. He had either to at-_
tack or to retreat; he guessed, and
rightly, that Meade would not attack,
and in any event his own disposition —
was for attack. On the first two days’
fighting he had attacked both the right
and the left of the Union position; he

be more than the Army of the
could take.

Lee’s plan was based on incomplete
knowledge of just what troops were
facing him, and on a not very high
opinion of them or of their ofhcers in-
any case. Exactly what information he
did have, and how he arrived at his
plan, there is now no way of knowing,
and so there is no way, finally, of judg-
ing his decision. Nevertheless, Long-
Lee’s second in command, 4
soldier’s soldier, a general only less,
prodigally gifted than Lee himself, o
posed the charge be the beginnin
and was ore # ie dpi le

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_ written this book

failure that he was’ accused—later on,
when scapegoats were wanted—of de-
featism. At the same time Meade
guessed correctly what Lee was going
to do. Meade, as a general, not
in Lee’s class at all; was his prognostic
merely a hunch, or does it too cast an
aspersion on this particular decision of
L.ee’s? When the have all
weighed, the nearest thing to an
nation” “T thought
my men were invincible.” And when the
entire event has been reviewed,
left, even after the colliding awful
spectacle of the battle, with the image
of Lee, crushed, repeating over and
over, “The fault is all mine...all my
fault...my fault!”—and with a sense
that one has been confronted with at

Was

facts been
“expla-

is Lee’s contidence:

one is

least one irreducible meaning of the
word “decision.”

I WAS left wondering, too, why this
hook (considering how many are writ-

ten on the Civil War every year) was
never written before. Much, as Mr.
Stewart points out, has been written

Stains on the

AGAINST THE LAW. By Peter Wilde-
blood. Julian Messner. 189 pp. $3.95.

C. H. Rolph
IF I WERE a_ homosexual

) and had
it would be much
more violent than it is. One virtue of
such a book by a writer of Mr. Wilde-
blood’s caliber is that it necessarily
shows him to be a thousand things be-
sides the homosexual that he declares
himself to be — normal and admirable
and ordinary things; and though his
context must isolate the fact of homo-
sexualism, he gives it some kind of per-

spective (difficult to achieve in Eng-

land) when he says: “I am no more
proud of my condition than I would be
of having a glass eye or a hare lip.”
He must have known that a carefully
restrained narrative, keeping strictly to
the facts as he saw them, would portray
English justice in about its worst pos-
sible light. And sure enough it does.
Most people who read the book are
made ashamed of what was done to this
young man and his co-defendants at
Lewes Assizes in 1954. In truth, I doubt

———.

i. H..ROLPH, a regular contributor to
the New Statesman, is a former Chief
| of the City of London police.

? | He is a member of the Executive Com-

|\ mittee of the Howard League for Penal

: eform.

\ puemie or oS oo

about the battle, on one side or another.
What he has set out to do is to tell
the whole story of “Pickett’s Charge,”
and to do it without bias, starting from
early morning on the day itself until
the Union counterattack petered out in
the late and early
The technique of detailed narrative
which he developed and made familiar
in books like Storm and Fire is used to
good effect here: the
tion of the Armies’ positions, the plans
of the generals, and the battle itself,
are lucid and sharp without ever de-
scending to the sensational, nor to point-
less conjecture. Indeed, in Pickett’s
Charge, Mr. Stewart makes a point of
articulating no particular vision about
the war, human behavior or
He sticks to the facts,
result sometimes has a satisfaction re-
sembling that of reading primary
sources, it occasionally seems disappoint-
ingly two-dimensional. Still, it is neither
more nor less than it sets out to be,
which is first-class reporting: objective,
intelligent and readable.

afternoon evening.

intricate eXposi-

destiny.
and while the

Common Law

that any book has made a greater im-
pact on British conscience since Dickens
and Charles Reade were writing.

Its author was involved in the “sen-
sational” Montagu case, a criminal trial
which had three principal results. It
sent three intelligent, likable, cultivated
and socially valuable young men _ to
prison for conduct which had inflicted
no harm upon anyone; it exposed the
cynicism and impunity of certain police
methods — which have not since, how-
ever, been modified in the smallest de-
gree; and it showed the odious figure of
the sneaking accomplice earning immun-
ity by betraying others — and being
officially encouraged to do so.

I DON’T myself praise or even accept
this remarkable book uncritically. On
the basis of a police experience of some
variety, I believe Mr. Wildeblood to be
mistaken, for example, when he says
that his telephone was being tapped
while his trial was pending. In times of
stress and personal danger this is one
of the easiest of all illusions, and I wish
more people could know how difficult it
is for the police to get the necessary
Home Office sanction for telephone tap-
ping. But I have discussed it with him
and he genuinely believes it happened.
“When I made a call, I could faintly
hear someone moving about on a creaky
chair” (as if they would!) “and some-

times humming, as of a recording ma-
Another thing: when he says
that Mr. D. Roberts, QC, Counsel
for the Crown, “thundered” about
homosexuals in his opening speech to the
jury, you need to know that Mr.
Roberts, although a big man, has a thin
voice that will not produce thunder.
And when this book attacks the’ Gov-
ernment prison commissioners
for the “callousness” with which they
contemplate the truly disgusting state
of some English prisons, it is, in the
main, blaming the wrong people: the
responsibility lies with the British pub-
lic, which grudges every penny spent on
prison improvement and_ bitterly op-
poses every scheme for establishing a
new “open” prison — the only hope of
amelioration for many years to come.
But with a very few such qualifications
this is the most outstanding book, on
Sass prison life to have been written

chine.”

and the

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for half a century; and in all important
respects [ would be prepared to say,
hand on heart, that it is accurate down
to its smallest detail.

Nevertheless its main’ importance
lies not in its prison pages but in its
account of the “pre-trial enquiries.”
‘These involved police methods which
seem to have had the full approval of
the courts and, subsequently, of the
government itself. And here American
readers will find some startling com-
parisons. It is a matter of growing con-
cern to American police authorities, for
example, that evidence obtained either
directly or indirectly as the result of
illegally searching a man’s house will
not be admissible in evidence. Wilde-
blood’s flat was searched (in his pres-
ence, at eight o’clock in the morning)
by two police officers who had no war-
rant to do so, and the residences of his
two co-defendants were actually search-
ed in their absence. Letters were thus
found which, in each case, were in-
criminatory only of the occupant; but
because they were all later charged
(rather, it seems, as an afterthought)
with “conspiracy” to commit homosex-
ual offenses, each and all of these let-
ters served as evidence against the three
of them. i

Few people in England are very
proud of that part of the story, but if
the full implications of the Common
Law “conspiracy” indictment were
generally understood there would be
an uproar resulting in its repeal. It is
as cruel and unprincipled as any legal
chicanery that has helped to fill the
Hungarian prisons and the Siberian la-
bor camps with their legions of political
prisoners. In the days when the Eng-
lish police system was rudimentary and
ineffective, the law felt itself danger-
ously threatened by any agreement
among “evildoers,” and all kinds of in-
dictments against “conspirators” were
held to be good. As Lord Campbell
said in the House of Lords on March 1,
1859: “If two men agree to blow their
noses together during Divine Service
so as to disturb the congregation, they
may be indicted for conspiracy.” And
they still could. It is also true today
that, as James Stewart Parnell’s lawyer
remarked at his trial in 1881, “plausible
means may be found for declaring it to
be a crime to do almost anything which
the Judges regard as morally wrong or
politically or socially dangerous.”

But if we are not sufhciently dis-
turbed in England about our conspiracy
laws, it is because most people do not
know about or understand them, Peter
Wildeblood’s book has at least made
people understand more clearly than

384

nee a ae,
ee

they have ever done before, with re-
luctance and anger, that English law
strikes odious bargains with offenders
who are willing to turn (or can be
frightened into turning) traitor to their
former friends. The two chief witnesses
in the Montagu case, male prostitutes
who were known to have committed
many other offenses and who admitted
their complicity in those under trial,
were not even prosecuted. It is this
principle above all that has stuck in
people’s gills. And no one so far, cer-
tainly no legislator, has lifted a finger
to do anything about it.

THE Montague case led directly to
the appointment of the Wolfenden Com-
mittee, which more than two years ago
recommended that homosexual acts
taking place in conditions of privacy
between consenting adults should no
longer be criminal, Nothing has been
done about that, either. The recom-
mendation has had the support of all the
churches and, with astonishing spon-
taneity and articulateness, hundreds of
leaders of public thought; but the Goy-
ernment thinks “the time is not yet
ripe,” which is to say that there must

‘ PDS aa To unr a}
be ae more Wildeblood crucifixions, at
least for a few years. A recent publica-
tion from the Church of England Moral
Welfare Council, What Js Unlawful?
Afterthoughts on the Wolfenden Report,
by Quentin Edwards, a London bar-
rister, suggests that the law should now
make all homosexual acts “unlawful” in
a sense which is less than criminal (e. g.,
as having, like adultery or like profes-
sional negligence, civil consequences
short of actual punishment), and a few
such acts, involving, for example, as-
sault or public indecency, punishable as
crimes in either sex. This might offer
an area of compromise for the extrem-
ists, giving as it does a chance to con-
demn the practice of homosexuality
openly as “unlawful” and yet to declare
that justice does not require that every
homosexual act between men should be
a crime.

For the individual, however, for the
man who wrote Against the Law and
who has now long been out. of prison
and earning his living again as a gifted
writer and journalist, the position re-
mains as he describes it. From what I
know of Americans, I think they will
read it with horror.

In Pursuit of a Civilized Society

WHITEHEADS AMERICAN ES-
SAYS IN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
Edited by A. H. Johnson. Harper &
Bros. 206 pp. $4.

Y. H. Krikorian
FROM THE DAYS of Plato to our

time many thoughtful minds have at-
tempted to create an image of the ideal
society. Aristocracy, absolutism, total-
itarianism and democracy are images of
this kind. Whitehead was continually
trying to create such an image.
Whitehead’s major contributions are
in the fields of logic, philosophy of sci-
ence and metaphysics; yet his concern
with the ideal civilized society appears
recurrently in many of his writings and
principally in the essays and lectures
that were written for the general public
during his stay at Harvard. These have
just been edited with an enlightening
introduction by A. H. Johnson. White-
head’s approach to his task is not that
of a trained historian or sociologist but
rather of a highly cultivated reflective
mind. What are his views on the pos-

Y. H. KRIKORIAN is professor of phil-
osophy, The City College, New York.

He is the editor recently of pepeoerslions
and the Human Spirit.

sibility of an ideal civilized society as
expounded in this collection?

First, as to the nature of a civilized
society. Whitehead developed his idea
of civilization primarily in his Adven-
tures of Ideas, and most of what he
says on civilization in this volume has
its roots in his earlier writings. The
notion of civilization is a complex and
ambiguous one. Though Whitehead fully
realizes the difficulties involved, he
would like civilization to mean a society
that makes possible a meaningful and
enjoyable life for all. Historically, civil-
ization for Whitehead is the victory of
persuasion over force. Civilization is the
maintenance “of social order, by its own
inherent persuasiveness as embodying
the nobler alternative.” Resort to force
is a sign of the failure of civilization.
The great idea which Plato gave to the
world, and which was further developed
by Christianity, was that the divine ele-
ment in the world is not the coercive but
the persuasive one.* This humanitarian
ideal developed the notion of the dignity
of man and undermined the early prev-
alent idea of slavery. And this human-

“For a contemporary example of this
principle in action, see “Should Labor

Be Coerced?” by’ William Hammatt —

eerie, page 871 of this issue.

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itarian ideal has increased the sensitiv-
ity to human possibilities. For White-
head these possibilities are truth, beauty,

adventure, art and peace. A civilized
society is one that exhibits these values
in all the phases of its activity.

Civilization is not, as often assumed,
a mere knowledge or imitation of the
best of the past; it involves freshness
and novelty. As Whitehead puts it, “A
race preserves its vigor so long as it
harbours a real contrast between what
has been and what may be; and so long
as it is nerved by the vigor of ad-
venture beyond the safeties of the past.
Without adventure civilization is in full
decay.” Values of civilization, for White-
head, are not mere abstractions but the
actual experiences of individuals. Civil-
ization is characterized by the maximum
respect for individuals.

THE ideal society can never be realized,
only approximated. Whitehead’s very
notion of reality as process makes all
accomplishment provisional. Yet he is
basically optimistic. He suggests some
major conditions that make possible a
high degree of civilization.

One of these conditions is the prev-
alence of more humane ideas. “As we
think we live.” In each era there are
some ideas which are so pervasive that
they are accepted like the air we breathe.
In the Hellenistic-Roman period the

idea of slavery was taken to be ines-
capable. Yet more humane ideas of man
ushered in the primacy of the ideas of
freedom and equality. Whitehead, of
course, in his emphasis on the efficacy
of ideas does not ignore the importance
of custom. Ideas to be effective must
be “massively coordinated inheritance.”

Another condition that makes for
civilization is an economic system that
harmonizes with the cultural needs of

the individual. Whitehead especially
emphasizes this condition. The fusion of
a the ideal with the economic policies
b makes “the stuff of history.” In our
_ present economic system there is “a
starvation of human impulses, a denial
i of opportunity, a limitation of benefi-
cial activity — in short, a lack of free-
dom.” Whitehead makes some sugges-
_ tions in the direction of improvement:
greater employer-employee cooperation,
more creative work, beautiful surround-
; ings for industrial plants.
i Finally, a more vitally motivated edu-
cation can make an important contribu-
_ tion to civilization. What Whitehead
writes on education is in many respects
the best part of the present volume.
, a ad was a Bennevishes educator

our society, one is exposed, while read-

not deal exclusively with abstract in-
tellectual concepts and factual know!l-
edge. “A merely well-informed man is
the most useless bore on God’s earth.”
Abstract or factual knowledge is useful
only when it promotes worthy thought
and action. At many points Whitehead’s
and Dewey’s views on education are
strikingly similar.

MOST of what Whitehead writes is
challenging; yet some of his suggestions
involve difficulties.

First, to what extent do ideas deter-
mine history? This is a difficult issue.
Ideas have an important role in history;
and at a time when many anti-intellectual
movements depreciate their significance,
one should be reminded of their efficacy.
Yet to what degree are they effective?
Was the abolition of slavery primarily
due to democracy or to the fact that it
was uneconomical under technological
conditions? Many would give the main
weight to these conditions. Whitehead
is not unaware of such situations; yet
when he writes “ . it was democracy
that freed the slaves,” or, when he says,
“As we think we live,” one feels he
tends to give too sweeping a power to
ideas. Often it is truer to say, “As we
live we think.”

Whitehead’s suggestions on the present
economic system fall mostly in the effi-
ciency-building area, though he is not so
much interested in efficiency as in the
development of more humane and cul-
tured industrial relations. The sugges-
tions are fruitful as far as they go, but
he fails to consider the tougher and
more basic economic issues, such as the
fair distribution of wealth and the more
democratic control of economic forces,
without consideration of which his sug-
gestions would not much alter the
present situation.

As for Whitehead’s views on persua-
sion, which are so central to his whole
view of civilization, one can fully agree
with his espousal of this method as the
only civilized way of settling conflicts,
and can approve his eloquent defense
of it. But can society wholly dispense
with force? Men seem to be pretty gen-
erally convinced that sometimes force
is the only means that is left for reach-
ing decisions. When a deadlock occurs
between conflicting aims, there is noth-
ing left but to fight it out. Though force
is not a substitute for reason in human
affairs, it might well be an element in
the rational life.

Whether one agrees or not with White-
head’s specific suggestions for improving

ing these essays, to a mind that is gen-
uinely’ humanistic, aca concerned with |

7
—s Ae f
4

Ao aoe Cae ees SG) a eT
4 LAM OP SF

THE VIENNA
YOUTH FESTIVAL

has been the subject of varying reports
in the past few month. The demonstra-
tions, the color and splash, the fist-
fights as well as the repeated affirma-
tions of “peace and friendship” have
all been covered in the press. But what
are the most relevant facts about the
festival? Why was the Austrian youth
movement bitterly opposed to it? Will
another festival be held outside the
Iron Curtain? For answers to these
questions, be sure to read A REPORT
ON THE VIENNA YOUTH FESTI-
VAL in the fall issue of

VENTURE

The report is written by a member
of the Student League for Industrial
Democracy who was in Vienna through-
out the Communist sponsored and dom-
inated festival. The SLID, publisher of
Venture, is America’s oldest campus
liberal organizatien. Through the 55
years of its existence, the SLID has
acted to reduce the complacency preva-
lent at American colleges about all
kinds of social and political issues.
Venture, published quarterly, is the
only nationally distributed magazine
about social and political issues com-
pletely written by students.

Also appearing in the fall issue:

THE ETHICS OF PACIFISM

MR. LIPPMAN'S WORLD
AND OURS

THE NEED FOR UTOPIAS

and many other articles and re-
views.

Chances are that Ventwre will do
more for you than simply reinforce the
opinions you already hold. Why don’t
you send for a free sample copy today?
Or if you would like to subscribe, rates
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three years.

VENTURE

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New York 3, N.Y.

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Kingston, Ontario, Canada

the achievement ‘of an imaginatively
rich civilization; and one is also en-
livened by the essential optimism of this
mind that yet does not ignore the com-
plexities that lie across the path toward
the ideal society. I wish myself that he
had explored more adequately the dark-
er aspects of our society. But if courage
and hope are prerequisites for success
in our pursuit of an ideal society, then
Whitehead’s rational optimism remains
of great value.

An Isle of Greece

THE MERMAID. MADONNA. By
Stratis Myrivillis. Translated from the
Greek by Abbot Rick. Thomas Y.
Crowell. 310 pp. $4.50.

Richard Elman
RECENTLY . a ‘riend_ of. mine, an
American of Greek descent, went back
to the Islands on a holiday to visit his
father’s relatives. Because of the ex-
igencies of travel’in that part of the
world, he was not able to let his
father’s people know in advance when
he would arrive at their, village. When
he did-come to that crossroads under-
neath a plane tree which his father had
been telling him about ever since he
could remember, he expected that his
arrival would cause some surprise. This,
however, was not the case. An old man,
chipping at some cobblestones about
a hundred feet down the road from
where my friend’s taxi dropped him,
looked up, shielded his face from the
sun, brushed his hands clean against
his frayed trousers and smiled. “Let me
see,” he said. “You must be John’s
boy.”

[ mention the incident because it is
of the same texture as those in Stratis
Myrivillis’ remarkable novel The Mer-
maid Madonna. Since Mr. Myrivillis
is highly regarded in European literary
circles and is now touring this country
as a guest of our State Department and
has even been nominated for the Nobel
Prize, it should be emphasized that the
novel, his first to be published in this
country, is a truly indigenous work.

Few novels im recent years have
been at once as realistic and as re-
mote as The Mermaid Madonna. It is
set on one of those obscure, sleepy
Greek ‘Slands where hardship is an
everyday event. But religion is also
an everyday event in Mr, Myrivillis’
world and just as early death, home-
RICHARD ELMAN, a young poet, is
the author of the recent novel A Coat
for the Tsar.

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lessness, lust and poverty are treated
as the normal lot of man, so is spiritu-
ality given its place. Never does
Mr. Myrivillis question the visions and
superstitions which he attributes to the
simple folk who populate his book, just
as they do not question their poverty
or the intransigence of their circum-
stances. The result is a group of char-
acters of great vigor with whom the
author seems passionately concerned
and through whom he is able to touch
us quite often with incidents of great
poignancy.

NEVERTHELESS, The Mermaid Ma-
donna will probably have. the effect of
a kind of fairy story upon eyen its most
interested American readers. That is
because there are so few moments of
identification along the way. In no
vital sense does the experience of these
homeless, dispersed Anatolian » Greeks
seem analogous to. the -experiences of
people in twentieth-century America or,
for that matter, in most other parts of
Western Europe. Ours. is. an age of so-
cial .mobility. This story is about the
immobility of those who have been dis-
persed,. those to. whom the idea of
change simply does not occur. More-
over, despite his use of the most com-
pelling. kinds of verisimilitude, the story,
rooted in legend, nurtured by caste and
a strict social order, seems unavoidably
charming even when tragic notes are
struck,

For, example, I don’t doubt for a
moment that in the harsh contexts of
ignorance and defeat a foundling girl
like Smaragthi might become a kind
of living legend. of chastity and hope,
nor even that her virtue might be at-
tacked by her despairing stepfather,
nor that the natural world and_ the
everyday chores of living might assume
a biblical sanctity to the ignorant and
the oppressed; however, this is not the
world which most of us are fated to
endure. So the problems of Myrivillis’
people seem as releyent as those of
Rapunzel or the Little Match Girl and
his unabashed spiritualism seems whol-
ly inapplicable and_ provincial. That
may be why The Mermaid Madonna
has acquired such critical respect from
some quarters and why it still remains
a disarming experience for this reader.
Not only does it seem well translated
and superbly written; it is also absolute-
ly relentless in evoking a scene and an
experience. Thus all the elements of
significant fiction are present except
pertinence: one finishes this work, al-
most as one might look up from a
pastoral poem, after haying marveled
over a world that can never happen

again. tl

‘4
|

ART

SCULPTURE is a displaced art. Since
the Renaissance at least, there have
been many fewer sculptors than paint-
ers, and the quality of sculpture has not
equaled that of painting. And, except
for Rodin, the best sculpture since the
" eighteenth century has been made by
” painters: Degas, Renoir, Matisse, Picas-
so and Giacometti. Nowadays the prob-
lem of exhibiting sculpture is a very
difficult one. It is hard to get space
~ enough: outdoors is usually better than
_ indoors. But even the Museum of Mod-
ern Art’s sculpture garden looks like a
_ cramped storage room; only Rodin final-
ly holds his own there.
Is sculpture an adjunct of architec-
_ ture? It certainly has been; but how can
"it be an adjunct of modern architecture,
_ which is mostly anti-art and anti-orna-
Hment? Before the Industrial Revolution
{ architecture was monumental; things
Bivere made. Art made thingishness co-
cnt, logical and objective, in a single
- building or facade, or in a larger way, in
_the baroque street or square, or the
Paris of Napoleon III. Paris has the
‘beauty of a visible humane coherence.
Buckminster Fuller once suggested that
the architecture of the future would
be invisible. In the twentieth-century
_urban environment of America the pres-
pence of the past is ghostly and the con-
“nections with the past are weak. The
coherence of New York is invisible,
poe it can be experienced.
_ The most visible urban coherence of
‘this century is the Los Angeles system
of freeways. Los Angeles or New York
4s a complex of functions. Experience
of our twentieth-century-created environ-
Ment is linear and textural: lines of
force of traffic, water, gas and electricity,
and texture that builds nothing. “Man”
is not an object to be looked at in the
round; instead he is what one is inside
of. Man is interior and subjective, and
it is unprecedented for artists to try to
express this with three-dimensional ob-

—

;| And so modern sculptors, I suppose
. influenced by their environment, often
| (do not present any image of man at all.
|| They present an image of the environ-
i//ment. The current fashion for steel as
| a material comes from the use of steel
t}"im modern construction. (It also comes
| \from the absence of craftsmen trained
a}in bronze casting.) Beside the challenge
i )Of the materials, the social challenge
«that issues from the functional instead
}of monumental character of the environ-

Fairfield Porter

ment makes man, too, a part of a
function, or at least diminishes his
scale. Consequently much sculpture, like
much painting today, resembles Chinese
painting, in which man is subordinate to
the environment; and many sculptors,
like Smith, carry the resemblance fur-
ther, by sometimes making landscape
their subject matter. What goes well
with modern architecture or, rather,
what do modern architects admit as an
adjunct, if not plants? The terrace of
the Lever Building contains, as far as
one can tell from the street below, a
wilderness of trees, a most informal
garden. Sculpture to go with such archi-
tecture would by no means have to be
a heroic version of man, not even a
sociologist’s or moralist’s version; ° but
instead some sort of undisciplined life
to set off the engineering, like autumn
weeds blooming in the cinders of a
railroad embankment.

TWO exhibitions of sculpture in Octo-
ber had a lot to do with meeting these
challenges: the show at the Castelli
Gallery, called “Art in three dimen-
sions,” and the sculpture group at the
Stable. Both exhibitions, though ar-
ranged with all the skill at the com-
mand of the galleries, were crowded
and confused. They showed the various
responses of sculptors today to their en-
vironment. Some try to represent man,
as developed from the Cubists’ view of
man, which, by the way, being geomet-
rical, can harmonize with architecture.
Such sculptures are Kohn’s Ecole Ma-
ternelle (at Castelli), a wooden “figure”
with a head stuck full of projecting
dowels, or Geist’s figure with non-
matching legs (at the Stable).

Louise Nevelson responds to these
challenges by building her own archi-
tecture. She makes a facade. This is
close to that Renaissance non-objective
architecture. that consisted of useless
facades. Her sculpture-architecture is
fantastic rather than representational.
She exhibited in both galleries and will
be showing at the Martha Jackson Gal-
lery through Nov. 21.

At the Stable, Weinrib’s tangle of
wire and bent metal on two supports,
though looked at from the outside like
any sculpture, created a thicket that the
spectator is imaginatively drawn into, as
one imaginatively enters and walks
around in a Chinese landscape painting.
Its formality is to be judged from
every direction, but as if from inside.

Tt is therefore somewhat subjective; or
perhaps one should say it is an ob-
ject that communicates physical sub-
jectivity. In both exhibitions Chamber-
lain showed jammed-up conglomerations
of brightly painted mudguards. The
color, which is easy and natural, con-
tradicts the look of ruin: the forms are
those of a junk yard, and the color
suggests acceptance: they are like row-
boats planted with flowers. In both
shows, Ortman’s neat constructions
have the brightly painted geometry of
games of chance. His moral could be
that you find your reward by follow-
ing the rules, without regard to the
outcome, as one enjoys parcheesi.

Seley’s figure at the Stable was sub-
jective in another way. A lacquered,
smoothly curved irregular piece of metal
stands erect on two angle irons; at the
top is a burnt vertical slit-mouth. It
represents the subjective experience of
the nude. Jean Follett’s cindery trays
with an arrangment of insulators have
poetic nostalgia.

At the Stable, Sugarman created vol-
ume in a sequence of heavy curves
chiseled from a long lamination of

<<é

... a call to those who believe in
the law of Leve as contrasted with
the use of violence.”’

—DON MURRAY.. . Hollywood
A Docudrama

WHICH WAY THE WIND

by Philip C. Lewis

Fri., Nov. 27—International House,
500 Riverside Drive, N.Y. cnciccsssseesees

Sat., Nov. 28—Little Theatre,
Adelphi College, Garden City, N.Y. $2.

mo.

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387

planks. Of all the exhibitors he per-
haps depends least on sentimental over-
tones.

The influence of Brancusi dominates
the diversity of Kohn, King, Malicoat
and Noguchi. Malicoat’s rock has the
Japanese appreciation of nature-for-it-
self. Noguchi’s Square Bird is one of
the few sculptures to express any sen-
suality, which is in the smoothness and
precision of the surface. The over-
whelming presence of science and tech-
nique has tended to eliminate sensual-
ity even more effectively than it was
eliminated by Victorian morality. In-
stead of the Puritanism of religion there
is the new sociological puritanism, like
that of the Communists, creating the
pressure to be contemporary; even
creating the belief that one can know

what one’s time is. It seems that many

sculptors, under the spell of the in-
visible reality of functions that dominate
our world, want to get out from under
the thingishness of their art by elevat-

ing subjectivity and evanescence. Where
the painters rebel against the nature
of their métier by opposing illusion and
favoring materiality, so the sculptors
on the contrary search for reality in
the invisible. Both painters and sculp-
tors rebel against their métier in order
to accept better their environment. Ab-
straction is the result of the attempt
to be more truly representational.

The traditional approach to sculpture
of Robert White (at the Davis Gallery )
ignored these challenges. By not trying
to represent the environment, he pro-
duces work that can stand on its own
and may assert itself in the way Rodin’s
sculpture does, in: the garden: of the
Museum of Modern Art: White makes
a slight and not too successful conces-
sion to sociology in the subject matter
of his drinkers, with their baroque rem-
iniscences: he is at his: best when
his. subject matter is the individual. His
small portrait. hina have a powerful
presence,

THEATRE

Harold Clurman |

PADDY CHAYEFSKY’S The Tenth
Man (Booth) is a curiosity, a strange
compost: it will undoubtedly fascinate
some; others may well find it indigest-
ible or offensive.

Into a makeshift orthodox synagogue
in Mineola, Long Island, one of nie
communicants brings his insane grand-
daughter, a girl of eighteen, who he
is convinced is possessed by a dybbuk.
(A dybbuk, according to the play-
script, “is a migratory soul that possesses
another human being in order to return
to heaven.”) In his youth, the grand-
father had seduced an innocent girl and
it is she who now cries out in agonized
protest, “I am the whore of Kiev” from
the mouth of the virgin who is
brought to the synagogue. Frightened,
incredulous and awed, other members
of the congregation suggest that the
dybbuk be exorcized. The exorcism takes
place. Its effect is transfiguring to a
passerby—a young lawyer with suicidal
tendencies undergoing psychoanalysis.
He is “the tenth man” (ten men con-

stitute the “quorum” required by Jew-

ish law for communal prayer). The sick
young man, who believes in nothing,

undertakes to care for and eventually |

to marry the psychopathic girl. He has
succumbed to love—the reality of which

he had hysterically denied a few hours

before—and love, as one character
i. ;

states at the final curtain, is the*same
as God. cad
Is this play a fantasy, a folk tale, a
mystic parable? No; it is a broad com-
edy—not’ through the absurdity of its
argument, but through the funniness of
its subsidiary characters: the frazzled
remnants of orthodox Jewry i in a subur-
ban American community. One is a re-
tired cloak and suiter, another a former
journalist, — still andther ‘an’ ‘atheistic
ne’er-do-well who clings to the congre-
gation for companionship and the kind
of guying disputation which is supposed
to make Jewish conversation so amusing.
In a word, the play has color—for
never have American Jews been repre-
sented as they are here. For example, an
impoverished old member of the “quo-
rum” comes in an athlete’s discarded
sweat shirt—the player’s number promi-
nent on its back—undoubtedly the “gift”
of one of the wearer’s grandsons. The
rabbi of this congregation is a harried
young man — more social settlement
worker than religious leader—trying des-
perately to raise funds for his synagogue
so that it may become something better
than a clapboard hole stuck between a
grocery and a buteher shop. The rabbi’s

telephone talk with another young rabbi.

(he tells him, “You are a truly devoted
and pious man and therefore utterly un-
suited to the rabbinate”) is one of the

_ me ” mnt hd

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an
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4 ce . ‘ 7 Ps ;

best things in the play—and central to
its serious aspect.

The writing throughout is only oc-
casionally that of a recognizable ver-
nacular such as its characters might
speak, and it is not-a translation from
the Yiddish. Mainly it is a studiously
stiff language employed either to give
these characters “dignity” or a sym-
bolic universality. On the other hand
most of them speak with an inflection
customary in American Jewish jokes.

The effect. of this mixture of ingredi-
ents—I shall not dwell on the semi-
intellectual dialogue which implies. the
author’s sympathy with the truth im-
manent in the ancient ritual and faith—
is both meretricious and real. The char-
acters are either synthetic or mere cari-
catural traits; the gags sometime. have
genuine savor but they. are more often
facile. We get the impression of an ex-
tremely sire showmanship ringing all
the changes on the. susceptibilities of an
audience. in which nothing is stable ex-
cept a kind of foggy. benevolence and a
faintly. aching emptiness which craves
laughter to fill the void.

BUT it is from these latter character-
istics’ that the play’s reality derives.
Chayefsky is talented; his play is willy-
nilly an image of the cultural disarray
within a large section of American Jew-
ry and within the souls of the theatre
public in general which lives on several
different moral levels’ at the same time
without possessing any true base any-
where. For while the play shows signs
of ‘vague regret at the loss of tradition
and nostalgi 1a for a time when one’s
community had spiritual unity, the jazz-
comic tone of the play betrays the pre-
dominanee of the wry skepticism and
cynicism of people who have no firm
commitment to anything outside the
sphere of success.

The play therefore is not so much a
creation as a symptom. As such it is
both sweet and revolting: yet it is pref-
erable to many performances which
are mere contraptions of the entertain-
ment industry. “Better to believe in a
dybbuk,” says the play’s atheist “than
in nothing.” That might be the epigraph
for The Tenth Man.

A dimension of énnobling warmth is
given the work by ‘lyrone Guthrie's di-
rection. Its fluent movement lends the
staging naturalness together with a
beautiful but unobtrusive _ pictorial
quality—signs of true mastery. Mr.
Guthrie has been aided by David bhays’s
setting and lighting, and an admirable
cast whose every member—and particu
larly Arnold Marlé, David Vardi, ape
Ben-Ami, Lou Jacobi and Gene Saks
is wo be gratefully saluted, |

a ris

hy f

dition
one’s
» \all-
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n a ind
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I the

nuch a
hit 8
i prt
which
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ye a
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rth 5
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ands the
with d
pictoil
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\ rene

Crossword Puzzle No. 842

By FRANK W. LEWIS

ACROSS:
1 You might be rewarded at 2 to 1
by,» the favorite, but........ (332;

meu, 4, 4)

9 This cat’s really flipped about the
wood, and.acts like a sponge! (5, 2)

10 Look in‘a sort of blower, and drop,
perhaps! (7)

WW Takes the valuables out of arma-

ments. (6)

12 See 1 down

14 Angle that isn’t prepaid first, but

_ it might be a ball! (7)

15 How can some lovers bear it? (5)

17 The plot might be, whether run
- dow or not.’ (5)

19 Wind storm about little Geor ge —

_ it’s enough to make one duck! (7)
21 See 15 down

283 Candy, but not a mountain. (6)
25 Kinstein, but definitely not I, might

be strained by it.4(7)

26 Pet a couple of animals, and steer °

down by it. (7)
7 Not a process servér — but he may
have broken bars: (7,7)

DOWN:

1 and 12 across Typical of brass bands
on ihe. fingers of the unforgetful.
2 Without. strife and storm, 27 might

P direct it. (7)

he all Kipling’s pomp iia to it?

4 Where a pet sits and drinks. (4)
5 Dashing the plant into pieces? (10)
6 It smashes atoms — in the mouth,
yet! (5)
' T See 15 down
8 The botom of 5
(4)

13 Wind meters, perhaps,
Mississippi. (10)

15, 21 across, and 7 down Season be-
longing to the audience of conduct.
(8, 4,°2,3, 5,25)

16 It’s time he was skilled at measur-
ing! (9)

18 Orestes killed her mother. (7)

20 Wandering like crazy, with
change around. (7)

21 At the other end of 8.. (4)

22 Is he possessed by something?

‘Quite the opposite. (5)

24 Seems odd to find Spanish flow in

the Bronx! (4)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 8it
ACROSS: 1, 1 down, 20 across, 14 and
8 First in war, first in peace, and first
in the hearts of his countrymen; 6
Otto; 10° Ragweed; 11 Rhenish;
Tell; 13 All Hallows; 15 Norther; 16
Portico; 17 Earthen; 22 Cantatrice;
23 Slur; 25 Acanthi; 26 Long Tom;
27 Duke; 28 Usurpation. DOWN: 2
Regular; 3 Toes; 4 Nodular; 5 Air-

is broken on top.

along the

loose

12 |

ship; 7 Tripoli; 9 Cellarers; 18 Ran- .

‘sack; 19 Nordics;
, stoi; 24 Anna.

>_>

20 Fickler;.21 Tol- |

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LETTERS

More Comment on
‘The Shame of New York’

Dear Sirs: “The Shame of New York”

is timely and constructive, and I hope

it is receiving the wide attention it de-
serves.

Joun H. Ray, M. C.

(15th District, New York)

DG.

Washington,

Dear Sirs: T have read with care “The
Shame of New York.” The article is an
extremely valuable addition to the grow-
ing list of analyses of the colossal prob-
lems facing New Yorkers. It is good re-
porting and courageous reporting. It
should also do much to point out to the
citizens of New York City the impor-
tance of fusion in 196].

I was particularly interested in the
facts on Title I which, of course, is a
subject in which there is a substantial
federal interest.

Joun V. Linpsay, M.C.
(17th District, New York)
Washington, D.C.

Dear Sirs: Having read Mr. Norman
Redlich’s letter on “The Shame of New
York” in your November 21 issue, I am
moved to write in hope that I can do
just a little to break or brake the wor-
ship of Robert Moses. I am sick to the
point of throwing up every time I hear
someone talk about what Moses has
done for our city. Has no one ever
thought of what he has done to our
city?

To illustrate what | am talking about, |

Jet’s forget Jitle I. Just go look at Un-
ion Square, Bryant and Battery parks.
Nice clean parks. Nice straight paths.
Nice clean lines of benches. Nice hex-
agonal blocks of walks. Nice fences
around the grass, and nice (under-
nourished) trees.

To hell with Moses. It is about time
he retired. He has taken all the charm
and character out of everything he has
touched. I go to a park to forget for a
few minutes that I am in a city. I don’t
enter a park so that the path will lead
me out on the other side.

Moses doesn’t give a damn about peo-
ple; he loves nice symmetrical parks
and nice housing developments without
people: just bricks, concrete and Kleenex.

Robert Witpur
New York City ; ae

Dear Sirs: Cook and Gleason are to be
congratulated. At least once in every
generation the political arteries of New

ll et | im~ »

.
ot

cee me jd .

ie e Cee : Bye

Ur ee ay ay
York become. so- cleceed? -and- encrusted
with deposits of corruption that they
threaten the existence of the city. I was
aware of the large number of cases dur-
ing the present. administration which
had brought it to public attention that
all is not well.in New York, but like
many others, | have thought the Mayor
would act to correct abuses as they were
disclosed. Cook and Gleason have laid
out a fine agenda for any group pre-
pared to act in the public interest, and
every student of city politics will bene-
fit by their work.

Pauv TiLverr
Political Science Dept.
Rutgers Universi
g
New Brunswick, -N. J.

Supporting Civil Liberties

Dear Sus: The Bill of Rights Fund,
which. marked its fifth anniversary early
this month, has already made grants
totaling more than $100,000 to approx-
imately 150 individuals. defending their
civil liberties in the courts. The grants
cover practically the whole scope of
civil liberties, including cases arising
under the First Amendment, the Fifth
Amendment, the Smith Act, state sedi-
tion laws, the McCarran-Walter Act, the
right to travel, and the principles of
academic and religious freedom.

Dr. Corliss Lamont, chairman, points
out that “the fund is the only organiza-
tion in the United States whose sole
function is to raise and dispense money
on behalf of individuals and organiza-
tions fighting for the freedoms guaran-
teed under the Constitution. In spite
of some improvement over the past few
years, the struggle to protect our pre-
cious Bill, of Rights remains critical.”

Contributions to the fund should be
sent. to Dr. Lamont at 450 Riverside
Drive, New: York 27, N.Y. Those who
give $100 or more. will ‘be Sustaining
Contributors; $25 or more, Supporting
Contributors; $1 or more, Associate Con-
tributors,

(Mrs.)) ELEANOR Prev
Secretary, Bill of Rights Fund
New York City

Drama for Peace

Dear Sirs; Knowing that your readers
are especially concerned about finding
alternatives to violence as a means ol
solving the world’s problems, I feel that
those living in the New York City area

would like to know that ae American

Friends Service Commit
a “DocuDrama” called
Wind. Peon Tyn

is sponsoring

othe N fp

Lorber ave said of the atilege implicit
in this presentation:. “Nobody who is
seriously concerned about the future of
our troubled planet can afford to miss
te

The drama, in the style of the “living
newspaper,” will be presented at. Inter-
national House on Riverside Drive,
Manhattan, on Friday, Nov. 27; at Gar-
den City, L.L, on Saturday, Nov. 28;
and in Ridgewood, N.J., on Sunday, Nov.
29. Three artists from Actors Equity ap-
pear in the show, and the narration is
by Albert Bigelow, the, stalwart soul who
twice tried to enter the Pacific H-bomb
zone in his ship, the Golden Rule.

For further information, contact Amer-
ican Friends Service Committee, at 237
Third Avenue, in New York City.

Ropert GILMORE
ew York City

In This Issue

EDITORIALS |
389 @

ARTICLES

391 @ Tough Talk Enrages the Union:
Big Steel’s Blunder

by B. J. WIDICK

395 @ Campus Rebels Find a Cause
by ALLAN BRICK

397 @ Our Ephemeral Civilization
by DAVID CORT

399 @ Pesticides: The Real Peril
by ROBERT L. RUDD

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

402 @ The Vanishing Rainbow

by TIORACE GREGORY
403 @ McKinley Gave the Orders

by WALTER LaPEBER
404 @ American Dreamer

by KENNETH REXROTH
405 @ Second Impressions

by ROBHRT M. WALLACE
406 @ Art

by FAIRFIDLD PORTER
407 @ Films

by ROBBERY WATCH

Crossword Puggle sep 408)
by FRANK W

nein aie aa

George G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, Wditor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Heitor
Robert Hatch, Books and the Art

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Manrice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Musie

Alexander Werth, Wuropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Nov, 28, 1959. Val, 180, No, 18

The Nation, published weekly (except for omis~
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1959, to the U.S.A. by
the Nation Associates, Ine,, ‘ts Sixth Avenue
New York 14, N. ¥. Second clays postage pald
at New York, N, ¥.

sara Sarees

« on 4 > i

eee $8, Two
onal postage ,

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.
_
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‘

WEW YORK, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER: 28, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 18

unt
os
re of

Charm School

(ORE 4
of Presi-

Discussing the “swing around the’ circle”
ential aspirants, Arthur Krock recalls the national tour
a politician who already was President: the unfortu-
nate Andrew Johnson. Seeking popular support for a
‘elatively conciliatory policy toward the defeated South,
ohnson found himself violently assaulted by the mil-
ant Republicans who planted “brutal hecklers” in his
udiences, launched a whispering campaign which por-
trayed him ‘as a chronic drunkard, and finally got him
impeached. Lincoln, of course, fared no better while he
as alive. No one will want to bring back those days of
“habitual political scurrility and slander, but the sweet-
| | ness and light which bathes Messrs. Kennedy, Hum-
“phrey, Symington, Johnson, Rockefeller and Nixon is
“scarcely more in the country’s interest. Politics is a
“serious business, and a little acrimony is not only
atural but necessary; with all this good fellowship, the
issues are practically ignored while the candidates ex-
nibit their bewitching personalities and polished man-
“ners i in public. This puts the whole democratic process
in question. One would think the United States was a
é “Nation without troubles-and without problems. Actually
‘it is a country subsisting on an armament economy,
with all its international and economic perils, a country
unprepared for the coming inroads of automation on
employment (of which the steel strike is only a pre-
“monitory symptom), a country in which the railroad
‘system is falling apart, in which the output of teachers
and physicians is grossly inadequate, and a country
ich, having turned its back on the sterilities of the
Dulles foreign policy, has scarcely made a beginning in
F formulation of a new one.
_ The tide of events runs swiftly and none of these
problems can be long postponed. True, Mr. Humphrey
“does try to deal seriously with serious issues, but with
7 such caution and lack of color that he fails to get the
a attention his ideas deserve. But on the whole, no one
has said a harsh word for months, and when issues are
mentioned at all they are usually straddled. Mr. Rock-
efeller once suggested vaguely that we might have

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NATION

EDITORIALS

to change our China policy sometime, but this year he
defends the implacable Dulles-Eisenhower stand for
non-recognition. He admits that “the revolution of our
times would persist even if communism were to die,”
but, next to Senator Symington, he is the most warlike
of the candidates—in a well-bred way, of course. All the
candidates rely on personal charm and political caution,
when what the country needs are some hard thinking,
a willingness to face unpleasant facts, and a few verbal
brickbats now and then.

Technological Disarmament

The able military analyst of the St. Louis Post-Dis-
patch, Brig. Gen. Thomas R. Phillips, U.S.A (Ret.),
gives an example of the “ballooning cost” of new
weapons. The weapon he cites is the bomber, which
happily combines inflation with obsolescence. The B-52
costs about $8 million-each, The faster B-58 costs about
$15 million apiece. The still faster — 2,000 miles per
hour, it is hoped — B-70 will cost $50-60 million apiece
when it is ready to fly three or four years hence. With
the Soviets manufacturing ICBMs en masse, the B-70
(even if it comes up to expectations) is a gigantic boon-
doggle for the benefit of the aviation industry and the
bomber-minded air generals who won their ribbons and
grades in the war which ended fifteen years ago.

Yet this cloud has its silver lining. With military in-
flation galloping along at this pace, something has to
give, and it 1s becoming clear where the soft spot is.
The President and his fiscal advisers insist on holding
down the military budget to around $41 billion. With
three hungry services, each fighting for its share, this
isn’t enough today and will be still more inadequate
tomorrow. The dollar drain is becoming serious; our
military-assistance program abroad is being carefully
scrutinized on a “Buy American” basis. Add to these
two factors a third: the Army, weakest of the three
services from a political standpoint, is spending a great
deal of money for its troops abroad and their dependents.
There has been recurrent talk of pulling back one or
two divisions, The screams of Dr. Adenauer and the

>>" Fria

NATO allies have so far been effective, but there is
every indication that a change is in prospect.

How tough things are is shown by the fact that even
the Air Force will have to pull in its belt. Gen. Thomas
D. White, the Air Force chief of staff, told the NATO
Parliamentarians Conference that the build-up of the
U.S. long-range missile inventory will have “significant
impact” on manned aircraft forces and specifically on
location of combat forces. The United States is devel-
oping weapons, said General White, which “more and
more are compressing time, distance and destruction in-
to relatively compact and readily directed packages.”
In other words, we can dismantle some of our manned
aircraft based abroad. Thus Mr. Khrushchev and Gen-
eral White are in partial agreement. Mr. Khrushchev
would have us give up all our bases in Europe; Gen-
eral White is foreshadowing the elimination of those
which advancing technology has rendered dispensable.
Evolving technology enforces a limited disarmament
which is balanced by the greater destructiveness of the
surviving weapons. If discernment and reason can
progress only half as fast as military technology, general
instead of selective disarmament will have a chance.

The Resurgence of West Germany

As the emphasis of American militarism shifts, the
balance of power in Europe shifts also, in a direction
favorable to our German ally. Dr. Adenauer may
clamor when a withdrawal of American divisions is
mentioned, but he will also see advantages to Germany
in such a reduction. Sometime in 1960, West Germany
will have fifteen Bundeswehr divisions in being, and
these will constitute the core of NATO ground strength.
Dr. Adenauer’s Defense Minister, Franz Josef Strauss,
remarked in a speech to senior Bundeswehr officers
that the West German army is destined to play an in-
creasingly important political role in NATO. No realist
will deny it.

German strength and influence are increasing in an-
other direction as well. Research is the handmaiden of
military technology, and the Germans excel in research.
After all, who evolved the guided missile, who supplied
a large part of the brains of the American missile center
at Huntsville, Alabama? Why should Dr. Werner von
Braun and his colleagues work in an alien environment
for people who, they have indicated more than once,
are not fully appreciative of their efforts? There may
be a migration in reverse one of these days. In the
name of containing communism, a Germany which was
Fascist not so long ago, and could be again, is steadily
acquiring the means of imposing its will on Europe.
If it is to be stopped, it will have to be within the
next year or so; in five years it will be too late. The
German military machine gathers momentum fast and

: for it, happy days are here agen

‘ en ad rn.

SS ee

; 4 : tf h i ro
1) deny pare it ae . : et
a6

te / ome
Provocation in Poplarville

At least the Mississippi grand jury which refused to

indict in the Mack Parker lynching case cannot be ac-

cused of hypocrisy. Disdaining the usual Deep South
procedures in such cases — an indictment followed by
a farce in the guise of a trial followed by an acquittal
— these jurors refused not only to indict, but even to

call witnesses or to hear testimony gathered by the

FBI. No doubt this species of arrogance sat well in
the shady corners of Poplarville, and in other dark
recesses of the unregenerate South, but it also con-
stituted a provocation to the forces of law and order
in this country which could not be overlooked. The

Department of Justice, which had originally stayed out

of the case in tender regard for states’ rights, is now
back into it again: FBI agents and the evidence they
have collected will have their day before a federal
grand jury, and whether or not Mack Parker’s murder
is avenged, at least the evidence against his murderers
will be spread upon the record. Furthermore, Attorney
General William P. Rogers, incensed at what he termed
the “travesty on justice” which occurred in Poplarville,
has announced that he is considering recommendation
to Congress of a new criminal statute that would per-
mit the federal government to move in “more strongly”
when states refuse to act on crimes in which a racial
element is involved.

It would appear that the Mississippi grand jurors
have done more damage to the segregationist cause
than anything since Governor Faubus’ Guardsmen
leveled bayonets at a handful of Negro children in front
of Central High School.

Speeding Up the Geological Clock

Poplarville is not the only battleground which the
Confederacy has lost in recent weeks. In Memphis,
Tennessee, the Department of Justice has asked a fed-

eral court to declare illegal, and to forbid repetition, of

an “all-white” primary held in nearby Fayette County
last August. This is the fourth suit the department has
filed under the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which empowered
the federal government to initiate suits to enforce vot-
ing rights denied because of race.

A government victory on this field, of course, would
very nearly mean the end of the war for the Deep
South. For without a “white” primary and a “white”

election, the White Supremacists would lose the one_

supremacy which they cannot afford to lose — that at
the ballot box. Robin M. Williams, chairman of the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Cornell
University, recently commented that ‘ ‘integration is

proceeding with the deliberate speed of a geological |

process,” Thanks to Poplarville, and perhaps also to
. ae of an election year, me seem to be
eed “q p. Th 7 a ee ;

‘|
F

| The Paper Curtain

Add another curtain to the iron and bamboo varie-

x. | § ties: the paper curtain that has been lowered in this
th }) country against any plain speech or clear. thinking on
by jthe subject of Soviet-American trade. For example,
wl | | the press largely ignored the recent conference on “The

Terms and Procedures of East-West Trade” called by
the American Management Association (held in New
York, November 12-13). Of special interest was the
‘blunt speech of Stefan Jean Rundt, of S. J. Rundt &

m- | Associates, who served for some years as an Intelligence
tt | officer.

he t Mr. Rundt’s major argument was that while we con-
m "tinue to talk in “hushed voices” about Soviet-American
m | trade, our closest allies are walking off with the first fat
ry trade prizes. And these allies, not the Soviets, are our
nl | keenest commercial competitors on world markets. By
| ‘the end of 1959, West Germany will have sold to the
mm | Sino-Soviet bloc goods valued in excess of $900 million
| per annum, These goods include such truly soft items
a | aS hrassicres, as well as. seamless pipe up to forty-inch
le, | diameter (which. Pittsburgh steelmakers were not per-
in | mitted-to ship). “In fact,” to quote Mr, Rundt, “while
a“ | we were sweating out the last Berlin crisis in Geneva,
y’ | West Germany granted East Germany a 21 million

mark trade credit — although Bonn does not. recognize
Pankow: diplomatically. At the same time, West Berlin
os | banks were advertising for Red .China- business.”
ise
jen

TOUGH TALK ENRAGES THE UNION

BIG STEEL’S BLUNDER .. oy. 4. wiaict

Not that American businessmen: fail to see the op-
portunities; many of them are exploiting these op-
portunities with great skill and diligence through foreign
subsidiaries in Europe and Japan, while their less-
favored domestic rivals — those without subsidiaries —
are handcuffed by the pretense that a boycott on East-
West trade is still in effect. To be sure, there are dif-
ficulties in Soviet-American trade; Harold Berman, one
of the participants at the conference, outlined them in
much the same terms he used in a recent article in The
Nation (“The Dilemma of Soviet Trade,” October 24,
1959).

But the difficulties are not nearly as formidable
as they have been made to appear. For example, Harvey
Williams, president of Philco International Corporation,
quoting from a Reuter’s dispatch, called attention to
the fact that Moscow is getting all the credit it wants
in Europe and that its credit standing with European
insurance companies is particularly high. Democratic
and Republican Presidential hopefuls should ponder
Mr. Williams’ remark: “To any executive interested in
expanding overseas sales — and who isn’t? — these
are fundamental points.” And so they are. Despite the
paper curtain, these same points will soon gain the
same wide attention in Midwest and East Coast busi-
ness circles that they have been receiving on the West
Coast. in increasing measure for the last three or four
vears. The ice that has blocked East-West trade is be-
ginning to break up.

ress which has taken. place in_ this

Added to the physical changes
are, the higher standards and in-
creased facilities of the University
of: Pittsburgh and Carnegie Tech,
along with a great expansion of cul-
tural ‘activities (for example, spon-
sorship by the Steelworkers Union
ot symphony concerts), all of which

the
hs,
ede Pittsburgh
| | NOTHING quite prepares the visitor Ruhr of America.
ty | for the surprises that confront him in
ks | Pittsburgh, the center of the steel
oi | industry. In the popular mind, this
ot | Slty 1s a factory town — a phantas-
_magoria of coal and iron, dirt and
, smoke and tall chimneys. But the
a ‘changes that have taken place here
" since World War If are almost in-
tf | credible. Dozens of new skyscrapers,

lends weight to the claim that the
city is truly in a period of renais-

me } expressways and parkways, new
st} bridges spanning the Monongahela — sance.
the | and Allegheny rivers — all are sym-

| bols of the undeniable material prog-

B. J. WIDICK, who has written ex-
tensively on labor problems, is co-
author, with Irving Howe, of The

U.AW. and Walter Reuther.

Pittsburgh also gained fame for a
new kind of labor-management rela-
tionship reflected in the fact that
for years management and the Steel-
workers spoke only of their mutual
“trusteeship” over the steel industry.
But the 116-day steel strike, now

suspended by President Eisenhower
under the injunction-provisions of
the Taft-Hartley law, has shattered
the concept of friendly coexistence
between Big Steel and the union and
refocuses the image of renascent
Pittsburgh in a less optimistic light.
Why did the steel strike occur?
What are the implications of this
labor conflict, which everyone agrees
is the most significant since the for-
mation of the CLO and the sitdown
strikes of the thirties? I sought an-
swers to these and other questions
from knowledgeable union people
and from specialists in the universi-
ties who have been observing the
stecl industry for many years.
The difficulty of getting an ac-
curate picture of what has been go-

391

I Ee oT ae
i

aed
ed
a

ing on js illustrated by two items
that appeared in the local press the
day I arrived here. One item said:
“United Steelworkers Local 1779
will distribute union-purchased food
tomorrow to employees of Pittsburgh
Forgings Company from 10 A.M.
to 2 P.M. at the Sons of Italy Hall
at Coraopolis.” This evoked a pic-
ture of tired, discouraged and em-
bittered Steelworkers near the end
of their rope at the conclusion of
116 payless days. But the afternoon
papers carried a story which said:
“Pittsburgh district Steelworkers,
displaying a remarkable attitude, are
swamping the Allegheny County
Board of Assistance with requests to
cancel applications for state finan-
cial assistance.”

Only after one talks to the Steel-
workers, and senses their pride and
determination, can one begin to un-
derstand the contradiction suggested
by the two news items. What is new
and different in this steel crisis, and
what has been largely overlooked by
journalists, is that R. Conrad Cooper,
the top negotiator for the steel in-
dustry, and President Eisenhower did
something for the Steelworkers Un-
ion which its president, David J.
McDonald, and his cohorts were
never able to do — that is, to trans-
form a confused, anxiety-ridden un-
ion, in which there existed a gap
between the ranks and its leaders,
into a solid force of unionism. That
this should happen reveals the gross
miscalculation of the steel-industry
strategists; and there is evidence,
now that the plants are operating
again under injunction, that they are
giving some second thoughts to their
whole strategy.

Talking to plant-level unionists a
few days after they returned to
work, I was unable to detect any
defeatism or any worry over the
ultimate outcome of the steel crisis.
I was told again and again of the
random, unrehearsed interviews
which a local TV commentator held
with Steelworkers returning to their
jobs. The attitude of the Steelwork-
ers was expressed repeatedly in this’
fashion: “We know we just about
had the companies licked, and that
is why they got Bisenhowek to put
in the injunction, We will work, but
we will be ready to go out again

rf eee) Poe. ys a Gi

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eighty days from now unless we gee
a good contract.’

Last April, when the preliminary
steel negotiations began, management
offered the Steelworkers an extension
of the existing contract for one year.
The union, in turn, threw into the
hopper a whole series of demands;
and union officials, as well as the
rank and file, were confident that a

‘compromise — normal in collective

bargaining — would be worked out.
The union never expected it would
have to strike, and it was almost
totally unprepared psychologically
when the industry negotiators, hard-
ening their stand, advanced more
and more counterproposals which
would actually have turned the clock
back for the union had they been
accepted.

THAT IS why the first month of the
strike was marked by hesitation and
confusion on the union side of the
bargaining table, and even more so
among the ranks. Unionists admit
privately that at that stage the
Steelworkers Union was in a very
precarious position. Two factors,
however, served to solidify the work-
ers and to revive their flagging
spirits. The first was the revelation
of the impersonal, almost cold-blood-
ed, attitude of the top negotiator for
the industry, R. Conrad Cooper. At
one point during the summer nego-
tiations, President McDonald of the
Steelworkers suggested at the begin-
ning of a session that they talk about
pensions, whereupon Cooper replied,
“Let’s talk about potatoes.” Pen-
sions mean a great deal to produc-
tion workers whose average age, in
1957, was forty-two, especially as
more than half of these workers
have more than ten years of service
with the same company. When the
story of this incident permeated to
the ranks, there was a_ noticeable
stiffening of attitudes among the
strikers.

At another bargaining — session,
Cooper began the company state-
ment with the blunt remark, “Unless
you change your attitude, Dave, we
are going to destroy you.” McDonald
replied heatedly for an hour and a
half — in language quite unlike that
which he uses on TV. The session

ended on that angry note. The next

res

. ae pista i

re Tey yet ay rast eae

| Coane told McDonald, “Dave, *

we are shocked by some of the things
you said to us yesterday.” Mc-
Donald replied, “You’re shocked?
How do you think we felt?” Where-
upon Cooper explained, “Dave, I
wasn’t talking about destroying you
personally. I was talking about de-
stroying the union.” Could Cooper
have been so obtuse as not to realize
how the union would react to such
a statement? Yet he, made it, and
in the making he shocked the Steel-
workers into the belief that man-
agement was out to destroy the un-
ion. The fight had now become a
matter of attitudes, an issue — for
the union — of survival.

The second factor which solidified
the union was the obduracy of man-
agement in their demand that work
rules be changed. At all levels of the
union, I was told quite candidly “Of
course, this is what saved us. The
men in the shop might be confused
on the problem of inflation and costs,
and they couldn’t get too excited
about this or that fringe benefit, but
when the companies talked about
taking away work practices which
had been agreed to and negotiated
over the years, this was something
that even a man who had never been
in the union hall for twenty years
could understand. This is what uni-
fied our ranks.”

I CHECKED this viewpoint with
other important sources, including
Don G. Rarick, the leader of the
rank-and-file dues rebellion, who
got an astonishingly large vote when
he ran against McDonald for the
presidency two years ago. Rarick not
only confirmed the importance of the
work-rule issue but, interestingly
enough, in my ninety-minute talk
with him, he uttered not one word
of criticism of his erstwhile oppo-
nent, McDonald, It should be re-
called that only a year ago, McDon-
ald was threatening to expel Rarick,
and other leaders of the opposition,
from the union,

Given the importance attached by
both sides to the matter of funda-
mental attitudes and the problem of

conclusion that the efforts of Joseph
F. Finnegan, Director of the Federal
Mediation and Conciliation Service, —

he , JATr ON

\ eae aw ‘
Z ig 'T ie [a -
5

would prove fruitless. 1e story is
old here that whenever a mediator
came into the negotiating room, both
sides would put on a professional air
_and repeat the kind of arguments
that everyone read ad nausewm in
| the press. As soon as the mediator
. | left, “We got back to studied insults
one B of one another.”

‘ _ IN THIS context, the invocation of
of the Taft-Hartley procedures by
1. |) President Eisenhower was considered
». |) inevitable. The union hoped in vain
». |) that Dr. George W. Taylor and his
¥ special board of inquiry might be
og able to make some change in the

‘situation. The union likewise hoped
4 in vain that the Kaiser formula for
é settlement might break the log jam.
r. ‘Unquestionably the Steelworkers
he gained a tactical advantage when
i Edgar Kaiser broke the united front
1 of the steel industry and thus tacit-
? ly disproved persistent corporation
| claims that the union demands were
} too costly for management. The
'd | Kaiser settlement—it amounts to
i | 22% an hour over a two-year period,
lt} with the appointment of a joint com-
ith | mittee to study problems result-
td ‘ing from automation, technological
ing _ change and local working conditions

| _—is now considered by the union as
as | its “rock-bottom” demand.
it | The dispute on work rules was
: complicated by the fact that so lit-
_ | tle attention was paid to a ruling
ith | | at late stages of negotiation, by the
img | chief arbitrator of disputes at U.S.
the | Steel. On October 7, Sylvester Gar-

tio | rett, impartial chairman of the arbi-
hen” es board under the expired con-
tt | tract between the company and the
not "Steelworkers, made a significant de-
the | cision in which he emphasized that
ly | “the stability in local work rules
tk | often benefits steel management as
ord | well as workers.” Mr. Garrett made

yp | | his ruling 1 in passing on a series of
union grievances over cuts in man-
_ power assignments at the giant Fair-
less works in Morrisville, Pennsyl-
- yania. The arbitrator declared: “The
parties’ heavy reliance upon local
arrangements and practices over the
pears suggests that the nature of
their collective-bargaining relations
‘requires reasonable local flexibility
« ¢ with essentially local prob-
. . . It isn’t easy to deal ade-

and in detail with all e ee m

Garon py

matters in a single master agree-
ment.”

The essence of the controversial
Section 2-b of the contracts—the sec-
tion dealing with work rules—is that
management must justify rule
changes and that the union has the
right to protest via grievances any
changes they consider unwarranted.
The industry negotiators are now
demanding that the section be modi-
fied so that the union gives up the
right to apply the grievance pro-
cedure to rule changes; or, more pre-
cisely, that the union accept all
changes “in the interest of efficiency”
—the final judge of what constitutes
“efficiency” to be management itself.

It has been largely forgotten in
the pyrotechnics of public debate
that Section 2, a part of the steel
contract since 1947, was reviewed
by the Wage Stabilization Board in
1952, which found no evidence that
the clause was a block to the pro-
motion of efficiency by management,
a claim which management is now
advancing.

If the steel industry remains rigid
in demanding changes in the work
rules—and the changes are part of
management’s last offer, on which
the Steelworkers will ha

nes be

RATT
—there is no. aneetion in the minds
of union officials that no settlement
is possible. Secretary of Labor
Mitchell’s report, issued on August
15, entitled “Background Statistics
Bearing on the Steel Dispute,” gave
the Steelworkers much material for
buttressing their public case and
helped to alert their leaders and to
solidify their ranks.

The steel industry alleges, for ex-
ample, that its workers are the Se
highest paid per hour in all manu-
facturing. This the Mitchell report
verifies, but it also brings out the
fact that the basic steel industry ms
average gross pay fell from $5,350 ”
annually in the prosperous year 1957 °
to $4,840 in 1958; and, perhaps even og
more significantly, it points out that
over 40 per cent of the Steelworkers
earned less than $4,800 in 1958— i
below the minimum income set by aa
the Bureau of Labor Statistics for an
urban, four-person family.

The Mitchell report, and an in-
dependent study which has been
made of the Kefauver subcommittee
hearings on administered prices in
steel, shed some light on the compli-
cated economic factors involved. Op-
erating at 87 per cent of capacity
for the first six months of 1959, the a
steel companies’ margin of profit for

the period was so great that a 15 A
cent increase in real employment

costs, combined with a price reduc- :
tion of about $7 a ton, would still .
have left net profits after taxes at :
the level of the all-time record steel- a

profit year of 1957. Surely the na-
tion as a whole is entitled to learn
whether this conclusion would stand
up under the close scrutiny of a fact-
finding board.

THERE IS another area in which

steel-industry officials are now taking

a second look at their earlier plans. —
This concerns their “crusade against
inflation” and its relation to the
“escalator” clause of the Steele x
ers’ contract, under which workers
are entitled to wage increases ‘to.
make up for changes in the cost of -
living. But today, steel-industry of-
ficials may have learned that wh
the price of steel is an irape
factor in determining national p
levels, it is not exclusively or
sarily decisive. Under their he
tract, the strikers now |

job would be entitled to a 3e per
hour cost-of-living increase the first
week of January, based on a rise in
the Bureau of Labor Statistics }:ving-
cost index. At a time when no steel
was produced and no steel prices
were raised, the cost of living went

up! Here is another reason why the
Steelworkers are bound to turn down
the steel industry’s latest settlement
olfer.

When Federal District Judge Her-
bert P. Sorg issued the injunction
which sent the workers back to the
steel plants, he ruled that the ex-
pired contract should remain in ef-
fect, but held in abeyance the opera-
tion of the so-called “escalator”
clause. Whether the Steelworkers
will actually get the 3 cents an hour
due them in the first pay period of
January will be a matter of judicial
determination. If Sorg rules that the
Steelworkers should get the increase,
it will be a serious blow to the steel
industry, which is demanding the
clause be removed from any new con-
tract. The dropping of the clause
would mean, in effect, that the Steel-
workers would be asked to accept a
3-cent cut some time in January
after having received a ~3-cent in-
crease the first week. No one expects
them to do that. And that is why
the top union Jeaders are very con-
fident that in this case, as in most
cases where Taft-Hartley injunctions
have been issued, the union rank
and file will turn down the last com-
pany proposals.

AT THIS point it would seem that
any reasonable man must conclude
that both the economic and work-
rule issues are resolvable by collec-
tive bargaining, and yet develop-
ments have proved otherwise. There
is only pessimism here over the out-
come of the steel crisis, and many
strong indications that the strike will
be renewed, at the end of eighty
days, with the willing support of the
overwhelming majority of the Steel-
workers,

In the end, I foresee victory for
neither the union nor management,
but rather a face-saving formula
which would add up to a draw. New
pressures are arising on the national
scene which seem to make this out-
come likely.

A few days ago, Secretary Mitchell

394

‘ Saou fh \ Ske

4 Ss
7 Oe ttl ls

accused both management and labor
of indulging in an orgy of name-
calling. “The class war is over,” he
said, “but too often the rhetoric
lingers on.” In the steel dispute, both
sides took their rhetoric seriously,
and this is not the least of the prob-
lems involved in reaching «a settle-
ment. In addition, the use of the
Taft-Hartley mjunction has aroused
large sections of the labor movement,
including the rank and file. At the
recent Industrial Union Department
Conference of the AFL-CIO, labor
leaders like Emil Mazey and Walter
Reuther of the United Auto Work-
ers harshly attacked the Eisenhower
Administration and steel manage-
ment. The relative complacency
shown by the AFL-CIO at its an-
nual convention has been replaced
by a genuine concern by all labor
leaders over the outcome of the de-
cisive steel struggle. The word “in-
junction” is a dirty word in the labor
movement and its use can arouse
passions far greater even than those
aroused by the Landrum-Griffin bill.
Labor leaders privately feel that on
this issue they can ignite the union
rank and file as they were never able
to do on the labor bill, but as they
could and did do to defeat right-to-
work laws in six important industrial
states.

WITHIN a month, the country faces
a maritime strike, while—most im-
portant of all—the railroad brother-
hoods and the big carriers seem to
be racing at express speed toward a
strike showdown by February. This
will involve a million railroad work-
ers and another basic industry. Steam
is building up within the labor move-
ment to a point reminiscent of the
violent 1930s.

There is much talk about the pres-
sure the Administration is going to
put on both sides, and particularly
on the labor movement, for settling
the steel conflict without another
walkout. But what is often overlook-
ed is that, with a Presidential elec-
tion year coming up, there is increas-
ing pressure on the Administration
not to present the Republican Party
to the American public as an out-
right advocate of Buia This
is a charge the late ee we
making with ‘ral

and e eco ae i

Moh members. It is. significant that
a man as loquacious on all questions
as Richard Nixon has found it ex-
pedient to remain silent on the steel
crisis.

George Meany’s recent letter to
the President, suggesting a top labor-
management meeting to calm down
icreasing class tensions, reflects the
enormous political and economic
pressures which are building: up. in
this country.

ALTHOUGH there has been much
speculation in newspapers about
what Congress will do if there is
another steel strike—including sug-
gestions for compulsory arbitration,
an increase of Presidential powers in.
labor disputes and other gimmicks
—many observers forget that Sena-
tors and Congressmen may well pre-
fer to avoid this hot potato in an
election year. It is quite often: over-
looked that the Landrum-Griffin
bill was largely sold to the American
public as a means of “protecting”
the ordinary working man from ex-
ploitation by his “labor bosses.” It
would be quite another matter to
win public support for any measure
that smacks of “strikebreaking,” or
which would weaken Jabor’s power
to protect the working man where -
he needs it most—in the plant where
he spends most of his working hours.

Moreover, it is traditional with the
steel industry to oppose “third party”
intervention or settlements imposed
from without, especially since the in-
dustry has made a fetish of so-called
“management prerogatives.” Legis-
lation changing the character of free
collective bargaining which would
establish government as the deciding
force in labor disputes would scarce-
ly be welcomed by the steel barons.

Time and time again, in conversa-
tions with labor-relations experts,
union leaders, political scentists, I
asked: “What will be the outcome
of the steel crisis?” Not one even at-
tempted to answer. “We don’t know,”
was the only reply I got. “You tell

’ The truth is that the crisis in
labor relations in this country has
turned into a political crisis whose
ramifications and implications will
unfold in 1960 with far greater
stresses and strains on our society
than anyone could have foreseen a
year AED. — ™

coath i or .
? ey
oy, ;

|
*n \ alee 9 oe , a

Hanover, N. H.
“THE STUDENT is ready to be
challenged,” concluded Edward D.
Eddy, Jr., in his discussion of the
“tension” which exists beneath the
“apathy” of today’s college student
(“Tension Beneath Apathy,” The
_ Nation, May 16, 1959). But the
question remains: challenged with
what?

A few weeks ago, Frederick L’
_ Moore, Jr., a University of California
_ freshman, went on a hunger strike
to protest against compulsory ROTC
_ on the campus. His stand was sup-,
_ ported by a petition signed by more/
_ than a thousand fellow students.

On October 30, a student-conduct-
ed poll at a sister university, the
_ University of California at Los An-

- geles, revealed a similar tremendous

_ opposition to compulsory ROTC;_70

_ per cent of 1,189 students polled de-

Mttanded that ir be-aholshed— [For a

general critique of ROTC as presently

administered, see “ROTC: Failure of
_a Mission,” by Gene M. Lyons, The
_ Nation, Oct. 24.|
| Barly this month, upperclassmen
at Norwich ‘University in Vermont,
the country’s oldest private military
college, protested in various ways
against general “militarism” on the

_ campus and against alleged “gagging”
of faculty members and censorship
_ of the student newspaper.

The very month, last spring, when

The Nation published the views of
_ Dr. Eddy and others on the problem
_ of campus apathy, a group of Dart-
- mouth College students were bring-
“ing to a climax a term-long contro-

versy about pacifist approaches to

_ world conflicts and the problem of

B ititary conscription. Such an out-

_ break seemed particularly strange in

APOIO PL

rts,

" _a college which long had been un-
¢ | able to sustain any undergraduate
| Organization devoted to political or
n° social action—not even an active
wl | Young Republican Club, much less
| a chapter of A.D.A.

November 28, 1959

the college “green.” The plan was
carried out despite (possibly because
of) efforts by a few faculty members
to divert the enthusiasts, news that
local police had been alerted and the
Navy drill team deputized to arrest
demonstrators, and rumors that an
ROTC officer had ordered his cadets
to march over any obstructionists.

The protest was executed with dig-
nity by two dozen nervous but eager
pickets who, holding their signs high
for news photographers, sat quietly
beside the temporary parade ground.

Two days after the demonstration,
pacifist A. J. Muste addressed a
meeting sponsored by the Dartmouth
Human Rights Society, a new stu-
dent-faculty organization devoted to
civil liberties and anti-militarism, to
which most of the student protesters
belonged. Three hundred students
heard Muste speak about the ineffec-
tiveness and immorality of the na-
tion’s policy of nuclear deterrents.
The normal tension of the issue was
heightened by the presence in the
hall of a band of ROTC cadets who,
having begun with heckling in re-
taliation for the demonstration
against their parade, stayed to par-
ticipate in the discussion following
the speech. Two hours after the for-
mal program had ended, some sixty
students still remained—in the hall
and outside on steps and sidewalk—
carrying on the debate in small
groups.

PROT ESTS similar_to that.at-Dart-

mouth are lancing through many of
the nation’s campuses. There is in
no sense a mass movement; the nor-
mal student is solidly unconcerned
with the awakening few. But campus
intellectuals are involved, and nat-
ural stu student _activists,. Wesnacaie in
the_opinion vacuums.of today’s cam-

puses, are looking to the anti-war

movement t_as the “only thing ‘ going
_on.’

Last spring a “Student Peace Cen-
ter” at the University of Wisconsin
completed its year’s activities by
holding an “Anti-Military Ball” the
night after the campus’ annual Mili-
tary Ball. Attended by some two
hundred students, the ball was titled

CAMPUS REBELS FIND A CAUSE ee by Allan Brick

“The Street Where You Lived, or
Dig You Later, Atom Crater,” and
included a skit, “To Boom or Not to
Boom: Hamlet in the Twentieth
Century.” Also at Wisconsin, this
year saw intense student agitation
for the elimination of compulsory
ROTC. Students—largely non-paci-
fists who had had ROTC—testified
before both houses of the Wisconsin
state legislature, receiving favorable
hearings from the Democrat-domi-
nated Assembly and rude treatment
from the Senate. (The latter body
probably will stop a bill which, back-
ed by the student senate, would
make military training voluntary on
the university campus.) Nor is the
Wisconsin faculty lethargic. Several
faculty members, at present failing
in efforts to have the university in-
troduce a regular course of instruc-
tion in non-violent approaches to in-
ternational problems, were planning
to offer their own course in non-
violence at a student religious center
this fall.

In the Midwest, the Student Peace
Union, which includes student paci-
fist leaders from fourteen campuses,
co-ordinates. anti-war activities.
Sparked by Ken Calkins, young
peace secretary of the Friends Service
Committee in Chicago, the S.P.U.
members devote themselves to ener-
getic outdoor soapboxing on urban
campuses. The most successful ac-
tions have occurred at Northwestern
University, where, despite the inter-
vention of Evanston police, pacifist
speakers have attracted tolerant au-
diences ranging between fifty and
one hundred ‘students for the two-
and-one-half-hour sessions of oratory
and circularizing. An audience com-
ment at Northwestern: “This is a
great idea; it’s the first exciting thing
that’s happened on this campus in
years. | wonder how long they’ll let
you get away with it.”

In Northern California, a student
pacifist movement is taking form
under the leadership of Robert
Pickus, formerly of the Friends Ser-
vice Committee and now director of
Acts for Peace. Begun a year ago in
the wake of West Coast excitement
following the attempt of the Golden

395

}
'
f.

ayes ee a a es an

‘ 4 A . AP

Rule to enter the H-test area, Acts
for Peace this year devoted itself to
week-long projects on seven major
campuses. Outdoor forums, evening
discussion groups and_ student-fac-
utly opinion polls focused on the
question “Should students challenge
or support our country’s military re-
sponse to the problem posed by Com-
munist totalitarianism?” The activi-
ties received full coverage by campus
newspapers.

A large part of the success of the'
California efforts resulted from fear-
less participation in the forums by
faculty members with vigorously. di-
verse views on militarism. Thé par-
ticipation of t ers—many of them
young and without tenure—cut into
the widespread student belief that
roads- to ‘business and_professional
life are closed to anyone who speaks
out _or belongs to unusual _ organiza-
tions. The student newspaper—of
Chico State College followed a col-
umn of quotations from faculty
speakers at an Acts for Peace forum
with a comment on student response:

Those instructors who have said
that the present students are not
living up to the student tradition of
being the radical and outspoken group
in society should be encouraged by
the response to the forum. Approxi-
mately 450 students responded by
stopping for periods ranging from two
minutes to two and a half hours to
listen to the discussion. .. .

[The speakers] agreed on only one
thing, that there is too much empha-
sis being placed on the military in
our foreign policy. Whether or not
one agrees with this view, he must
concede that these “podium pound-
ers,” as they have been called, are
breaking the wall of silence that has
caused today’s students to be called
the “silent generation.”

ON CAMPUSES today, the few non-
conformists are surprised and the
large majority of conformists are be-
coming rather shocked to discover
that an issue and opportunities for
action are at hand. Judging from
these responses, one might conclude
that the problem of student apathy
exists largely because the student’s

mind has been insulated eis

central question of modern life:
What is the responsibility of the
moral individual in the face of the
immoral and de-individualizing de-

396 4

mands of modem nations: preparing

for war?

Considering thié question in re-
ligious terms, Norman Cousins has
written: “Would the great religious
leaders have preferred to die them-
selves rather than sanction the use
of a weapon [the H-bomb] that
brought the gift of life under total
jeopardy? Specifically what would
Christ do? If this. question is irrele-
vant, then nothing in Christianity is
relevant to the human situation to-
day.” And yet do campus religious
leaders face the question or even ad-
mit its existence? Nowhere in The
Nation's report on student apathy
by Wilham Sloane Coffin, Jr., chap-
lain of Yale University, is that ques-
tion considered. The normal answer
of campus chaplains and other re-
ligious leaders, when prompted to
give platform to Cousin’s view about
the relevance of Christianity to poli-
tics, is that such a view has nothing
to do with essential religion or that
it must share emphasis with the op-
posing (militarist ); position.

THUS THE American student finds
a religion that counsels disengage-
ment in the name of other-worldism
or, while purporting to be grounded
on an Absolute, teaches a “liberal”
relativism. Theologian Karl Barth
speculates as to whether Christian
opposition to nuclear war “ought not
to concretize itself in an active re-
sistance (perhaps taking the shape
of a direct invitation to rejection of
military service)”; but the chaplain
of Yale University speaks in abstrac-
tions about the need of the “whole
man” for “commitment.” Is it any
wonder that the student cannot see
the connections between real life and
the precepts of campus preachers
and teachers—who, after all, must
live at peace with the campus mili-
tary establishments?

The student now slouched doodling
in his classroom chair will rise up
with questions only as educators—
administrators and instructors—be-
gin to admit their failure to relate
the assigned readings in Thoreau,
Emerson, Whitehead and Dewey to
his role as an individual citizen in
the outside commur ity. But, loom-
ing between the classroom ind ae
world, Selective Service ble

visions of a private career bi be ginning .
o

fab

a El

C : / . f -
= hee ‘ 0

The student’s fear of a horrific and
purposeless two years spent in a
James Jones barracks leads him to
subordinate, in his undergraduate
life, idealistic career goals to devices
for stacking the best Army deals.
Such cynical games further under-
mine his ability to connect visions

of social service and personal sacri- —

fice with actual college experiences.
And the fact that he is not encour-
aged to think for himself about the
reasons he must be trained for two
years in military service makes him
all the more indifferent to seeing
himself as a citizen. “Know thyself!”
becomes for today’s student a mean-
ingless exhortation. Passing through
a eatlege which supports ROTC as
one of the primary experiences in
student life, and which in many ways
owes its livelihood to military favor,
he is in no position objectively to
scrutinize military service as prob-
ably the chief conditioner of modern
man as social animal.

Nevertheless, after a decade of the
campus cadet or the future Pfe. as
the only possible images for Ameri-
can youth, young individualists ap-
pear. Tearing at the insulation, they
are beginning to think for themselves
about whether or not there is any
direct military necessity for Selective
Service, about whether or not that
system is democratic or preferential
according to economic class, and
about whether or not military ap-
proaches and solutions are always
beneficial for the nation and for the
world.

ON MOST campuses one can hear
discussion—can even attend colloquia
—about student apathy and the ab-
sence of moral values from student
minds. The discussions exist in ab-
stracto. They result not in any up-
surge of social awareness among stu-
dents, but rather in a temporary
interest for analyzing student apathy.
Seldom does this buoyant new in-
terest come down to precise issues.
Sometimes touching on race relations
and sometimes even on problems re-
sulting from the fraternity system,
the colloquists hardly ever deal with
the root cause of student apathy:

_institutionalized neglect of the con-
‘flict between the private person and |

the social group; or, to be COnGhAt

Shs \
oe Zane 1 #; ei Th N TION
gavin lll vO am

at a foreseeable date—graduation.

cal
id

ent

ary

the conflict between the moral in-

dividual and the military state. If,
as C. Wright Mills has said, profes-
sional clergymen largely have be-
come chaplains who ease the Chris-
tian conscience into war, professional

educators have become detached
analysts who, in abstractly explain-
ing student apathy and neglecting

concrete issues, provide facades of
activity which allow students to ra-
tionalize their own indifference.
But, paradoxically, the very ac-
knowledgement of apathy and irre-
sponsibility as student norms now
gives rise to possibilities for indi-
vidualism and social action in many
colleges. For example, the image of
Ivy League men as partying con-

OUR EP HEMERAL CIVILIZATION ee by David Cort

EVERYBODY knows that much of
the furniture of our civilization is
designed to have a very brief life.
Monumental as the sum appears at
any moment, incredibly more mo-
mentous than the sum of any other
civilization in history, the parts are
individually ephemeral. Thus, the
factories and skyscrapers, the auto-
mobiles and trucks, the roads them-
selves, the housing developments, the

household appliances, the enormous

factory machines and the kitchen
pots, the plastic screwdrivers and the
papers towels, all foreshadow their
obsolescence or collapse and replace-
ment. (All except churches and col-
lege campuses, perhaps.)

It will be proposed here, however,
that we are even just a little more
ephemeral than we are quite prepared
to be.

For if there is one thing we are
sure of, it is that we are leaving a

full and permanent record of all our

doings, experiments and conclusions.
Many a library contains nearly 5,-
000,000 bound books, as well as mass-
es of manuscripts, maps, photographs,
art reproductions, microfilm, ete.,
beatstifully indexed and ordered to
exhibit to a researcher a thousand

DAVID CORT’S latest book, Is
There an American in the House?,
will be Deena soon by Macmillan.

experts. Books, once tl

a
=e
™
s
‘s

formists actually preys upon the con-
sciences of some Ivy League students,
making them watchful for something
they might commit themselves. to.
Such students may become, at least
in spirit, beatniks who, with beards,
guitars and varying amounts of sin-
cerity, strike postures of revolt. Some
vo on to find positive affirmations
to fill the shells they have adopted;
in search of personal careers, they
discover the practical and moral rea-
sons for being responsible toward
others. Realizing the need for world
peace and freedom, and questioning
the nation’s role in perfecting weap-
ons of mass destruction, they chal-
lenge the prescriptions of the church
and the military establishment—the

years from now every detail of our
transient splendor and magnitude.
Harvard’s library, for example, has
more than 5,000,000 volumes. Com-
parable mountains of paper are ac-
cumulating all across America. If a
great writer, artist or scientist is
ignored today, we can imagine that
no great harm is done posterity, since
he will be found intact in all the
libraries. The high mortality of
records—of the work of a Sappho,
Menander, Aristophanes, Leonardo
or Haydn—cannot, one thinks, hap-
pen here.

But wait a minute. A recent analy-
sis of modern paper shows that the
whole record of the past fifty years
will have turned to indecipherable
powder and tatters by the year
2000 A.D. The carefully ordered
mountains of books and pictures will
by then be useless moraines of saw-
dust. In the present way, our civili-
zation’s slide into oblivion will be
more rapid and complete than that
of the first jongleurs.

THE DETAILS of the approaching
library disaster can be found in the
April 24, 1959, Science: “Permanence
in Bool Papers,” by W.
and Reavis C. Sprou

of paper production, a now a 2

7 7

me, 4 . - th ;
ah é. ae : _ .
a. 3 SS ceo |

bulwarks of conformity in colleges.

There is “tension” in the student.
See-no-evil hear-no-evil apathy often .
covers an inward hidden person who és
is plagued by the disparity between
the responsible rebel his liberal arts
and religious training call for and
the nonchalant listener which is all
society seems to allow.

Students are “ready to be chal-
lenged.” But most of them cannot be
challenged while teachers and min-
isters fail to admit, much less discuss,
the ignominy of their nation’s role
in the nuclear-missiles race, even as
they pretend that the treasured pre-
cepts of American moralism can re-
late their students to the modern
world. .

per cent factor as against newspapers,
magazines, shopping bags, containers,
towels, toilet tissue, wrapping paper,
etc., piliieh have a brief function.
For years, paper technologists have
hardly thought about permanence
and have hardly ever seen a sheet
of paper a hundred to a thousand
years old. Ancient papers are only
museum curios to the modern paper
trade.

Certainly in 1906 the Library of
Congress made every effort to pro-
duce a really lasting book when it
published Thomas Jefferson’s records
of the Virginia Company of London
on all-rag paper. Yet by 1928 the
first volumes were falling apart, pos-
sibly “because of an excessive use
of aluminum sulfate and rosin in the
sizing.” The bad air in cities, with
its burden of sulphur dioxide, is often
blamed for such deterioration. But
according to Barrow and Sproull, this
is a very minor factor and affects
only the outer edge of the Paper,
if anything.

The ancient writing materials, —
papyrus, vellum and parchm
were very durable; and so i
early papers, introduced into Europe —
after the twelfth century. These were
mildly alkaline or very slightly acid.
Their durability is ascribed to. the

presence of calcium an thi

‘*

7,
~* a ae Peed!) oh

| i

compounds “introduced either during
the bleaching of the rag with extract
of wood ashes or through washing
the rag with water containing bi-
carbonates of these elements.”

THE first bad news for paper came
when carbon inks were replaced by
iron-gall inks which eat through the
paper. Later additives in making
paper were generally acid and de-
structive: first, potassium aluminum
sulfate in the sizing in the seventeen-
th century; now alum-rosin sizing.
These acid details are hardly worth
repeating here; librarians can find
them in the Barrow-Sproull report.
Whether acid paper is cheaper, easier
and more profitable to make, the
authors do not say. They carefully
describe the tests they made on all
sorts of modern book papers, with
the M.I.T. folder-endurance tester
and the Elmendorf tear-resistance
tester. All that need be repeated here
is that they found conclusive evi-
dence that virtually no book pub-
lished after 1900, and not many just
before that date, will be legible in,
at the most fifty years. To quote
them:

It has been found that modern
books—even those written with a
serious or scholarly purpose (“non-
fiction”) and published (“to last!)
in hard bindings—are deteriorating
rapidly, and many of those issued
twenty-five to fifty years ago are
now almost unusable. The paper of
an average American publication of
the first decade of this century re-
tains only 4 per cent of the folding
endurance of a typical new book
paper of today... . This typical new
book paper itself shows low initial
strength (for example, folding en-
durance on the order of only 20 per
cent of book papers already 200 to
500 years old) as well as indications
that it is subject to rapid deteriora-
tion.

On this evidence, the enormous
printed wordage of the last two
generations is less significant for
posterity than the ripple pattern on
an ocean beach. It is true that some
haphazard and fractional reprinting,
as in paperbacks, will give some
works another brief gasp of life. Much
recent science is already partially
obsolete, and new textbooks will al-

‘ ways follow one another, heel and

toe. Somewhat as the jongleurs’ works
398

had a Stes Cee on
our writers will have a fragmentary
survival in quotation. It would in-
deed be shaking to suppose that by
about the year 2000 everyone who
has used the printed word in this
period, would be, in the literal sense
of the word obsolete, “completely
used up.”

But not so fast. The authors of
“Permanence in Book Papers” tell
us at last that something can be
saved, perhaps all. The way to re-
demption is to take apart the hun-
dreds of millions of bound books in
the libraries of record, soak the sheets
overnight in a solution of calcium
and magnesium bicarbonate (the
formula is given), then rebind. A
semi-skilled worker can do the bath-
ing part at the rate of about 2,500
ordinary pages a day; the rest of
the process is periodically necessary
routine in any library.

The librarians will probably balk
at this arduous and expensive im-
perative for some time. They can
be allowed another ten years’ delay
for most books, though about then
it will be too late for a good many
of their modern treasures.

THIS MATTER of the ephemeral
books must hold for us a much wider,
or classic, significance than that of
a fortuitous, and corrigible, error in
the modern manufacture of book
papers,

“Ephemeralization” is in fact a
key word in the industrialized ideal
held up by writers on industrial
civilization, including me. It has
been said, quite properly, that the
tools and fixtures should be in-
creasingly lighter, more efficient,
more easily replaced, more economi-
cal of materials, and that society
should never be absolutely com-
mitted to the tools and fixtures of
even the recent past.

We will pass over the irony that,
as in the libraries, we are more

Se A * : if

Baremersl fee we had Menown'e or in- |
tended.

But at its most reasonable ‘the
doctrine of ephemeralization over-
looks some possibilities. One is the
possibility that some stage of past
performance may have been much
more efficient than the present stage;
and that the only way of return is
by means of the old, obsolete (but
lost) models. Another is that to some
degree society is always committed,
more deeply than it knows, to the
tools and fixtures it is using. A third
is that mankind’s true wealth can
always be defined as a kind of capi-
tal, which cannot afford to be ephem-
eral. Under this heading come the
total acreage of useful top-soil, the
water-table, the wild flora and fauna,
the insect life, the mineral resources
as related to annual consumption,
the total of good, solid shelter, and
of course the good condition of the
knowledge of the past in the libraries
of record. Respect for these assets,
and the desire to keep them healthy,
constitute a kind of cultural and
ecological capitalism, which must
often regard as abominable the works
of both communism and _ financial
capitalism.

This thought can be finished with-
out using the words “entropic” or
“anti-entropic.”

For on the bay of Naples, a beau-
tiful example of the non-ephemeral
is at this moment coming to light
after 1900 years, under the direction
of Amedeo Maiuri, Director of the
National Museum of Naples.

Herculaneum, a town of only 6,000
people, comparable to many Ameri-
can suburbs today, was overwhelmed
by a muddy landslide from erupting
Vesuvius on August 24, 79 A.D.
Thus we can now see the arrange-
ments of people who had planned,
not primarily for permanence, but
for continuous use and enjoyment
and pride. Herculaneum, in contrast
to our American suburbs, had a

peautifu “thea re, a splend id palaes-

ra or gymnasium, a highly decorated
te two public baths, a regular
city plan with fountains at the inter-
sections, an abundant water supply
and the famous Villa of Herculaneum
full of sculptures and a library of
papyri made to endure. The upper
class of this provincial town had
large, beautiful and permanent man-
sions with a view of the sea. The
large middle class lived in comfort-
able homes with newly painted
dining rooms, well-watered, shaded
gardens, and mosaic floors. (The
apartment houses of the second cen-
tury had not yet made an appear-
ance. )

People who have seen the part of
the town already exposed express a
desire to move right in, and find an
anticipatory sense of happiness there.
A genuine love of the community,
the opposite of the cold concrete
hearts of such city-planners as

Robert Moses, ii left a P apiritaal
patina on the marble, bronze, mo-
saic and stucco of the dead city;
and this cannot be ephemeral.

Compare old Herculaneum to
American towns with many times
the wealth and three or four times
the population: Culver City, Calif.,
Highland Park, [Ill., Morristown,
N. J. and Port Chester, N. Y., all
well above the average American
town in local pride. Where are the
baths, the fountains, the gymnasia,
the fine libraries, the palaces and
the tiny gardens? The American
theatres, of course, would be for
movies—and would be now half-
empty. Even the once abundant
water supply has run short for many
American towns of this size. In every
department, at every social level,
the American towns are shamed by
Herculaneum. Even at plumbing and
sewage disposal, Herculaneum bests
them.

Other, less admirable features of
imperial Roman civilization are not
here our subject. But the kind of
sound, thoughtful, non-ephemeral
building seen at Herculaneum must
have deepened the awe which the
Roman world impressed on the bar-
barian. This world did endure for
another 400 years, and its legend
remained Europe’s ideal until the
nineteenth century, when at last the
title of Holy Roman Emperor was
abandoned, in 1806. One would like
a little of that durability for the
legend of one’s own civilization.

And let it be emphasized that
Herculaneum knew the difference
between permanence, an unnatural
and impossible condition, and the
non-ephemeral, Only sixteen years
before, it-had been reminded of its
impermanence by a disastrous earth-
quake. The citizens were still rebuild-
ing when Vesuvius buried them in a
permanence of 2,000 years. .

PESTICIDES: the REAL P ERIL ee by Robert L. Rudd

CONTAMINATION of a portion
of this year’s cranberry crop drama-
tizes hazards which accompany the
growing use of chemical pesticides.
Yet the danger revealed by the in-
cident is not, in the long run, the
basic one involved in the use of pes-
ticides, and to that extent our alarm
is misdirected.

Traditionally, man has resisted the
onslaughts of competing animals and
plants with the crudest of measures.
He has been compelled to pay a cer-

_| tain tariff to these competitors—a

portion of his crops, his livestock, his
timber or his person. Oecasionally
_ the tax is too great and he fails. But
he has never been content to pay
e the tithe and has followed every path
that promises*to reduce or to elimi-

_ nate his competitors. Less than two

decades ago, new chemical discov-
_eries revealed a pathway which prom-

_ ROBERT L. RUDD teaches zoology
5 at the Unwersity of California. He
is the author, with Richard E. Genel-
ly HE Pesticides: Their Use and Tox- :

ity in Relation
es 1 #

-natural-control

‘to Wildlife.

ised total release from this compe-
tition. DDT was and remains the
best known of the pesticides along
this pathway of promise, but there
are dozens of others. Many are quite
unlike DDT; some are more toxic;
many are widely used.

Although our experience with these
chemicals has been brief, it has also
been intense and greatly varied. We
are therefore now justified in asking
the question: Have chemical con-
trols led to the Eden which earlier
experience promised? In spite of
short-term gains in crop yields, and
localized alleviation of disease, my
answer is “No!” Their use has in
fact created as many problems as
have been solved. Witness a few:
Increasing contamination of our
lands, waters and foodstuffs; increas-
ing billions to support unneeded
production; increasing destruction of
agents; increasing
misery from overproduction in 1 many

areas of the world. | hay

A great deal of | publ

spread use of chemical pesticides; to
the omnipresence of chemical resi-
dues in our foods, to the possibility
of injury to human beings (the cran-
berry crisis!) and livestock. The
public debate on these matters has
led to a greater awareness of the
hazard, a general heightening of re-
sponsibility in users, industry and
government, a greater research ef-
fort, and to some corrective legisla~
tion.

Most of this emphasis has center- ~
ed on chemicals alone. A common |
belief is that solution of hazard prob- —
lems will also solve pest-control
problems. This is by no means true.
Following present land-use practices, —
we must use chemicals—and the fre-
quency with which we use the
must increase as our land use «
tinues to intensify. Eliminate p
cides and our “plagues and |
lences” would be far more

than they were before the ad y

of pest control.

—to repetitive application? An ecol-
ogist would answer “Simplification
of the ecosystem.” The ecosystem is
the total living complex, relatively
stable because of the great diversity
of actions and kinds of organisms.
When something gets out of balance
in such a system, corrections occur
quickly and the imbalance is cor-
rected. Hawks and owls, for example,
congregate in unusual numbers
where large numbers of mice occur.
Checks to abnormal increase of any
species are inherent in most ecosys-
tems. In. simplified ecosystems, nat-
ural controls are fewer and respond
less rapidly. Potential pests become
actual pests under this condition,
and herein lies the real danger of
our present control practices.

All managed crop and timber pro-
duction deals with simplified ecosys-
tems. The first person to harvest
and store natural cereal grain for
later sowing started the simplifica-
tion of agriculture. Until the mech-
anization and later chemicalization
of agriculture, there was little sub-
stantial departure from the methods
of the first agriculturalists. Acreages
were small, landscapes diverse. Eco-
system simplification was relatively
slight and was in any event local.
Hedgerows, trees, weed patches, sea-
sonal cropping and multipurpose
farming combined to form a diver-
sified base for a diversified fauna.
Mechanized and chemicalized crop
production has resulted in large ex-
panses of single crop species—the
destruction of diversity in the land-
scape.

Simplification of the fauna follows
simplification of the landscape. A
pest species provided with abundant
food and few competing animals to
check its increase, may under these
conditions become far more numer-
ous than was ever remotely possible
before present-day, large-scale sim-
plification. When the pest is intro-
duced from another country, rarely
does it bring with it any of the ani-
mals which control it in its native
land; as a result, great increase in
numbers with devastating conse-
quences can be expected. Most of
our major insect pests are “intro-
duced” species. © ~

We further simplify the fauna by
two means. We remove single spe-
cies—coyotes, for example—when the

400 .

he ” the eet Rae Ane a

x Y
wf }
1

methods are available to do so. When
such methods are not available, we
do so by nondiscriminating means
such as blanket chemicals. The use
of parathion in citrus groves, for ex-
ample, kills most insects nonselec-
tively. Control of a pest species may
be ternporarily achieved by chemi-
cals, but the resurgence of pest spe-
cies is ‘almost assuredly more’ rapid
than is that of the predators and
parasites normally checking the pest
species. Initial chemical control,
therefore, creates the later need for
more chemicals. Once begun, there is
no stopping if the crop is not to be
lost.

If repetitive treatment with the
same chemical is continued, control
of one pest may be achieved in time

to herald the arrival of a new one.
Shifts in animal balances can well
result in the increase of previously
harmful species to pest numbers. The
emergence of spider mites to pest
status followed successive treatments
with DDT in orchards throughout
the world. As another example, the
control of coyotes and to some ex-
tent the smaller predatory mammals,
may be responsible for the irruptions
of rodents in Western rangelands.
Although this belief is hotly disputed,
the fact is that many livestock grow-
ers have forbidden the poisoning or
trapping of predatory mammals on
their properties. Their aim is rodent
control; their method—natural check
and balance in an ecosystem pre-
viously awry.

~I have described the conditions
under which chemicals may perpet-
uate pest control. by reducing nat-
ural checks to population increase,
and the particular way in which new
pests can be created, It is also ap-
parent, in rodents, that partial re-
duction of a pest population may
actually act as a stimulus to breed-

Pa Te
’ tht i! it

ing by the pest species. This reaction
does not seem to be widely appre-
ciated among pest controllers; yet
it is a maxim of livestock growers
and managers of game species that
reduction in numbers is often neces-
sary to yield maximum vigor and
reproduction.

SIMPLIFICATION of the ecosys-
tem is the result of most current pro-
duction practice in the United States.
Clearly, immense biological and eco-
nomic problems are created by it.
Yet, one other characteristic of our
age complicates these problems fur-
ther—transportation. To an unprece-
dented extent, animals and plants
are being moved from one part of the
world to another. Relatively few are
imtentional introductions (certain
game birds and the biological-contro!
organisms are exceptions); most in-
troductions are unintentional. The
hardier species become established,
spread and may well become spec-
tacular pests. The gypsy moth, corn
borer and boll weevil are examples
among insects; house rats and mice
are excellent examples among mam-
mals. No practical way of defending
against unwanted alien introductions
has yet been found.

Quarantine measures, now stand-
ard practices at ports of entry, con-
sist of prohibitions against certain
plants and animals known to be con-
taminated, and inspections of ad-
missible kinds to intercept contami-
nated stocks. Valuable as quarantine
is, it is only partially effective. Fif-
teen of our major insect pests ap-
peared in this country after the
establishment of federal quarantine
procedures. It is virtually impossible
to prevent the entry of major pest
species.

The only recourse available when
such a pest becomes established is an
“eradication” campaign, A_ serious
belief in the ability to eradicate pest-
insect species is very recent: only
the combination of aerial application
and new synthetic chemicals make
it possible. In only one species—the
Mediterranean fruit fly—has such a
campaign been successful; the recent
eradication of the pest in a few coun-
ties in Florida followed just such
methods. But the fly had been
“eradicated” previously — thirty

years ago. The “eradication” pro-—
vo The Natiog
hy 7 Shi

a pesaencabes are to remain.

grams against the gypsy moth- and
the imported fire ant aim at species
well. established in a number of
states. Chlorinated hydrocarbon in-
secticides distributed by air are the
control means. Both campaigns have
been bitterly opposed. Eradication of
these species is indeed possible, but
an informed public will not tolerate
the hazards nor the cost necessary
for such efforts.

THE simplification of ecosystems re-
sulting from the use of nonselective,
toxic chemicals creates problems in
addition to the loss of, or threat to,
desirable species. To illustrate, two
pest insects—the rice stink bug and
the sugar-cane borer—in Louisiana
last year irrupted to economically
serious levels following fire-ant “con-
trol” measures. Competent entomol-
ogists “credit” these .outbreaks to
the nonselective action of a control
chemical—the removal of the nat-
ural checks on the populations of
pest species. Of course, additional
chemical means are available to con-
trol the insect irruptions caused by
the initial chemical treatment. Sim-
plification of the ecosystem followed
by unimaginative methods to keep
it simple! The total price is much
greater than the cost of the first
insect-control treatment.

Perhaps I may be forgiven a heret-
ical notion. Our export of American
agricultural “know-how” may be do-
ing the “favored” countries an ulti-
mate disservice. The extension of
simplified crop systems throughout
the world cannot fail to magnify pest-
control problems. Have we given
enough thought to the total results
of simplified chemicalized crop sys-
tems over vast areas of the world’s
surface? Possibly a fanciful objec-
tion in a period of burgeoning human
populations!

If simplification of the ecosystem

_has produced serious pest problems,

the obvious solution to them is to
reverse the pattern. Complicate it!
The eminent ecologist, Professor
Charles Elton of Oxford, in a recent
book suggests that we both conserve
variety and cultivate ecological di-
versity. He says in fact that we must
do so if we are to produce indefinite-
ly from lands now in use. We must
do so if our aesthetically satisfying
ow can

we. accomplish~this- “complication”?

We do know how. But before we
attempt to do so, we must. protect
the present. ’We must conserve
variety and prevent more simplifi-
cation.

THE FIRST necessity is to continue
quarantine programs to prevent ac-
cess of the hardy, adaptable organ-
isms-that become pests. Experience
with such organisms makes:clear that
our food and fiber production: areas
are ripe’ for further. invasions. ~ Al-
though the quarantine program can-
not be totally successful, it must be
counted as necessary until such time
as we can make the biological ad-
justments. necessary to minimize
pest problems.

In the same light, it becomes nec-
essary: to minimize, cultivation. prac-
tices. or chemical applications which
might lead to further simplification
of the fauna. A sizable margin of
insurance will be demanded by grow-
ers. Such “safety” margins can in
many instances be reduced by utiliz-
ing available information on resist-
ant plants, timing of planting, man-
agement of water and so on.

Both of the foregoing are protec-
tive measures to be operative while
the most important phase is being
put into effect. Professor Elton’s
suggestion — cultivate diversity —
must be implemented. Some existing
land-use practices already do so; we
have a good base from which to pro-
ceed. Conservationists and wildlife
enthusiasts have already arranged
for and continue to speak for refuges,
for the legal protection of existing
species, for the education of the gen-
eral public, and for proper utiliza-
tion of renewable resources. The
practices of the Soil Conservation
Service have led to diversified land-
scapes accompanied inevitably by
faunal diversity. The efforts of Soil
Bank and similar “reserve” plans will
result in this diversity. So also will
any change to less intensive land use,
such as that now occurring in many
parts of the Midwest and South.

But only in the conscious pitting
of one living thing against another—
biological eontrol—ean we directly
control pests without the hazards ac-
companying repeti chemical ap-
plications. Ma | a insects
and viruses have 4a

into the’ United States-to aid in bio-
logical control. Only a few have been
truly successful, but these few have
repaid the cost of all biological-con-
trol efforts to date a thousandfold.
Their importance is grossly unap-
preciated, particularly by industry
and government.

To such established controls as the
lady-bird beetle, University of Cali-
fornia entomologists have recently
added “living” i 1a
and fungi that can’be applied when
certain pest insects reach damaging
numbers. The effect of using bio-
logical control agents is, of course,
the sought-for complication. Simpli-
fication of the ecosystem resulted in
the absence of natural checks; we
can now “complicate” the life of a
pest without chemical hazard to
plants, animals and man and with-
out following the primrose path of
ever-increasing simplification of the
ecosystem.

Some. entomologists, particularly
in Canada, have already shown the
way to manage complex insect re-
lationships with efficiency and safety.
European entomologists now speak
of managing the entire plant-insect
community. It is called manipulation
of the biocenose. The biocenotic en-
vironment is varied, complex and
dynamic. Although numbers of in-
dividuals will constantly change, no
one species will normally reach pest
proportions. The special conditions
which allow high populations of a
single species in a complex ecosystem
are rare events. Management of the
biocenose or ecosystem should be-
come our goal, challenging as it is.

The way is clear, the conditions
ripe, for a shift away from chemical
controls and from the oversimplified
environments which create the need
for them. In many crop environments
it is already too late to make the
shift. Before the pest-producing, sim-
plified ecosystem becomes so wide-
spread as to insure a constant chemi-
cal prophylactic blanket on the all —
outdoors, we should look to our bio-
logical reserves. For the good of us |
all, chemical techniques must give
way to ecological emphasis. The cul-—
tivation of ecosystem diversity ¥
yield crop safety, sustained pro
tivity, reduction of chemical haz
and a landscape much more apy
ing to the eye.

SS
Ss
Sore

i en

The Vanishing Rainbow

A BIOGRAPHY OF EDWARD
MARSH. By Christopher Hassall.
Harcourt Brace. 732 pp. $6.75.

THE LIGHT OF COMMON DAY.
By Lady Diana Cooper. Houghton
Mifflin. 274 pp. $5.

Horace Gregory
IN ENGLAND a brilliantly revived
kind of non-fiction has precedence to-
day: the historical essay, the memoir,
the biography. Even the “official” biog-
raphy, once dull, secretive and heavy,
has become a vehicle of British literary
art. Christopher Hassall is not another

Boswell, nor is Lady Diana Cooper an-

other (nor would she care to be) Duch-

ess of Newcastle “In
the tradition” of such writers, both in

their wholly different ways write ex- °

tremely well. In both books, the reader
has the sensation of being “in” on the
ground floor; the action is lively and
seemingly true to life. Of the two,
Lady Diana’s memoirs seem more spon-
taneous, less consciously controlled than
the official biography of Edward Marsh,
private secretary to Winston Churchill,
and the editor, “E. M.,” of Georgian
Poetry in five volumes (1911 to 1922).
The career of Edward Marsh precedes
Lady Diana’s; the orbits through which
they moved were of a world that seems
curiously distant, somewhat Stately
Home-ish, almost pre-historic, when
compared to the world of the Welfare
State today.

Edward Marsh (born 1872) was heir
to a small government annuity (which
he called “murder money”) because in
1812 a distant relative, Spencer Perce-
val, then Prime Minister, entered the

_lobby of the House of Commons and

was shot dead by a certain Mr. Belling-
ham. The inheritance came to Marsh
through his mother, Jane Perceval. His
father had gone to medical school with
the future Poet Laureate, Robert
Bridges, and through that early friend-
ship unknowingly gave his son another
kind of inheritance — a sensitive, Shel-
leyesque interest in poetry. A childhood
disease left him “incapable of the act
of love . . . destined from then on to
live and die as chaste as the day he was

HORACE GREGORY'S latest book is
The World of James McNeill Whistler,
to be published this month by Thomas
Nelson. i

, ; ey f
La att LES

born . . . he cultivated a capacity for
friendship . . . untroubled by physical
desire . . . feminine in its tenderness.”

Throughout Mr. Hassall’s book, its
slender, handsome, eye-glass-in-right-eye
protagonist is Eddie, the perfect sub-
ject (as he became) for Max Beerbohm
portraits. His education was of West-
minster and Cambridge; his literary
tastes were formed by friendships with
Bridges, A. E. Housman and Maurice
Baring (who later is a friend of Lady
Diana), and Edmund Gosse, arch-dic-
tator of letters. Coming down from
Cambridge it was natural for Marsh to
slip into a clerkship in the Colonial Of-
fice. He had very little money (he re-
mained relatively poor all his life); more
valuable than money were his charm
and social tact, and more important
than these was his gift for loyalty in
friendship. It was not accidental that
Churchill chose Marsh as his secretary.
Marsh sealed his lips with an innocent
boyish smile that offended no one. He
was, as Churchill called him, “the per-
fect secretary.” At both. political and
literary gatherings, he skimmed as
lightly across surfaces of talk as a long-
legged dragonfly on a stream of water.

Among the witnesses of “the Smart
Set” in Edwardian London, Marsh was
at Churchill’s side, and they agreed
that Lady Diana’s face could launch a
thousand ships while many others
launched no more than two hundred. As
the reign of George V began, there were
three Edward Marshes, each separate
from the other: First, Churchill’s sec-
retary; second the Edwardian dandy,
odd man in at a dinner party; and third
the patron of poetry and British paint-
ing. Lhe Georgian anthologies were yet
to come, but their arrival was fore-
shadowed by Marsh’s romantic friend-
ship with Rupert Brooke. Brooke, the
latest arrival down from Cambridge, was
as handsome in his own right as Lady
Diana was beautiful in hers; he in-
spired Marsh to read the younger Brit-
ish poets and with Brooke’s image in
mind, Marsh wrote in his prefatory note
to the first of his Georgian anthologies
that “English poetry is now once again
putting on a new strength and beauty.”

Poetry and British painting (Marsh
guided by Walter Sickert’s taste) were
the uses to which the “murder money”
was put. As literary o's sh’s
range was greater oo itations

of his taste in verse, Before his death
in 1953, his legacy had aided John Mid-
dleton Murry as well as D. H. Lawrence,
Isaac Rosenberg as well as Wilfred Gib-
son, and beyond the Georgians, its bene-
fits were extended to James Joyce as
well as Dylan Thomas. Although the
sums at his disposal were not large,
Marsh was a great and gallant “giver.”

Marsh’s taste in poetry veered in the
direction of what might be called “maga-
zine verse,” the small lyric cast in con-
ventional designs; and like a number of
the Georgian poets whom he favored
most, fresh diction and metaphor dis-
turbed rather than pleased his ear and
eye. His taste was Bloomsbury taste,
which even today still dominates choices
made in verse anthologies by Lord David
Cecil, and which is displayed by The
New Yorker as though there were a re-
vival of Georgian verse in America.

Under the patronage of Marsh’s good
will, the British poets had access to the
Royal Pension Fund and temporary
fame — at least a reading — on the
peripheries of political and Court circles.
Their names were within earshot of fash-
ionable company, including Winston
Churchill, Lady Diana, the Asquiths and
Duff Cooper. At no time since the
twelve years when “E.M.” edited the
volumes of Georgian poetry have so
many young men of talent made their
way by name to the circles of the spec-
tacular few.

BY 1922, when the final volume of
Georgian Poetry appeared, taste for
whatever was “new” in poetry had shift-
ed its attention to Pound and Eliot;
the ridicule of Georgian mannerisms,
which had been so brilliantly advanced
in the Sitwells’ magazine, “Wheels,” a
few years earlier, was ammunition in the
hands of a younger generation. Marsh ,
himself had drifted to Ivor Novello,
Chu Chin Chow and the operettas of
Shaftbury Avenue. The theatre had al-
ways engaged his enthusiasm, and he
found such young men as Novello and
Noel Coward almost as fascinating as
the earlier Rupert Brooke.

But from the late 20s onward—Marsh —
was now in his fifties — the strain of
keeping the social Marsh, the political
Marsh and the literary Marsh separate ;
had begun to exert its toll. It was as
though his psyche had been split three
ways. On a holiday in Corsica he suf-
fered the first of his “blackouts”; on
taking a walk through a wild country-
side, he lost bs and then gles :

io of wh ;

Tt took a rescue Batty twenty-four hours
to find him, and when he was found,
he was almost naked and close to death.
He had come very near to the borderline
of insanity, yet his triple-faced loyalties
remained unbetrayed. The hero con-
cealed behind the mask of the dandy
survived; fromm then on Marsh was a
much older man, and in reading the
prool sheets of the books his frends
wrote, he became more watehful and a
trifle pedantic; he became the vicarious
“author” par excellence. He amused
himself by doing three translations, the
Vables of La Fontaine, a Horace and
Fromentin’s novel, Dominique. This last
was his masterpiece.

_ ao /} Ff. 5
a

OF THE period that Marsh’s career so
clearly represents, Lady Diana Cooper
is the heroine — and the Lady can
write. Her language, unaffected, chatty,
not unlike the language of Nancy Mit-
ford, is the language of a “set” — lan-
guage that may- seern affected to those
outside Lady Diana’s circles, but is. as
natural to her as talking with a glass of
champagne in one hand at six in the
morning. One has the image of a very
pretty girl who is never quite tight and
never quite sober. Her image is reflected
in Evelyn Waugh’s most enduring novel,
| Vile Bodies, and a more distant, imita-
nd * tive reflection of the same image may
he 1 be glimpsed in the novels and_ short

—_

rt. oS =

SB.67 £24 2 4

fe | stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The girls
m5} 7 of the “silly” and “flapper” generation
wl’ | were would-be carbon copies of the or-
8) iginal Lady Diana who, by the way, on

reading Marsh’s edition of Rupert
Brooke’s poems, burst into tears of de-

af _ligh t and awe — and grief that Brooke
had died so young. Duff Cooper wrote

ite ye extremely Georgian poems to his Diana;
ot & and her replies to him, in prose, were
m, | no less charming. With the same charm

cel she confesses “My calligraphy was al-
a ways and remains even worse than my
the | spelling, which is atrocious and so
hd phonetic that I write bs for ms when I
el, | have a cold.”

50 Shortly before World War I, Lady
jk | _Diana’s “Coterie” began to have pre-

_monitions of early death. During a mid-
night party (every one drinking) on a
iS 4 -Thames-moored yacht; an idea (was it

_ Lady Diana’s?) struck the ‘“Coterie”
to go bathing — one man leaped over-
e- Mioard and drowned; rescue was futile.
With World War I ‘the real death tolls
bo A began to mount, and hysteria mounted

at the ‘same pace. Irrespective of class,
Ni rich with the poor, death in the

Near |

1 of young Eng
Lady Diana (r
2 “Nurse Man
d and “cae

1959
. or} .

East and i in France swiftly es

the popular press. Even Mary Pickford’s
light was dimmed by hers. She was
Lord Beaverbrook’s heroine; gifts came
to her from everywhere and at the time
of their marriage, Duff Cooper and she
practically lived on presents from mil-
lionaires, showered in tribute to Lady
Diana’s beaucy. Nor is it surprising that
Moras Gese and Reinharde chose Lady
Diana to play both Madonna and Nun
in ther wildly creative and constantly
reimprovised spectacle, The Miracle.
The films directed and produced by the
late Cecil B. De Mille follow the stand-
ard set by The Miracle, a production
that combined the excitement of a three-
ring circus with the story of Christ’s
birth. It was immense: society girls and
professional actresses attempted to rival
Lady Diana's speechless parts of Ma-
donna and Nun, but she conquered.
However she acted, the public came to
spothghted out of shadows,
holding a huge doll and strait jacketed
in a simulated “stone” cloak.
formance was, as she called it,
“Gothie-Freudian”

see her,

a fantastic
interpretation of the

Mckinley Gave the Orders me

IN THE DAYS OF McKINLEY. By
Margaret Leech. Harper & Bros. 686
pp. $6.95.

Walter LaFeber

THOSE who wish to discover the roots
of American foreign policy during the
1950s must begin their search in the
history of the 1890s. It was then that
the 1893-1897 depression forced Ameri-
can business leaders to look upon for-
eign markets as the relief for the Amer-
ican industrial glut; it was then that in-
fluential observers saw in the closing of
the American frontier a need for the
virgin market of Asia; it was then that
the United States wrapped its newly
discovered muscles around the far-off
Philippines and other Pacific islands,
thus undertaking world-wide political
commitments; and it was then that
Wiliam McKinley rationalized the
American policies which responded to
and caused these events.

Margaret Leech’s In the Days of Mc-
Kinley sounds a new chord in Ameri-
can historiography with its emphasis on
the importance of McKinley. Miss Leech
discounts Alfred. He

te oie a: CT ete so Price es fap

The per-/

sree’ ha ;

Scriptures, but she herself. wasithe real
show, the center of the circus. It wis Ly
little wonder that in the United States a
she outshone even the publicity of movie
stars. The sight of near-Royalty and
blond Leauey in one glance was too
extraordinary for an. American public ©
to ignore.

‘This second volume of Lady Diaaa’s
culled The Rain-
bow Comes and Goes and there will be
more) tells of further adventures beyond
The Miracle, not the least of them a
cruise to Greece with the Duke of Wind-
sor in the brief interval when he was
King of England. The King was_per-
haps too boyish to remain King, nor
does Lady Diana underestimate his
charm. He enjoyed the arts both of y
being informal and “dressing-up,” and
Lady Diana’s portrait of him playing
the bagpipes around the dinner table
and in kilts is not to be forgotten. It is
like a small snapshot in color of the days jog
before the British Isles became a citadel 4
of the British Commonwealth and a 4
Welfare State.

memoirs (the first was

that “Hanna and the others will shuffle r
him and deal him like a pack of cards.”
She admits that Joe Cannon was correct.
in saying that McKinley kept his ear :
so close to the ground that he got it ;

full of grasshoppers. But Miss Leech oe
then demonstrates that McKinley al-

ways erected himself long enough to

systematize the desires of American cor-

poration leaders and farmers into policies

which led the United States into a new

and vigorous role on the world stage.

Too many historians have left McKinley

lying on the ground.

This theme is thoroughly documented.
John Hay, George B. Cortelyou (Me-
Kinley’s secretary), Elihu Root and
John D. Long were among the many
who agreed with Mark Hanna’s com- |
ment that “McKinley gave the orders.’ 2
On several crucial oceasions it was Mc- —
Kinley who came through with the wy
play that cinched the victory for |
forces. His Chicago speech in 1
brought the wavering Illinois RB
oa delegation to his side, a

arket Club speech on the P
in io — erie 2

an 1T Tp
cy ¢ eae

sorb the goods produced by American
industries and farms. He once told
Cortelyou, “We need Hawaii just as
much and a good deal more than we
did California.” Miss Leech raises ques-
tions about the popular story that the
President decided to take the Philip-
pines only after the Almighty indicated
that the United States must Christian-
ize the natives. McKinley knelt beside
his bed not for guidance, but because
“he had not been able to bring himself
to renounce a demand for the archi-
pelago.”

MISS LEECH uses colorful and sure
strokes to paint her picture of this un-
derrated President. Miniature portraits
of Russell A. Alger and William Shafter
stand out among many which are
masterfully sketched. The author is
often biting. She so sharply treats Nel-
son Miles and Thomas B. Reed (he of
the “cankered heart”), that both may
be doomed to the limbo of American
history for a long time.

Unfortunately, her strokes for other
men and events are not as sure. To say
that John Hay as Secretary of State
“was entirely untrained in Far Eastern
affairs” is to overlook Hay’s dispatches
from London in 1897 and 1898 which
illustrate his knowledge of and concern
about the partitioning of China. She
traces Theodore Roosevelt’s expansion-
ism in 1898 to a mentality which lay
“somewhere between that of a _ boy
scout and the young Kaiser Wilhelm
of Germany.” This may be picturesque,
but is difficult to reconcile with the fact
that Roosevelt had profound scholarly
knowledge of American westward ex-
pansion and worried deeply over the
closing of the frontier.

But most troublesome to this reviewer
were Miss Leech’s treatment of the
events leading to the Spanish-American
War and her analysis of the Open
Door doctrine. She scarcely mentions
the Cuban Junta which played a vital
role in arousing American sentiment.
Her story of the de Lome letter (a note
written by the Spanish Minister in
Washington which attacked McKinley
as a cheap politician) omits the crucial
fact that it was not the Cuban Junta
which sent the letter to the State De-
partment, but John A. McCook, an in-
fluential and prosperous New York
lawyer whom McKinley had almost
named as Secretary of the Interior. Me-

~~ Cook had a finanejal interest in initiat-

ing an American-Spanish conflict for. he
had invested heavily in Junta bonds. |

This points to another omission, Th
is little notice of the part the Amer-
ican business community played in the

yt ek

aes ary
nv
interprets the McKinley-Hanna alliance
as “the commitment of the Republican
party to the business interests” should
deal with the key point of whether the
President followed or led these interests
into war.

The books of Charles S. Campbell,
Jr., and the as yet unpublished inves-
tigations by Thomas McCormick of the
University of Wisconsin conflict with
Miss Leech’s account of the origins of
the Open Door notes. She follows the
standard view that Great Britain,
through Alfred E. Hippisley, originated
the doctrine. But Campbell has shown
that American corporations and_busi-
ness periodicals called for such a pro-
nouncement before 1899, while McCor-
mick’s researches in manuscript sources
reveal that McKinley and Hay formu-
lated the notes quite independently of
Hippisley.

Finally, to say that “the doctrine of
the Open Door lingered in American
mythology” but disappeared in reality
because it was “unessential to the na-
tional interest,” is to throw away the
skeleton key to much of American di-
plomacy in the twentieth century. Cer-
tainly the State Department’s Far East-
ern Adviser Stanley Hornbeck did not
believe the Open Door policy had dis-
appeared by 1900 when he wrote in 1936
that the Japanese would have to be
stopped in China or “the open door will
go out of existence.”

These are major defects in Miss
Leech’s narrative. They only slightly
mar her theme that McKinley was an
executive who “gave the orders” at a
crucial period of American history. This
theme, plus a vibrant literary style, en-
titles the book to a wide reading.

American Dreamer

THE WEST-GOING HEART. By
Eleanor Ruggles. W. W. Norton. 441
pp. $5.95.

Kenneth Rexroth
THIS is a sad book. It is a life of Vachel

Lindsay, and Vachel Lindsay had a very

sad life. What makes it even sadder is
the realization that all his heartbreaking
expense of spirit was far too dear a
price to pay for his poetry. His poetry
was not very good. Approximately thirty
poets of what might be called “anthology
rank” have committed suicide in the

United States since the beginning of

this century. It is by fur the commonest

a of death amongst poets. Most of

em aye not ae non-confe jormists,
Sue

coming of fer war. Yet an ; aint which’

tions, i \‘-

odc iifies, evil vere mast eat ‘Seat
been exactly the opposite — “dreamers
of the American Dream,” like Lindsay.
Many have been quite conventional peo-
ple, middle class, socially acceptable and
rather dull.

Lindsay was a sort of Whitman of
the high-school assemblies. He took
Whitman’s dream of a utopian society,
emerging from the enlightenment of the
Founding Fathers, and the storm and
stress of the radical eccentrics of the
revolutionary forties, and turned it into
something folksy, a bigger and better
and sweeter Hometown. He took Whit-
man’s sonorous verse and turned it into
tub-thumping circus music. High-school
assemblies and women’s clubs loved it.
For a generation he was the favorite
American poet of the London Mercury,
he was exactly the loud barbarian whom
John Squire wanted to exhibit to the
world as the perfect poetic voice of
America — he was made to order for
Bloomsbury ethnocentrism.

PERHAPS they were right. He was cer-
tainly typical of the hometown that
produced him and that he always be-
lieved hated and feared and snubbed
him. Today, I suppose, he would be a
mildly rightish liberal, a common-sense
New Dealer. In his own time he was an
accurate reflection of Midwest Popu-
lism. His best poem is written to Gov-
ernor Altgeld, “Sleep softly, . . . eagle for-
gotten, . under the stone, .. .” As

far as [ know he never wrote one to the .

Chicago anarchists whom Altgeld par-
doned, nor even a little one to Gene
Debs. He did write an innocent hero-

worshiping dithyramb to William Jen-—

nings Bryan. It isn’t much as a poem,
but it is an accurate picture of the en-
raptured Middle West that thrilled to
Bryan’s cross of gold speech and _ his
flamboyant and treacherous leader-
ship. 1 suppose he looked on his “The
Congo” as an epic of the Negro people.
T oday it seems ridden with chauvinism
and it is a brave soul who would ‘* “put it
on” in a high-school assembly in the
civilized parts of the country. That is it.
Vachel Lindsay was hopelessly naive,
more naive than Carol Kennicott in
Main Street. It is true that the Found-
ing Fathers and the enthusiasts and
screwballs of the forties had dreamed a
great dream. It is even possible that that
dream may some day in some measure
come true, But in the first quarter of

this century in the middle classes of —

KENNETH REXROTH, poet and
critic, is a frequent contributor to The —

Nation. He is the author of Bird in the
Bush, recently published by New Direo~

A peg ee ni ‘ < _
a Nat ON

, SS ee aaa ae ae

is one of the humanities.
clearly so; and biographers of literary
_men “must at every moment” be critics,

ea » ,
liddle Western towns it had become
pretty confused and sentimental.

Yet Lindsay knew better too, at least
at times. One part of him was drawn off
into what has since become Chamber
of Commerce local patriotism and social
service; but another, smaller part of
him, knew better. I doubt that it was
the conflicting pull of these two tenden-
cies that broke him apart — I think he
killed himself from personal troubles
and illness (he was an epileptic who
feared and even refused to admit his
disease), augmented by the manifest
evils of the lecture circuit that was al-
most his sole source of money. But the
conflict was there and he knew it, and
even if his was a vulgarized version of
the vulgarly called “American Dream,”
it was infinitely less vulgar than the
waking realization of that dream he saw
always about him. Naive, yes — who
else would write a poem called “Why I
Voted the Socialist Ticket”? Naive, but
terribly sincere. By the time Lindsay
swallowed Lysol it had begun to look
as though there would never be any
place in the world again for that naiveté
and that sincerity, and that simple, even
folksy, social vision. Eleanor Ruggles
has done what the reviewers call a thor-
oughly workmanlike job; the whole pic-
ture of Lindsay is here and he isn’t too
much inflated or sentimentalized. This
was his life, and possibly its telling is
another documented answer to the ques-
tion, “Why have thirty poets of anthol-
ogy rank committed suicide in the
United States since 1900?”

Second Impressions
Review of Paperbacks

Robert M. Wallace

Criticism

_ Literary Biography by Leon : Edel
(Anchor, 95c) is attractive for its ac-
counts of Mr. Edel’s work, especially

_with Henry James, but it is important

for its argument that literary criticism
Biography is

_ Mr. Edel says. His claim for psychology
in literary biography and his warning

against psychoanalytic excesses reflect

his own successful practice. Criticism,
psychology and biography interact at
every point, as in the late Professor
Lowes’s still exciting and satisfying
ey in the ways of poetic pag '
The Road ‘to Xanadu (Vintage, $
his i nie Mr. rues view as he ts

Titics, . sinh

1959 — =

cant reel
ce

Wellek and Austin Warren. Even the
juminous sea creatures of the Mariner
and Kubla Khan’s ice palace have a
biographical origin as well as an aesthe-
tic relevance and can be most fully
understood in the broader context.
Where are they from, and what did
they mean to Coleridge? The point can
be pushed “rather excessively,” as Mr.
Edel unfortunately says in another
connection; but not very.

Mr. Edel’s book suffers by its origin
as a series of lectures and an introduc-
tory anthology note (though a superb
one). Live Masters by Joseph Wood
Krutch (Midland, $1.75), a useful and
pleasant study in the mutations of the
novel, suffers from easy old prejudice,
as regarding Samuel Richardson, and
from the shifts of thirty years which
make the omission of James and Joyce,
for example, regrettable. Alfred Kazin’s
articles and essays in The Trembling
of a Leaf (Noonday, $1.65) are per-
haps too timely. Mostly from the re-
view journals, they are personal, often
penetrating, fertile and uneven. Mr.
Kazin is concerned with “the costumes
that man wears in our time,” as he puts
it in his general introduction to Dreiser’s
The Titan (Dell, 75c). Yet the fact
that he can appreciate Dreiser’s excite-
ment with “the dense, peopled, factual
world itself’ recommends the breadth
of his interest.

Twelve Original Essays on Great
American Novels, Charles Shapiro,
editor (Wayne State, $2.25) and Forms
of Modern Fiction, William Van O’Con-
nor, editor (Midland, $1.75) profit by
the symposium’s “versatile sense of
literary values.” The essays on great
American novels, Cooper to Faulkner,
are original indeed, written for this col-
lection and throwing new light. Even
where weaknesses appear, the essays
enrich one’s insights. It is so with Mal-
colm Cowley’s on The Scarlet Letter
when he describes its structure in five
acts, though he neglects the point that
parts of the novel not to be fitted into
a dramatic scheme are essential to its
distinctive tone and substance.

This flaw in Mr. Cowley’s argument
would be best overlooked, perhaps, if it
did not point to a difficulty which re-
appears in Forms of Modern Fiction, by
which Mr. O’Connor means the novel.
The openly serious writers of novels since
George Eliot who have explored new
subjects and methods, and the students
of technique, the Jameses and Lubbocks,

still flounder at times like Henry Field-

ing, who had to
of writing” in terms c
poerantiyias the thea
their

ae ‘new species
Pic, iene
these

at oP

the novel has been moving rapidly into ~

new fields, ahead of the critics. Sugges-

‘tion was the best Fielding could man-

age, and it is all Mark Shorer, for ex-
ample, should try with such dicta as
that “style is the subject.” His “Tech-
nique as Discovery” is a sort of mani-
festo and hence overwrought in spots,
but even a manifesto should avoid be-
laboring D. H. Lawrence for not saying
what he meant while confidently speci-
fying Lawrence’s meaning on the basis
of his “obscure” gaucheries. In a sense
Mr. Shorer is probably right, but he is
on sounder critical ground when he
moves toward the position of Eric
Bentley’s balanced discussion of Robert
Penn Warren in the same volume. “The
novel is still read.’ and should be de-
spite Mr. Shorer, “as though its content
has some value in itself.”

Also: Bird in the Bush by Kenneth
Rexroth (New Directions, $1.55), “ob-
vious essays,” seven from The Nation,

still fresh and alive in the reprint.
Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism,
Edward Wagenknecht, editor; /igh-
teenth Century English Literature:
Modern Essays in Criticism, James 1.
Clifford, editor; J/nterpretations oj
American Literature, Charles Feidelson,
Jr. and Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., editors
(Galaxy, $2.65 ea.) reprint fruitful,

sound key studies almost entirely un-
touched by pedantry and deservedly
called productive scholarship.

Fiction

Benjamin Constant said of his auto-
biographical novelette Adolphe (Signet
Classics, 50c) that “character is every-
thing,” but the compression of its ac-
tion too is a great virtue. Still, analysis
of feeling and motive is its chief at-
traction. Adolphe is an egoist and prac-
titioner of sensibility, and in this “anec-
dote” of 1816, Constant imposes real-
ism on old artifice and foreshadows the
modern psychological novel. This wel-
come, attractive edition includes The
Red Notebook, Constant’s memoir of
his first twenty years, and an absorbing
introduction by Sir Harold Nicolson
which traces parallels between Adolphe |
and Constant’s affair with Mme. de _
Staél.

Adolphe, here first in paper covers,
is exceptionally well edited, but vario
text series (though not invariably |
liable) are commonly preferable |
such titles. See Henry Moxie
timental | The Man of Feeling
85c), Hawthorne’s House of |
Gables Rinehart, 65c) and Trollope’s
Doctor The (Riverside, $1. Dia ry

Also: Nineteenth Century Gern

: 79 ’ : Flores, }

f
{
{
;

cellent small-scale account,

stories. Youth and The Shadow Line,
each with two other tales and admirable
introductions by Morton Dauwen Zabel
(Anchor, 95c ea.). The Transposed
Heads by Thomas Mann (Vintage,
$1.15). The Finest Short Stories of
Sean O’Faolain (Bantam, 50c). [Eigh-
teen} Stories by Elizabeth Bowen
(Vintage, $1.25). The Circus im. the
Attic and Other Stories by © Robert
Penn Warren (Dell, 50c).

Music

The Listener's. Musical Companion by
B. H. Haggin (Anchor, $1.25), a superb
handbook, incisively written. Revised.

Music and Imagination by Aaron
Copland (Mentor, 50c), a personal
examination of the role of imagination
in writing, performing and listening to
music.

Qpera as Drama by
(Vintage, $1.25), with Mozart and
Verdi as the most admired models,
shows how music and libretto meld in
truly successful opera.

Joseph Kerman

Miscellaneous

The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by
Sir Kenneth Clark (Anchor, $1.95) ex-
pertly, for all its small scale, reproduces
the 300 illustrations and the six excel-
Jent Mellon Jectures of 1953,
and’ increased to nine.

The. American. Adam:
Tragedy, and Tradition in © the
teenth Century by R. W. B.
(Phoenix, $1.35), analyzes and
times imposes patterns on debates,
1820-1860, on the ideal American.

Satires. and Epistles of Horace, a
modern English verse translation by
Smith Palmer Bovie (Phoenix, $1.95)
combines scholarship with Fforace’s col-
Joqiusal manner and sophisticated air in
all four Books.

The Song of Roland (Ann Arbor,
$1.65) with only minor failures pre-
serves the original form and assonance
in a faithful, vigorous and simple trans-
Jation by C. K. Scott Monerieff,

Devotions and Death's Duel by John
Donne, with copious seleetions from
Walton’s Life of Donne (Ann. Arbor,
$1.65), deeply moving informal ars
moriend: and consolation book, the Jat-
ter in the form of “the Doctor’s own
funeral. sermon.”

An Outline of Russian Literature. by
Mare Slonim (Mentor, 75c). An. ex-
strong in
showing interrelations with kuropean

expanded

Innocence,
Nine-
Lewis
some-

culture though it entirely omits the —

part played by the West through Popes

Nicholas J, Hadrian JE and John VIL
in the encouragement given Cyril and

Methodius in their creation of the Rus-
sian alphabet, ~ 04.0, ‘a

— 406 wire Be te

she Lk MD
siete) Lh ASG (ames

Fairfield Porter

THE LARGE exhibition of Cézanne at
the Wildenstein Galleries (until Decem-
ber 5) contains many paintings never
shown before in NewYork. The exhibi-
tion is for the benefit of the National
Organization for Mentally Il Children.
The significance of Cézanne is something
that the critics keep trying to explain:
they repeat each other and their expla-
nations overlap and insist, in the same
way that Cézanne insisted on his con-
tours. His parallel straight strokes over-
lap where they cluster around the con-
tour, like too many adjectives modity-
ing the wrong noun. Or there are gaps
between the strokes where Cézanne ig-
nored a passage that he was either sure
of, or planned to attend to Jater. “The
contour eludes me,” he is supposed to
have said. His repetitiveness 1s the stut-
ter of inarticulateness. And except ‘for
a few famous remarks, he was also’ ver-
bally inarticulate. The contour eluded
him. As he went after it, and kept fix-
ing it, 1t acquired greater and greater
firmness and simplicity of shape.

His contemporaries who rejected him
were repelled by his clumsiness. But it
was also catching, so strong was’ the
impression he made. Whistler, usually
adroit and witty, was reduced by the
sight of Cézanne’s paintings to a kind
of heavy, choked rage. He said, “If a
child painted that picture, her mother,
if she was a good mother, would slap
the child.” His contemporaries could not
understand his deviation from Impres-
sionism. Was this another revolution so
after the Impressionist one? But
Cézanne did not want to rebel, he
wanted to belong to the Salon of Bou-
guereau. He is supposed to have said
that he wanted to make out of Impres-
sionism something as solid and enduring
as the art of the museums. He adapted
Impressionism in order to bring it back
into line. The Impressionists were not
interested in the contour. Pissarro, their
most articulate spokesman, said it was
the interior color and value that count-
ed, not the edge. Cézanne insisted on
the reality of things, which the Impres-
sionists denied insofar as for them there
existed only sensation, But Cézanne,
who criticized the Impressionist exclusive
reliance on the eye, its substitution
for touch, had trouble with things; the
Impressionists didn’t.

CEZANNE classified the elements of art
in an academic way into drawing, lig
sid the Brie the Phang { pace r

soon

me He ad a_system for’ devine with,

his nervousness. He was not open to the
world; as an artist, it frightened him.
People frightened him, they resisted him,
he could not control them, he could not
even get them to respond. Cézanne’s
people are treated like still-life: objects,
immobilized and abstracted. His apples
have more instability, and they often
look about to roll off the table. The
leaves of his trees keep turning on the
branches; they quiver in the still air like
aspen leaves. Everything has motion,
but contained, except only his people,
unless they are the figures of art, like
his bacchanalian lovers. Cézanne had a
passion for fastening things down, a
passion too neurotic to be called classi-
cal. The Classicists, who did not know
that they were classical, believed in an
ordered world, which they unconscious-
ly expressed. Cézanne believed in the
Church, because he was afraid of his own
weakness. His weakness expressed itself
in the opalescent quiver of his interior
spaces, and his need for firmness ex-
pressed itself in the increasing simplicity
of his shapes and in the clarity with
which he contained -everything inside
contours, including that contour that is
the edge of the whole canvas. At the
same time everything also constantly
escapes. The landscape of Mont Sainte-
Victoire from the Philadelphia museum
makes a revelation of the truism that
earth and sky have different natures.
But still the sky and earth so tightly
and simply distinguished by their con-
tour of separation, interpenetrate each
other. The ground is airy and the sky
stony, and both splintered like flint. The

portrait with most human individuality —

is of Henri Gasquet, but this reality,
which must have threatened so timid a
man as Cézanne, is controlled by turn-
ing the sequence of the hat, the face
culminating in a peak over
temple, and the triangle of shirt front,
into a sequence of geometrical shapes.
What is the appeal of Cézanne to us
now, who no longer are unfavorably im-
pressed by his real clumsiness? To us
the stutter, the tentativeness, is itself
charming. And it represents skill, the
skill of combining a new understanding
of uncertainty (the quiver of broken

color and the elusive contour) with the,

insistent emotion of his contour lines.
His formality fascinates us, the formal-
ity of violent feclings simplified in curves
and straight lines to contain the une
certainty of what he knew, symbolized
by the colors of nature, If certainty is
not real, he will create it, Out of inar-
ticulateness comes expression, and our
of fear of contact comes his translation
of tactility into a new visual language
suggested by. Teigtebvighieny., And as his

wl
Aer TIO!
yh tae Sah i

& he

the left,

™

forms are simplified, so is finally his
color, which tended to becorne more and
more a convention of orange and blue-
green. All his broken color is still there,
just as much as all his hesitation about
the edge, but the edge that he hesitates
over is a circle at last, and the many
colors seem to have resolved into two.
For color also eluded him. Finally, con-
tour and texture contained most of his
vision, and it was his contour and tex-
ture that the Cubists appropriated.

FILMS

Robert Hatch
MEASURED by the pain it inflicts and

the damage it does, man’s greatest sin is
insensibility. And seen that way, The
400 Blows is the story of a promising
youth beset by monstrous sinners. No
one in this adult conspiracy is what we
normally call wicked — they are merely
dull, weak, indolent, impure, self-indul-
gent. But like mindless geese charging a
lamb, they drive the boy until he can

run no further (quite literally, for his

feet are in the sea). Then the film
freezes into a snapshot of his level-eyed,

_ honest face and we are left to wonder

what sort of man he will become.
The 400 Blows is the first picture by

_ Francois Truffaut, who wrote, produced

and directed it. Quite probably it is
autobiographical, at least in broad con-

tent, for M. Truffaut was himself a

_ juvenile delinquent. Later he became a

_ movie critic so savage that he was ban-

ned from the Cannes Festival; he then

_ married the daughter of the producer

_ whose films he particularly excoriated,

and at the age of twenty-seven made

this picture in response to a dare from

his father-in-law. It won the first prize
for direction at Cannes.

All this background makes good chat-
ter, and probably accounts in part for
the ecstatic reception the film has re-

ceived. Also, M. Truffaut is one of sev-
eral very young men now making pic-
tures in France; they are known as “the
new wave” and their exploits aid one
another.

I make these grudging remarks, para-

_doxically, because M. Truffaut is a pow-
erfully gifted man. It is no favor to him
to treat his first excellent venture as

though it were a miraculous vision of

‘ beauty and truth, to say that he has

_ achieved perfection at the first stroke —

Beero carly, when he has not.
The 400 Blows is no Poil de Carotte,
zs nor yet a Dangerous Games. It is a work

pewPlendid observation and it flows with ; is s visually erotic. Actually

the urgent but flexible visual pressure
which occurs when the man in charge
bas a natural affinity for the camera.
The limitation of the picture is that
its powers of insight do not match the
vividness of its surface record. Jean-
Pierre Leaud, the fourteen-year-old star
of the work, enacts with poignant ac-
curacy the schemes and disasters of
romantic boyhood. He is a joy to watch,
for he moves with the neat grace of
young strength and he has a generous,
mobile and intelligent face. But his ac-
tions and expressions convey a general-
ized alertness and responsiveness; they
are not made to define the depth or
nature of his reactions to specific ex-
perience. He responds when he is vilified
by his teacher, bamboozled by his
parents, compressed by the corrective
institution that takes him over. But
what do such things mean to him in
terms of his relations to himself and his
stance toward the world? At the end,
is he running away, or running ahead;
is he beaten or tempered; will he sink or
swim? M. Truffaut handles his young
actor, he handles all his actors, with
marvelous appreciation of the fine mesh
of behavior. But I think he has not
found the revealing devices that would
open the heart of his story without
breaking the admirably cool flow of its
reporting. These people are hauntingly
real, but they are seen closely from the
outside. One broods about what they
seem to be; the picture does not provide
access beyond seeming to what they are.

LOUIS MALLE is another in “the new
wave” of young French directors — on
the evidence of The Lovers, M. Malle is
about fourteen. He is preoccupied with
the sensation of sex at the involuntary
level, where satisfaction is the goal and
the only relevant comment is clinical; he
evades the consequences of sexual al-
liance, where competing responsibilities
come into play and narrative becomes
possible. It is very innocent to suppose
that the way people make love is dra-
matically significant, and very youthful
to believe that the fact they have done
so makes a story.

Reduced to projections of a sexual
revery, the principals of The Lovers are
remote, stiff and objectively uninterest-
ing. They too seem childlike, because
men and women are never that free of
their own pasts. To be more specific,
when a woman walks out on a husband
and child because a new acquaintance
has roused and sated her, she pays some
price for the change of alliance. If she
pays no price, she is a moral idiot and
unrewarding as a character - fict

_ It is no secret by now a

scenes of this sort, occupying in all per-
haps three minutes of the film. One is -
in a bathtub, that classic rendezvous

adolescent dreams; the other, in a
hed, is so photographed as to isolate
the woman during her moments of trans-
port. The effect is to make of sex a

If it’s bound in paper,

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THE. NEW Ingmar Bergman import,
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CHelsea

What it-retains i thé intense, - almost
hypnotic, observation of people that
makes his pictures literally shocking.
Bergman sees into people with a. power
that is almost ruthless and one. feels
atavistically that his gifts are dangerous.
A’ more openly superstitious age would,

I think, have long since carried him off

to the stake.

The story with which he works here
might be called neatly ironic. It con-
cerns three women brought together in
a maternity ward: one, high-strung and
intelligent, has miscarried and is obsessed
by the notion that the child was not
born because the husband did not want
it; the second, a good, happy young
wife, is looking forward to motherhood
with simple, animal joy, but the baby
is born dead;’ the third, a ‘tough little
defenseless girl, is waiting in bitter fear
for the child she could not rid herself of
by the usual’ backstairs’ nostrums. In
the end, she learns: the lesson of life
from the sorrows of her comrades, and
phones her mother for forgiveness and
welcome home.

Tt is, as you sée, a sadly sweet tale and
plausible only at the level of romantic
fiction. But the quality ‘of the three
women, as developed by Bergman, is
something entirely different. They grow
miraculously’ from the’ intensity. of our
insight into them; they become im-
portant by the very terms of their limi-
tations; they make claims on us, not
because they are very interesting, but
because they are so very familiar. Mem-
bers of one’s own family — _ cousins
known from childhood — make this sort
of claim. It is always a responsibility to
know a great deal about another human
being, and Bergman again and again
puts that burden on his audience.

A VERY promising bank robbery is
foiled in Odds Against Tomorrow by the
circumstances that one of the gunmen is
a Negro and another a white supremicist.
This circumstance also rather foils the
picture. Odds Against Tomorrow is an
independent production by Harry Bela-
fonte and one could therefore predict
that it would somehow-deal with race
relations. But Mr. Belafonte has chosen
an awkward story for his purpose —
crime adventure and social preachment
do not mix. For one thing, the appeal
to vicarious sadism and the call to so-
cial decency are so far apart that the
spectator becomes emotionally befud-
dled. For another, there is something
askew about deploring intolerance on the
ground that it reduces the efficiency of
armed robbery,

The virtue of the pieture — in addi-
tion to a blood-stirring cast consisting
of Mr. Deseo) Robert Ryan, Ed

ye ; :
j pills
a Po eee | aie Ea:

dat. s Shelley. - Wintets _ and» ‘Gloria

Grahame (for a moment) — is the
photography. The scenes were shot in
New York and in a Hudson River town
somewhere near Poughkeepsie during
blustery November weather. The natural
theatricality of the city and the river
under the cold light of racing cloud
banks has been brilliantly caught with
no arch artiness. It is a background
of almost percussive tension.

IT IS an excellent sign, I think, that the
Germans can make such a picture as
Arewt We Wonderful? (Wir Wunder-
kinder). It is a chronicle that treats the
Nazis with biting scorn and the “good”
Germans with no more than cold sym-
pathy. There is no breast beating in it,
but neither, is there dodging of respon-
sibility. The best it will say for Germany
as a whole in the years when Hitler rose
arid fell is that it was careless of its
fortunes and its honor; the picture ends
on the clear warning that Nazis in. the
trappings of respectability and influence
are still coloring German society.

The narrative is a simple enough story
of two former schoolmates, representa-
tive as they mature, of the extremes of
German decency and depravity, whose
lives converge at strategic moments in
the years from 1918 to the near-present.
The good boy is a somewhat colorless
romantic type (the two girls in his life
are lovely); his opposite is a chillingly
vivid recreation of the low echelon S.S.
bully. Perhaps the most brilliant. pas-
sages in the picture are the scenes of the
menage this pederstrian thug sets up in
the expropriated home of a Munich
Jewish businessman. They swarm with
relatives and hangers-on who mill about
in an atmosphere of lechery, bad art,
dishevelment and warm champagne.

This history of changing fortunes,
which is, for all its stern purpose, a little
mawkish, is framed in the convention
of cafe satire. It is allegedly being shown,
a movie within a movie, in a cafe the-
atre, and two comic singers periodical-
ly break the continuity with acrid com-
ment from the pit. This sort of device
does not translate very well — the en-
tertainers seem almost studiously ama-
teur to American eyes, and their patter
has to be paraphrased by a voice in
English (in this case an unhappily
strangulated voice), These interrup-
tions, plus the fact that the pieture
opens and closes with passages of ex-
pressionistic René Clair mockery that
fit oddly onto the romantic main theme,
give Aren't We Wonderful? an ill-ear-
pentered look. But the picture grasps
history with a resolution that would be
admirable in any people and is astonish-
ing in the Germans.

=+.
wy

By FRANK W. LEWIS

ACROSS:

1 A small company politician gets
nothing, and according to Fritz, is
occupied by foreigners. (8)

5 Forms ties, like modest dwelling
places. (6)

10 Just now, when this goes away!

11 Birds. on board would hardly be
slick chicks. (10)

12 Speaking well of nothing but the
lowly mariner, (7)

13 Did this part of Germany. appear
soft to the Soviet? (7)

14 In a colloquially amusing manner
with the tail of 3 down and. the
head of a lynx. (6)

15 Backyard helper or hauler? (7)

18 Bits and pieces of what the posse
looks for. (7)

21 It afraid of birds, possibly? (7)

24 Chopped dates, or cooked? (7)

26 Bulb displaying the internal ratio
of good judgment. (7)

27 College man dispatched to look back
for the missing ones? (9)

28 To live around a little minister of
note? (5)

29 A rough rider finishes more than
one course. (6)

30 Put on the first and third in
Hialeah! (8)

DOWN:

i Somewhat younger than the motor-
man? (Has a rather large holding,
however.) (6)

2 The supply of planes in the flight?

3 Macauley said Dryden’s imagination

resembled the wings of one. (7)

Flowers barely win out over a poet.

Disposed to add up a form of art?

It offers up fragrance, or the head

of an upstanding knight. (5)

Supports the idea of making it

Susan’s. (8)

Lived’ out, like the politician of 1

across, surrounded by decomposed

fish. (6)

16 Even solid men’s: state, eventually.

17 To make a mistake between the
sailor. and the worker would be
deviating. (8)

19 A false note, even in the confused
din, is recognizably chanted. (7)

20 To sum up, in foreign money it’s
a way to cause depression. (6)

21 Not quite direct quotes about the
point of building, (7)

22 Some self doubts about capacity
implied, with pleasant results. (7)

23 Gleans an impression of heavenly
bodies, perhaps. (6)

25 Drink is found inside the passage.
SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 812
ACROSS: 1 Not by a long shot; 9
Soaks up; 10 Globule; 11 Rifles; 14
Codfish; 15 Torch; 17 Seedy; 19 Wid-
geon; 23 Carmel; 25 Intense; 26 Bull-
dog; 27 Warrant officer... DOWN: 1
and 12 No strings attached; 2 Traffic;
3 Yesterday; 4 Laps; 5 Nightshade; 6
Stoma; 8 Head; 13 Midwestern; 15, 21
across and 7 down The Fall of the

Ane

co. ©

| Crossword Puzzle No. 843 |

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November 28, 1959

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1 have now prise seg York,” written by outsee law has Beas not been punctured; er -. That everything
titled “The Shane Gene Gleason, which constl- act that the or

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Fred J. Cook and GO phe Nation. LS glans Tiled: “The Shame of Nene yrevelations appease
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NATION

SPECIAL ISSUE: 50 OCTOBER 31, 1959

e the refa
ittle to encourage
in New York City at the jast a
that this report . will bring us mg
among New York's ae :
about the little boy vie wa 2
the police—is one of the m

tales I have ever read.

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examples
icle 10
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... plus RADIO and TV coverage, including David Susskind’s “Open End”
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DECEMBER 5, 1959 . . 25¢

BURL;

An Editorial
9

| IT’S STILL ‘THE SHAME of NEW YORK’
.
: THE SPY CIRCUS

et. Parasites With Cloaks and Daggers

ee Compton Mackenzie

| 2

i PAYOLA
| Sing a Song for Sixpence
Paul Ackerman
| | a
| ‘OATHISM’ ON THE CAMPUS

Kevin Sullivan

LETTERS

Fall Book Issue

Dear Sirs: 1 found The Nation of No-
vember 14—the Fall Book issue—an ex-
cellent one, especially since I am cover-
ing the whole problem in my class in
Literary Criticism. I’m urging my stu-
dents to read it.
Seymour BEtTsky
Professor of English
Montana State Univ.
Missoula, Mont.

Dear Sirs: May I congratulate you on
your Fall Book issue. The pieces by
George P. Elliott, R. V. Cassill and
George Steiner were, I thought, excep-
tionally good. Any one of them would
justify the issue. The three of them to-
gether make it outstanding.

GEORGE BRocKWAY
President, W. W. Norton & Co.

New York City

Dear Sirs: It’s a shame George Steiner
[Fall Book issue] can find nothing more
vital to write about than the fact that
a few minor critics can find nothing
more vital to write about than J. D.
Salinger. And at that he’s hardly con-
vincing. Sure, a few articles have ap-
peared recently, as they have about
most of the first-rate American writers,
but the word “industry” is scarcely ap-
propriate. ...

There is still much to be said about
Salinger. Until other writers learn to
speak as well as he does in “Uncle
Wiggly in Connecticut,” “Zooey,” and
in the other essays on modernity, I
for one will read any article with the
word Salinger in the title, even if it’s
by George Steiner.

Joret O. ConarRroE
New York City

‘Attainment’ or ‘Pursuit’?

Dear Sirs: Did Jefferson’s pen slip philo-
sophically, as Herbert L. Smith claims
(Letters, Nov. 7) in his argument against
the phrase “pursuit of happiness” as
used in the Declaration of Independence?

In his quiz of college students, Mr.
Smith succeeds only in demonstrating
that members of his class were un-
familiar with the document, and in their
ignorance permitted him to substitute
the word “attainment” for “pursuit.”
The permanent value of this part of the
document seems to lie precisely in the
use of “pursuit.” Jefferson knew that
the values by which men live are con-
stantly changing; the more man knows

¥ Pe Ae ee a lee
if eS re ) var)

of himself and the world in which he
lives, the more aware he is of how much
more there is to learn. He will always
pursue and never “attain.”

Instead of equating pursuit and at-
tainment, it seems students could spend
their time far more profitably studying
the values which exist in their world
so that they might more clearly and
consciously engage in the pursuit.

And, of course, their teachers as well.

Lester COLE
Los Angeles, Calif.

Red China at the U.N.

Dear Sirs: In the editorial, “Chinese
Fireworks,” (issue of November 7), you
indicate that in the most recent U. N.
vote on Chinese representation, the
United States was deserted by its
closest allies—that Britain and France,
among others, abstained. This is simply
not true: the French and British ab-
stentions took place not on the question
of representation, but on that of Red
repression in Tibet.

If Britain had refrained from opposing
the Communists on the issue of China’s
U. N. seat, it would indeed have been
surprising. Only a few weeks before the
vote, Prime Minister Macmillan report-
edly told Prime Minister Kishi of Japan
that the policy of withholding recogni-
tion was “wise and realistic.”

It would appear that your efforts to
prove Washington’s isolation in Far
Eastern affairs are foredoomed to failure.

K. H. W. Hirsorn
Oxford, England

[Mr. Hilborn states the facts on the
U. N. vote correctly, and we regret our
error. On the larger issue of Red China’s
admission to the world body, there is
no doubt that over the last few years
sentiment in favor of Peking has been
growing. In our opinion, this ,year’s
Tibet and India crises served only to
delay the inevitable-—Ed. |

International Society

Dear Sirs: During the past two years a
number of professional people interested
in the development of underdeveloped
countries have established the Society
for International Development. The so-
ciety now has over 600 members, in-
cluding some twenty institutional mem-
bers, constituting nearly a Who’s Who
in the international field. The first
issue of the /nternational Development

Review has just been published and

copies will be made available to new
members as long as the supply lasts.

The basic purpose of the society is to
provide an intellectual meeting ground

‘411 @

for people of all professional backgrounds
who are interested in economic deyelop-
ment of underdeveloped countries. Of
the present members, about 40 per cent
are of nationalities other than American.
The society is eager to extend its
membership. Interested persons are re-
quested to write the undersigned.

(Mr.) Marton CLtawson

Society for International Development
Room 408, 1145 19th St., N.W.
Washington 6, D.C.

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
409 @

ARTICLES

Parasites with Cloaks and
Daggers: The Spy Cireus

by COMPTON MACKENZID
Payola: Sing a Song for
Sixpence

by PAUL ACKURMAN
‘Oathism’ on the Campus

by WEVIN SULLIVAN
Moral Standards in Foreign
Policy .

by ROBERT PAUL WOLFF

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

414 @

416 @
419 @

422 @ Survival in Sicily
by NORMAN THOMAS di
GIOVANNI
423 @® Rabid Idealist .
by ERNEST SAMUELS
423 @ The Interview (poem)
by DAVID GALLER
424 @ Look Back to Anger :
by GHEORGHE STRINER
426 @ Art
by MAURICE GROSSER
427 @ Theatre
by HAROLD CLURMAN
428 Music
by LESTER TRIMBLE \
Crossword Puzzle (opp. 428)
by FRANK W. LEWIS
CONN
= George G. Kirstein, Publisher
= Carey MeWilliams, Wditor
= Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Mdltor

Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. ‘Rosenthal, Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, European
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Dee. 5, 1959. Vol. 189, No. 19

The Nation, published weekly (except for om: —
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Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A. by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
New York 14, N. Y¥. Second class postage paid
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Subscription Prices Domestio—One year $8, Two
years $14, Three years $20, Additional postage
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Change of Address: Three weeks’ notice is re-
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ae Digest, Index to Labor Articles, Publi¢
‘airs, Information Service, Dramatio tades.

:
:
=

~- : : d / , i
r Pee

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1959
VOLUME 189, No. 19

|) EDITORIALS

It’s Still ‘The Shame
Of New York’

That The Nation’s special issue, “The Shame of New

York,” would be a target for attack, we never doubted.
No feature article of this kind — whether it examines
the exalted myth of the FBI or the fallibility of Robert
Moses — is likely to remain immune. City government
in New York is a $2 billion (per annum) enterprise;
the stakes are high, astronomically higher than they
were when Tammany Hall was founded, and no one has
ever suggested that the tiger was toothless. But what
we did not anticipate was that Fred J. Cook’s post-
publication account on a TV program of an attempt,
in 1956, to influence his and Gleason’s reporting about
municipal affairs in New York — a charge not made or
referred to in the article — would be denied the next
day by Gene Gleason, who was co-author with Cook of
“The Shame of New York.”

7 We have, of course, checked into the background of

_ the incident and have questioned Messrs. Cook and

Gleason about what took place in the bizarre session in

the office of the District Attorney when both men, re-

porters on the New York World-Telegram and Sun —

accompanied by a bevy of spokesmen for that newspaper

— were subjected to a lengthy grilling. Frankly we

were, and are, disturbed by the accounts of Mr. Glea-

1 son’s statement as JE ae by the District Attorney’s
office.

4 _ There is no doubt that somewhere along the line

ni Gleason told an untruth; but it is by no means clear

whether the sudden and unexplained retraction is more
to be believed than the original accusation. Contrary
to the original reports, Gleason did not sign a “six-page”
statement or any other kind of statement. Confessions
_ under pressure are properly suspect and unsigned con-
_ fessions under pressure are doubly so.

& ¥ % ~
os is a ote : ' :
oe - é

& ¥) 2 label BS et :
, ‘Bias oa

=. Phe original assignment for “The Shame of New

i as »

THE

NATION

York” was given to Fred Cook, who has written other
major feature articles for The Nation. Cook requested
the assistance of Gleason, who had worked with him
in developing the original , stories on which “The
Shame of New York” was based. Our confidence in
Fred Cook is wholly unimpaired. He has been placed
in a most unfortunate position for which he is in no
manner responsible, as even the District Attorney’s of-
fice concedes. The action of the World Telegram and
Sun in summarily dismissing both reporters may not
appear to others as unfair or precipitate, but we are ot!
convinced that it was grossly unfair to Mr. Cook, who '
had served the paper with loyalty and distinction for
sixteen years; and subsequent developments, we feel,
may place the Gleason matter in quite a different light
than the lurid one in which it was first reported. What
has happened to Fred Cook should stand as a horrible “ee
example of what is likely to happen to any reporter
who insists on pursuing stories of great civic importance
about which his city desk is not too enthusiastic. For
some years now it has been apparent that the World-
Telegram and Sun would seize upon the first opportunity
that presented itself to discharge Cook. But the shabby
treatment he received zs surprising.

At the outset, the World-Telegram categorically de-
nied that Cook had told his supervisors about the
“bribe” incident in 1956. But the crawling soon began.
Yes, Cook had taken Norton Mockbridge, the city
editor, to lunch in 1956 as Cook had said; yes, Cook
had told Mockbridge that he (Cook) and Gleason “were
beating their heads against the wall” in trying to get —
the facts about Title I projects; yes, Cook had said ae
a number of persons “with whom he and Mr. Gleaso Mr
had contact in the city government” had warned him
that they were “getting into deep water” by probing
Title I; yes, Cook had said that he was worried about —
the preesnees being applied to Gleason; yes, Cook h iad
‘said that “press agents” had made offers of jobs and
favors; all Mockbridge does not recall about the at

ey oa

; ae ok

-
ae

7 2, ee ee

RS ge al a

eon conversation is the mention of a city official. The
concessions are in remarkable contrast to the original
unqualified denial. After checking the facts, we are con-
vineed that the level of the working press of New York
would be measurably raised if it were manned through-
out by men of Cook’s courage, intelligence, integrity
and high sense of social responsibility.

BUT there is always some silver in the lining of every
cloud — dark, medium-dark and just gray. For ex-
ample, the 8,000,000 residents of New York have been
given a splendid alternative in their quest for honest
city government. All of their problems have now been

reduced to a simple, comprehensive issue. The vexa-
tious questions raised in “The Shame of New York” —
which by no means listed all facing this great city —
can now be banished. For, if we may judge by recent
statements by Mayor Wagner, District Attorney Hogan
and the ineffable Robert Moses, there is just one issue
before these 8,000,000 New Yorkers today — whether
or not an effort was made in 1956 by a city official to
influence Gene Gleason.

When, therefore, New Yorkers read, as they have at
regular intervals subsequent to October 31 when “The
Shame of New York” first appeared, of the steadily ac-
cumulating evidence of the mess that Robert Moses has
made of Title I, they can dismiss the stories as un-
pleasant fantasies. Their concern should be: did success
spoil Gene Gleason? Did a young, talented reporter,
honored for his diligence by his colleagues of the work-
ing press, exaggerate an incident which occurred in 1956
and which he reported to Fred Cook who, in firm re-
liance on its authenticity, referred to it in the by-now-
famous Open End program on TV?

When local residents read, as they did subsequent to
October 31, of the death of four children from infectious
diseases contracted in a rat-infested upper West Side
slum, they can dismiss it as a nightmare; the real issue
is Gene Gleason.

When they read of Frank A. Zelano, the courageous
rank-and-file member of the transit union, victim of the
gruesome “bugging” incident described in “The Shame
of New York,” still being denied the hearing which
Mayor Wagner promised him, their consciences can rest
easy; there is only one issue, the shame of Gleason.

When they read of the sentencing of retired Police

at ie

Bs carrying less than $19,000 in loose change in his pockets
was described by Messrs. Cook and Gleason, let the un-

n lew restos comely based on the: life of Fiotelle La-
f Guardia.

_ When they read, as they did recently, of a shakedown
: engineered by officials of the Bureau of Weights and

410 a f 5

Meattires of butcher in ihe very somes s sections ‘of cee
city — butchers who were in turn robbing the poor by
selling them cheap meats at top prices and by secretly
pressing down hard on the scales with their fat, greedy
thumbs — let them forget about it. The whole story
sounds as though it were a script written by the late
Bert Brecht about a new Threepenny Opera in
which Mack-the-Knife is your friendly neighborhood
butcher. Fred Loughran, the ousted head of the bureau,
described as a Stork Club character with a summer
home is Islip, where the Mayor summers, and a fine
apartment in Yonkers—in addition to a Brooklyn home
—all on a salary of $158 a week, is not the villain.
Fie upon the thought; the real culprit is G.G.

The facts set forth in “The Shame of New York” re-
main to be challenged or acknowledged. Although the
issue has been out for a month, no requests for correc-
tions or retractions have come to this office. The citizens
of New York still want to know, Messrs. Wagner, Hogan
and Moses, why a city of 8,000,000 people and 9,000,-

000 rats has “‘lost its soul.”

San Juan Circus

The House Un-American Activities Committee re-
cently held hearings in Puerto Rico. The pattern was
the one familiar to mainland Americans. The friendly
witnesses, mostly detectives, FBI agents, informers and
the like, read their scripts of accusation and exposure.
The unfriendly witnesses, really defendants, are then
put on the stand and decline to talk on grounds of one
or another Constitutional amendment. The committee
winds up its proceedings by threatening the recalcitrant
witnesses with contempt citations. In the United States
this goes on, for the most part, in an atmosphere of
public indifference and perfunctory press approval. In
Puerto Rico things were different; both public and press
were actively hostile. The pickets were numerous and
vociferous. The San Juan Star of November 19, under
the caption “Yesterday’s Circus,” commented editorial-
ly on the “Yankee-Go-Home” signs on the walls of
public buildings and the floods of hostile leaflets. “All
this flurrying around,” said the Star, “seems aimed at
showing that the U.S. is interested in improving the
situation in Latin America, when, actually, it is just
such nonsense as this which has put us in the pickle
we’re in with our Latin American neighbors. Not Mc-
Carthy-like probings, but a radically new approach to
our Latin American foreign policy is required.” Writ-
ing to The New York Times, Waldo Frank made a
similar observation. Mr, Frank warned: “If our De-
partment of State and certain sectors of the press per-
sist in labeling as Communist every organized effort to-
ward social justice and a better condition of life, they
will end by } persuading the peasant everywhere to as-
sociate the, reforms he nena lb Perko A ‘that

4 he he » a N YI
' ; - Lame. b ‘ ry / b i A }

+- Med b i

Ly 7

point we shall have lost our battle.” Mr. Frank was
writing of Cuba, but things are pretty much the same
everywhere south of the Rio Grande. If the commit-
tee must make a show of itself, it would be better to
do it at home.

Comstock Rides Again

In the October 10 issue, The Nation had something
to say about the danger to civil liberties in Postmaster
General Arthur EF. Summerfield’s “war on muck.” In
the same issue, Stanley Meisler presented the history
and present status of this everlasting war. The Post
Office became responsible for the nation’s morals in
1873, with the passage of the Comstock Law. Anthony
Comstock, agent of the New York Society for the Sup-
pression of Vice, will be remembered by readers of H. L.
Mencken as the ardent smut hound whose idea of sup-
préssing “vice” was to ban books which the next genera-
tion regarded as great literature. He has worthy suc-
cessors and one of them, Representative Kathryn Gran-
ahan, is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Postal
Operations, which has been touring the country and,
reaching San Francisco, received a mixed reception.
The police yanked Playboy off the newsstands. A “non-
sectarian” committee was formed to combat books and
magazines that “numb the mind and lead to rape.”

~ Among the books cited were Lady Chatterley’s Lover,

The Blackboard Jungle and Pornography and the Law.
The Protestants and Jews were apparently lukewarm
about the crusade and did not send representatives, but
the moving spirit of the committee, a lady attorney,
said this must have been because they didn’t get the
notices that had been sent out.
Unfortunately, this spirit of caution did not extend to
Representative Granahan. She cited what the San
Francisco Chronicle called “amazing statistics.” “One
out of twelve persons arrested in the nation,” according
to the “pleasant-looking matron in an attractive hat,”
are juveniles and “im every case they are found to be
hiding this kind of literature in their pockets or under
their pillows.” (Italics supplied.) Furthermore, Mrs.
Granahan has discovered that “80 per cent of the in-
mates of juvenile mental institutions in Pennsylvania
are children under fifteen and every one of them is there
because they read this [lewd] literature.” The Congress-
woman’s final discovery is that the “campaign of filth
and smut” aimed at the nation’s youth might well
prove to be “Communist inspired.” In many cases, she
observed, the same attorneys defended Communists
and persons accused of publishing indecent literature.
The lady is evidently given to sweeping statements, but
Anthony Comstock, reading obscene literature through
all eternity, should be proud of her.

PARASITES WITH CLOAKS AND DAGGERS

THE SPY CIRCUS ee by Compton Mackenzie

DURING HIS visit to the United
States, Mr. Khrushchev claimed
that the Russians had broken one
of the American codes. That may
well be true, but the public must
not jump to the conclusion that some
sinister master-spy in the top tele-
vision class had been able to tempt
an American citizen to sell the con-
tents of a code book to him. If a
cipher has been broken, it will have
been broken by a team of industrious
and patient experts working in a back
room somewhere in Moscow; and

SIR COMPTON MACKENZIE, one
of Britain’s best known and most
prolific novelists and biographers,

served with British Intelligence for

_ several years. after having been in-

valided out of the British Army in

1916.

December 5, 1959

against that possibility there is no
defense except continuous changing
of the ciphers. Mr. Khrushchev was
reported to have said that American
agents in Europe and the Middle
East gave the Russians their code
books and that these were used to
send back false information. It is
difficult to believe that anybody so
intelligent as Mr. Khrushchev could
talk such nonsense; but when he
chaffed Allen Dulles, head of the CIA,
at a White House dinner about their
both paying the same agents for in-
formation, he was probably stating
a fact. The amount of money wasted
in subsidizing worthless information
all over the world should keep every
taxpayer resentfully awake at night.

Let me say at this point that any
expense undergone by either side to
safeguard the secrets of scientific de-

struction can obviously be justified.
At the same time, my experience of
British, German, French, Italian,
Serbian and Russian Intelligence
during the First World War makes
me feel very doubtful whether the
protection of these scientific secrets
is aS competent as we hope. Be
that as it may, the scientific spy
could be as formidable a figure as
the wartime spy of once upon a time
before the invention of radio, radar
and the airplane reduced him to
comparative unimportance.

What we suffer from now is the
peacetime spy who, in nine cases
out of ten, is not a spy at all but an
agitator or propagandist whose al-
leged activities are an excuse for of-
ficialdom to waste vast sums of
money on counterespionage. Toward

the end of World War One, the

411

Chief of the British Secret Service
wanted me to succeed him a year or
two after the war was over. When I
told him that as soon as the war end-
ed I intended to get back to my own
work, he said reproachfully, “But
our work is much more fun in peace-
time, you know.” And that is the
trouble. The magic of Secret Service
is too potent for most men. They
are back in their boyhood, playing
cowboys and Indians; Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn are at their
side; they are characters in the
books of the thriller merchants who
provide fustian cloak and dagger
romance. The Wild West may no
longer exist, but the pipe-dream
paradise of Secret Service, unfortu-
nately for the taxpayer, was never so
easily attainable as it is today.

In 1932 the third volume of my
war memories was suppressed by the
authorities and I was prosecuted un-
der the Official Secrets Act. There
was a state trial at the Old Bailey.
In the paradoxical words of one
paper, “world-famous figures of the
Secret Service were watching the
case.” The proceedings were a cross
between the trial of the Knave of
Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and
Bardell v. Pickwick, but as most of
the case was heard im camera the
absurdity of the proceedings could
not be reported by the press. Never-
theless, it can be a very expensive
business to produce a farce at the
Old Bailey, and when the curtain
came down I set out to recoup my
losses by writing Water on the Brain,
a skit on the Secret Service. In a
preface to a subsequent edition, I
wrote:

Water on the Brain was written
immediately after my trial at the
Old Bailey under the Official Secrets
Act. At the time, the book must have
seemed to the average reader a
fantastic Marx Brothers affair, but
during the Second World War many
more people discovered that those
responsible for Secret Intelligence do,
in very fact, as often as not behave
like characters created by the Marx
Brothers. Duck Soup, for instance,
appealed to me as a film of stark
realism.

Water on the Braim at one time
looked like becoming a serious text-
book for neophytes of the Secret

*Penguin Books, 1959.

we ty eer spe e .

: ,
Service, and indeed if it had not for
a time been so difficult to get hold
of, it would probably have become a
standard work. ...

By a coincidence I had just fin-
ished copying those words when I
received a letter from San Francisco:

Your: New Preface to Water on
the Brain . .. impels me to let you
know that your book was used as a
text book in a U.S. Intelligence
agency, OSS. Since copies were not
procurable in 1942, one hundred
photostats were made. .

I wonder if today’s public, with
wider experience of the absurdities
of Secret Intelligence, will any longer
accept the book as merely a gro-
tesque fairy tale. I should add that
Greek Memories, the book suppressed
in 1932, was published in 1940 un-
censored. What the Secret Service
people had really objected to was
being laughed at in Greek Memories;
seemingly it was important for the
public to take them seriously lest
their appropriation be cut down (the
vote on the Secret Service appropri-
ation, by the way, is secret). When
war came and money was being
lavishly squandered again, my books
of war memories no longer worried
them.

I DO NOT know whether there is a
secret vote for Intelligence funds in
the United States or whether there
is any method of checking the way
in which such money is spent.’ There
is none in Britain. Our Secret Service
was started by the Cecils in the time
of Elizabeth I and much developed
in subsequent centuries to protect
William of Orange and the Hanover-
ian monarchs. It was used most ef-
fectively of all in the days of the
French Revolution and Napoleon.
After that it languished until a few
years before the First World War.
Then it was decided that we must

2In the United States, the bulk of
funds for Intelligence are lumped in
the budget for the National Security
Council; the rest is buried in the bud-
gets for the various military services.
Formal apropriation is made by a sub-

committee of the Appropriations Com-

mittee in secret session; subcommittee
members are told only as much as Ad-
ministration spokesmen want to_ tell
them, which is very little. There is no
further accounting for the funds either
to Cone or to the American peo-

ple,—
b ie
ion 7 ; via »
™ p. | tales ee

find out something more about Ger-
man war plans than the average
military or naval attaché could man-
age on a pittance for such work. A
small organization was formed under
a naval commander to handle espi-
onage, and another — under a major
— to handle counterespionage in
Britain and the Crown Colonies. The
money for the former was supplied
by the Foreign Office, for the latter
by the War Office. The Admiralty
ran its own Intelligence Division.
When war came in 1914, various or-
ganizations for Intelligence were start-
ed. In the Mediterranean area there
were several of them with their
various headquarters in London, to
which could be added four censor-
ships (all of them unwilling to co-
operate with one another). The
French, Italians and Serbians were
hard at work, and until the Bolshe-
vik Revolution there were one or
two feeble and amateurish Russian
centers. In Athens, the Germans had
four separate organizations, all com-
municating with Berlin independent-
ly of one another until they were
abandoned at the end of 1916 to-
gether with the Turkish, -Austrian
and Bulgarian espionage centers.

The new passport regulations were
not established until the war had
been going on for nearly two years,
Our system in Britain was copied by
every other power, and when the war
came to an end the passport depart-
ments of embassies and _ legations
served — and still serve — as a
cover for much of the Intelligence
work festering in Europe today. I
use a strong verb, but it is not too
strong for what I believe to be the
harm they do to the cause of inter-
national understanding,

One of the problems of the modern
world is the rapid multiplication of
parasites in every direction; the
parasites encouraged by Intelligence
“yt oN, , N amine .

+ uthe fit a, ahs

are the most noxious of all because
their existence depends on being able
to produce the conditions in which
they can flourish. Moreover, they
excite public hysteria, and the very
word “spy” has for the public a more
menacing sound than “murderer.”
When British or U.S. spies are ar-
rested or expelled on the other side
of the Iron Curtain, the public is
encouraged to believe that the no-
tion of a British or American spy is
a wicked fantasy invented by the
Communists. In Britain the press
always puts a British or American
Spy in quotation marks when they
report the apparently incredible be-
havior which has led to his expul-
sion from Moscow or Prague or War-
saw. The public on the other side of
the Iron Curtain is soothed with
the same syrup of injured innocence.

~
Tae

es |

I HAVE already admitted that the
protection of nuclear secrets is vital,
and nobody should grudge the money
spent on this. Beyond that, I be-
lieve most of the paraphernalia of
| Intelligence is a pernicious waste of
time and an unwarrantable expendi-
ture of money. I recognize that un-
_ controlled immigration is impossible
| for the economy of certain countries,
| but why does any country suppose
} that its present or future is served
| by spending vast sums of money in

__ the control of its visitors? Why does
any country suppose that to fill up
forms in train or plane stating in
} what year the tourist was born and
| ‘the maiden name of his mother and

Sr NRT ROE

questions is a useful precaution?

The man on mischief bent will have
no difficulty in filling up these forms
and the passport of such a man will
be above suspicion. In time of war,
a it may be necessary to check the
movement of travelers; in time of
peace such control is merely a de-
vice to employ a lot of people who
might otherwise be unemployed.

In time of war, spy mania is en-
demic, much intensified by the prac-
tice of bombing cities from the air.
Yet there is not one single well-at-
tested example of a spy signaling
to hostile planes. If the air forces
of the world were dependent on such
aid, their effective destruction would

- }

answering a number of other idiotic —

| ie oy soey reduced. The

hysteria of the military authorities
in Great Britain at the beginning of
the Second World War was a blot
upon our reputation for keeping calm
in moments of national peril. If all
the supposedly potential spies had
been left to carry on their business
as maitres d’hétel and waiters, the
course of the war would not have
been disturbed by a ripple.

Secret Intelligence work has a
progressively lowering effect upon
the intelligence of those who are en-
gaged upon it, particularly at a high
level. Three years are the very ut-
most a man should be retained in a
position of such responsibility. His
view of human nature becomes stead-
ily more and more distorted and his
judgment of political motive less and
less sound, He outgrows his ability
to give reassuring advice to the ex-
ecutive, because an improvement in
international relations threatens his
own career. He becomes chained to
prejudice and mistrust. Under his
influence those below him come to
regard common sense as a threat to
Intelligence. As for the rank and file,
they are naturally continuously
eager to believe the worst because
that is what they are paid to do,
and the cleverest of them are too
often tempted to indulge in double-
crossing. Mr. Khrushchev obviously
has as much contempt for his own
agents as he has for those of the

West. At the same time, he could
not help bragging of the confidential
messages he had been able to read,
and of deliberately sending false in-
formation in the American code he
claimed to possess. The obvious truth
is that both sides are engaged in
sending false information in the codes
of their opponents. The efforts of

_the Russian Embassy in London to

obtain information by bribing unim-
portant misfits in the military serv-
ices are pathetic in their uselessness;
I have little doubt that the efforts
of the British Embassy in Moscow
are equally pathetic.

WHEN Mr. Khrushchev surprised
the United Nations Assembly by
Proposing complete disarmament i in

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ay
ie
ihe

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a nee
four years, the general ‘opinion was
that it was bluff. In that case why
did nobody call it? Instead, it was
pointed out by various politicians,
with the usual platitudes, that it was
no use talking about disarmament
until the method of controlling dis-
armament had been decided. A creak-
ing cart was to be put in front of
the horse. Why? Because, threat-
ened with the loss of its occupation,
Intelligence wanted to guarantee the
continuance of its job.

But at this point let me say a
word on behalf of Intelligence. We
must not assume that Intelligence ae
was at fault because the British a
Government has made a mess of the ae
Middle East and the Near East (the ae
latter being now ignorantly called
the Middle East). Intelligence may
have provided accurate informa-
tion about the state of affairs to
which the government may have ie
been deliberately deaf. I have had
too exasperating an experience of

foretelling exactly what would hap-

pen if a certain line of action were

pursued, and of finding such prophe-

cies steadily ignored, to preserve the _
least faith in the ability of politi-
cians to benefit from accurate In-
telligence. Mr. Khrushchev may
congratulate himself on knowing —
what his opponents are going to do
next by intercepting a telegram; he
overestimates their capacity for
knowing what they themselves are
going to do next. We recognize hat
the Russians are a nation of chess
players, and the Russians foolish iy
persist in believing that all we
tions in the West are the same.
Russian panic over Hungary
probably due to their belief
U.S. disapproval over Suez

deliberate camouflage for a projected
American intervention in Central
Europe. This to us ludicrous credu-
lity can only be explained by the
activities of American and British
Intelligence agents in the satellite
countries. Tension between West and
East would certainly be relaxed if
those activities were given up. The
efforts of Russian agents to stir up
trouble in Africa and elsewhere are
inspired by the missionary spirit of
communism and can only be ren-
dered ineffective by counter-mission-
aries backed by the constructive
spirit of capitalism.

During the First World War,
British Intelligence collected over
30,000 names for a secret black list
compiled from the contributions of
its various branches. From time to
time I would ask for the removal of

a = a

names of suspects whose innocence
had been established by further in-
vestigation. Could I get one of those
names erased? Not one. In the end
I grew so fed up with this attitude
that I refused to contribute any fresh
names. The leatherbottoms, chair-
borne in London with herbaceous
borders of ribbons earned by feats
of valor with a typewriter, then
tried to get their own back by pester-
ing me with requests to report the
latest activities and whereabouts of
suspects in the list. One day I was
rebuked for having failed for a
whole year to report anything further
about Hagios Taxiarches, the smug-
gler, and was ordered to put an agent
on his track. I replied that I should
require aircraft for such a task, and
when I was indignantly asked what
I meant by such a request, I re-

plied that if as instructed I was fo
find out what the Archangel Michael
was doing I must have aircraft. They
had confused some smuggler with
the name of his boat — the Holy
Taxiarch, which is how the Arch-
angel Michael is sometimes referred
to in Greece.

I could relate a hundred stories
of almost equal fatuity by Intel-
ligence, but the public, fed by spy-.
thrillers and television with pretend-
ed true stories of Secret Service ad-
venture, likes to believe in such fairy
tales. I feel like the parent who
cannot bring himself to undeceive
his children about Santa Claus.

Nevertheless, I owe it to my con-
science to declare that the effect of
Intelligence work on international
understanding is perhaps the greatest
threat facing peace today.

PAYOLA: Sing a Song for Sixpence . . by Paut Ackerman

A TRADITIONAL method of song-
plugging—the payment of money to
secure the performance of a song or
a record—has now engaged the at-
tention of the House Special Sub-
committee on Legislative Oversight,
District Attorney Frank Hogan of
New York City, and newspapers
across the country. The practice,
common for decades, received little
notice until the recent TV quiz scan-
dals turned the attention of the sub-
committee to the general area of
song and record promotion.

Involved are broader problems
than that of commercial bribery.
The investigation will turn a spot-
light upon the question of what con-
stitutes Proper use of the publicly
owned air waves; and it touches also
upon how the country’s musical
taste is formed—i.e., does certain
music become popular only because
a disk jockey has been paid to play
it on the air?

Radio and records fell into each
other’s arms, so to speak, in the

PAUL ACKERMAN is music-radio
editor of The Billboard, national
weekly covering the amusement m-
dustry.

1940s, and because each needs the
other, the love match has not ended.
TV forced the two together. As
sponsors turned increasingly to the
glamorous new medium, local radio
stations, forced to economize, cut
live programing—including music—
to the bone and came to rely on
recordings to fill the void.

Today, several thousand record
manufacturers are licensed by the
American Federation of Musicians,
of which about 700 are producing
records on a consistent schedule.
The rest “take a flyer” when ready
money, artists and a song happen to
be available at the same time.

It is deceptively easy to “take a
flyer.” A “side” can be recorded for
a few hundred _ dollars; pressing
plants are ready to drop ship” the
disks if the manufacturer is a fair
credit risk; the need for warehousing
is obviated, and the possible profits
are large. But large, too, are the
potential losses if the manufacturer
oversteps the bounds of sensible pro-
motion by flooding distributors with
tree records, — '

Some 200 “single” records — the

term for seven-inch 45s—are released

weekly these days, and of course

only a few become hits. The disk
jockey—chief promotion source for
a record—obviously lacks sufficient
air time to promote everything he
receives. So the competition be-
comes fierce—and at this point pay-
ola comes into play. Payola is an
ugly word, and there are those in the
music industry who prefer to use a
softer one: romancing. The nuances
are supposedly different. When a
record manufacturer, record distrib-
utor or music publisher wines and
dines a visiting disk jockey, it is
“romancing”—a practice no better
and no worse, it is argued, than simi-
lar generosities extended to buyers
or sellers in other industries. But
when does romancing end and pay-
ola begin? And, the more idealistic
ask, can one legitimately compare
radio and TV, with their explicit re-
sponsibility to operate in the public
interest, with any ordinary private
industry?

THE TECHNIQUES of payola are
various. Some record distributors
give certain disk jockeys a monthly
“retainer” to plug their records, Or
the jockey may be given a share in |
the music-publishing business, and

' | NATION

may even own a copyright. Some —
jockeys are also in the retail record

business or own an interest in rec-
ord-pressing plants.

Thus, aside from the question of
commercial bribery, there arises also
the question of conflict of interest.
Jack Gould noted in The New York
Times of November 20 that the
American Broadcasting Company
had ordered Dick Clark, a teenage
idol and disk jockey, to divest him-
self of an interest in music publish-
ing and record firms. Clark may
have taken something of a “bad
rap,” the radio columnist noted, and

added:

If Congress is going to pursue this
realistically, then it will find that
many singing stars have a “conflict
of interest” at some point. In-
numerable singers own “a piece” of
a music publishing house and favor
songs of that house in their reper-
toires. And ages ago, it was com-
mon practice for some singers to in-
sist that, in exchange for plugging a
tune, they be listed as co-author, a
neat dodge that could mean royal-
ties for years. . .

In one form or another, payola
predates both the modern record
business and the disk jockey. In the
1920s, the practice was common in
vaudeville, then the best vehicle for

plugging a song. In the 1930s, ro-

mancing and/or payola were con-
centrated in the band business. Rec-
ords and disk jockeys had not yet
reached their present position of
eminence. But “plugs” by name
bands via remote broadcasts from
smart hotel spots were highly sought
after by music publishers and _ re-
sulted in large sales of sheet music
(no longer a factor).

BY THE late 1930s, payola at the
band level reached such proportions
that several important music busi-
ness executives decided to work out
a Fair Practice Code aimed at out-
lawing the practice. One of the
chief movers in this attempt was the
late John G. Paine, then chairman of
the board of the Music Publishers’

Protective Association and subse-—

quently general manager of the

American Society of Compe Au-—

Srors and eee Anc

name, which today is operated by
a son, Herbert.

The plan for a code collapsed,
however. This reporter was told at
the time that rank-and-file publish-
ers opposed it because they felt that
without payola, they could not sur-
vive in their highly competitive in-
dustry. And this is what they are
arguing today.

There is no doubt that payola is
practiced widely today by manufac-
turers and distributors—including
many who dislike it, but feel that it
is necessary for their survival. “I
regret,” one manufacturer told me
recently, “that our hands are no
longer clean.” Both big and small
companies have bowed to the facts
of life, it would seem.

There is reason to believe that,

proportionately, payola is not nearly
so widespread among jockeys. Of
the thousands of jockeys now at
work across the country, it is doubt-
ful whether more than a few hun-
dred are important enough to be
subjected to “heavy” romancing.

WHAT IS the effect of all this upon
the nation’s music? Would Rock
’ Roll, for instance, be with us if
there were no such thing as payola?
It is axiomatic in the music busi-
ness that a “bad” song or record—
by which is meant a song lacking in
commercial appeal—can never prove
a hit no matter how much plugging
it gets, legitimately or ‘illegitimately.
:. a eee

“ood” song—i.e., a song with com-
mercial appeal—must receive ade-
quate plugging if it is to achieve its
hit potential.

Elvis Presley was adequately
plugged, but he is also “good.” All
the payola in the world used in be-
half of competing disks will never
dent the popularity of this singer,
whose records have already grossed
more than $50,000,000 in the last
five years.

In sum: payola may be ethically
deplorable, but it is unlikely that
it has ever changed, or ever could
change, the course of popular Amer-
ican music.

IT IS important to remember that
the current “crisis” in the music
business is concerned solely with so-
called “single” records—the seven-
inch disks which are manufactured
primarily for the teenage market
and which today dominate radio’s
musical programing. Will this teen-
age fare continue to be radio’s chief
musical ingredient? Here is a situa-
tion which merits examination not
only by radio and the sponsors, but
by the federal agencies whose func-
tion it 1s to see that broadcasters
operate in the public interest.

Long-play records, or albums, pro-
duced primarily for the adult mar-
ket, account for approximately 75
per cent of the industry’s total retail
dollar volume. The amount of al-
bum material programed by radio
stations is not nearly as large as the
amount of “single” record material;

but it is increasing. Album reper- —

toire contains much fine classical
music, jazz, folk, mood and pop mu-
sic. This adult area of radio pro-

graming is relatively free of payola,

for here the disk jockey never be-
came such an important promo-
tional lever. If present trends con-
tinue, it 1s quite possible that the
listening audience will be favored
with more album recordings, as more
and more radio executives and spon-
sors realize the necessity to re ach”
larger audience.
The present probe must,
ally, lead to an examination o
the foregoing facets of the comy
cated song and record business. T
ultimate result ought to be a healt
ier music and radio industry, —

ae
p |

(

WHEN ON November 17 Harvard
and Yale universities withdrew from
the federal student-loan program be-
cause of the loyalty-affidavit re-
quirement, there was a ripple of ap-
plause through academic groves and
a murmur of approval from editorial
corners. But whether the conscience,
or even the attention, of the great
public was caught by this action is
more than doubtful; for in a culture
where intellect is suspect, the sub-
ject of education—except as an as-
sayable commodity—is food for
bores. Yet the significance of the
event was clear. Two major univer-
sities, following a lead marked out
for them by Princeton and several of
the country’s smaller liberal arts col-
leges (Amherst, Swarthmore, Ober-
lin and others), had by their action
openly repudiated the implication,
embodied in the National Defense
Education Act of 1958, that the
American student, precisely because
he is a student in need of financial
aid, is potentially a greater security
risk than his less talented or less am-
bitious or less impecunious fellow-
citizen. This citizen, like some of
his Senators, might wonder what
all the hullabaloo is about—why
shouldn't these kids sign an affidavit
worth $1,000 or more a year to
them?—and he is likely to dismiss
the issue as an egghead quibble, a
tempest in an egg cup.

It was not always so. Apathy and
hysteria polarize the public’s re-
sponse to education, and the present
apathy—if the vote on the New
York school-bond issue may be read
as a symptom—is far from the hys-
teria that shivered the scholastic air
when, two years ago, to our wild
amaze a crew of vulgar boatmen
launched Sputnik into space. The
threat, then literally swinging over
our heads, was valid cause for alarm;
but it seemed then, and it still
seems, that the alarm was excited
more by the threat to our amour
propre than to our armor of defense.
Surpassed—could anyone doubt it?

KEVIN SULLIVAN is Assistant
Dean of the Graduate Faculties,
Columbia University.

416

Ae day A Ue ee

—in technological skill, in that know-
how we used to think peculiarly our
own, Americans developed overnight
a sense of shame as acute as their
sense of danger; we were as anxious
in those days to relieve the national
embarrassment as to bolster national
defense. It was natural, therefore,
that when we looked around in
democratic indignation for someone
to blame, the culprit should finally
prove to be not the administration
that shaped our policy nor the mili-
tary charged with our defense, but
the schools to which we had en-
trusted the education of our youth.
Invidious comparisons were made
between Soviet and American edu-
cation, the air was thick with un-
answerable question and jittery ac-
cusation, the prevailing mood was
one of gloomy urgency. Educators,
for the most part, perhaps secretly
gratified that they were at last re-
ceiving any kind of attention, took
the punishment quietly, for there
was now a hope that once the furor
died down the end of talk would be
the beginning of action. And they
were almost right, though the action
they got was not altogether to their
liking.

BY SEPTEMBER 2, 1958, less than
a year after the Russians burst into
space, Congress had passed and the
President signed into law the Na-
tional Defense Education Act.
Though in signing the President
spoke of the act as “an emergency
undertaking to be terminated after
four years,” it was evident that this
was no ordinary crash program.
General debate over federal aid to
education had been going on for al-
most a quarter of a century — a de-
sultory and inconclusive debate. Now
at last a decision had been made and
a principle established: federal aid
to education was right and neces-
sary, though of course in the appli-
cation of that principle—how much
aid and what kind and to whom—
room still remained for further dis-

cussion. This there has been,

Immediately after passage of the
act—only twice before in our history
had there been any comparable fed-

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‘OATHISM’ ON THE CAMPUS . oe by Kevin Sullivan

eral esi on onhtetaaet the North-
west Ordinance of 1787 and the
Morrill Act of 1862 which estab-
lished the land-grant colleges—the
Administration, which had seen the
bill pass smoothly through Congress
(66 to 15 in the Senate, 212 to 85
in the House), was in a more opti-
mistic, indeed a self-congratulatory
mood. There was now a law which,
according to the U. S. Office of Edu-
cation, “authorizes something over
one billion dollars in federal aid. In
the swinging sweep of its ten titles it
touches—and returns to touch again
—every level of education, public
and private, from the elementary
school through the graduate.” A
month after its passage Lawrence G.
Derthick, U. S. Commissioner of Ed-
ucation, expressed his gratification
with “the broad sweep of approval”
which the act had received across
the country. Since then it has be-
come increasingly clear that this was
by no means a clean sweep.

Many educators, while acknowl-
edging the act as generous, compre-
hensive and long past due, were
troubled—chiefly, as the recent ac-
tion by Harvard and Yale indicates,
by the so-called loyalty-oath provi-
sion written into Title X, section
1001(f). This requires of all student
applicants for a federal loan not only
the usual oath of allegiance—few ob-
ject seriously to this—but an affi-
davit to the effect that the student
“does not believe in, and is not a
member of and does not support any
organization that believes in or
teaches the overthrow of the United
States Government by force or vio-
lence or by any illegal or unconstitu-
tional methods.” The italics are
mine. The educators were not of
course objecting to the rhetoric—
though they might have itched to
score this with blue pencil—but to
the discriminatory implications of
this particular disclaimer and to the
practical and philosophical futility
of all such oaths. The silence of the
educators in the days of Sputnik
now gave way to a collective—not,
unfortunately, a concerted—chorus
of dissent.

In the spring of this year, a Senate

The Nation —

“ Py })

Od i ea

——

Subcommittee on Education pro-
vided them with a forum. Individual
officers of education who could not
appear personally had firmly worded
statements read into the record, and
groups and associations of every
stripe—college faculties, university
departments, student associations,
chapters of the AAUP, spokesmen
for the ACLS, the Association of

American Colleges, even non-aca-

demic organizations such as_ the
American Jewish Congress and the

National Council of the Churches of
Christ—joined common cause in op-

position to the provisions of Title X.

And the cause seemed notably ad-
vanced when Arthur Flemming ap-

_ peared before the subcommittee and

threw the weight of his Department
of Health, Education, and Welfare
to the side of the dissidents.

THE NEXT three months were full
of hope. Late in July, the Senate,
despite competing claims of other
national and international business,
scheduled two days of debate on a
bill (S.819), sponsored by Senators
Kennedy of Massachusetts and Clark
of Pennsylvania, which would elimi-
nate both the disclaimer affidavit
and the positive oath of loyalty.
Since this bill had been reported
out of committee by a 12-3 vote and
had the demonstrated support—

December 5, 1959

hi dee. : <r aN ,

overwhelming but not unanimous—
of the country’s educators and other
interested groups, it actually seemed
for a short time that common sense
was going to prevail. It did not. The
debate on the floor of the Senate
ended in a draw, with the Kennedy-
Clark bill returned to committee,
but in the two days of debate,
despite the pettifoggery of some
Claghorns, specific issues were de-
fined and broader issues implied
which have bearing not only on
American education but on_ the
American ethos.

There were four substantive points
of debate: (1) the relation of “edu-
cation” to “defense” in the title of
the National Defense Education Act;
(2) the distinction between “oath”
and “affidavit” in Title X of the act;
(3) the substitute amendment of-
fered by Senator Mundt—in effect
a “little Smith Act”; and (4) the
discriminatory implications of section
1001(f), Title X.

Debate on the first issue quickly
revealed that the original act passed
through Congress as handily as it
did not because it was an education
bill, but because it was a defense
measure. Without another twenty-
five-year argument, this may have
been the only way such a bill could
have gained the assent of Congress,
but it now raised as many problems
as it had seemed to solve. Waterloo
may have been won on the playing
fields of Eton (though as good a
case might be made for the plough-
lands of Kerry or the plains of
Prussia), but this was not because
cricket pitches had been dug into
obstacle courses. Education imparts
skills which conceivably are imme-
diately applicable to our first line of
“defense,” but at its best it also
insinuates values which in a democ-
racy must always remain the ulti-
mate bulwark of defense. The Na-
tional Defense Education Act, de-
signed to encourage the production
of-scientists, engineers and experts

in certain “language areas,’ empha-
sized skills to the neglect, many
think, of values. A nuclear physicist
fluent in Kalmuck-Mongolian may
be a good man to have around in
any future unpleasantness, but there
is perhaps as great a need for men
who remember Thermopylae and
Runnymede and the plains of Troy.

THE supporters of the Kennedy-
Clark bill recognized this weakness
in the original act—the failure, in
Senator Javits’ unhappy trope, to
allow education “to stand on its bot-
tom as education.” They realized,
too, that the opponents of the bill
had apparently a strong debating
point in this coupling of “defense”
with “education.” For this reason,
Javits later in the debate moved to
amend the bill, continuing the elimi-
nation of the disclaimer affidavit,
but preserving the positive oath of
loyalty and attaching the standard
penalties for perjury. This amend-
ment squeaked through the Senate
by a 46-45 vote.

It may or may not come as a sur-
prise that there were Senators who
saw, or professed to see, no distinc-
tion between a positive oath of
loyalty and a negative statement of
belief—the disclaimer affidavit. On
this point there was pettifogging
aplenty. But Senator Kennedy, who
showed in sponsoring the bill a kind
of courage he once wrote about,
showed also patience and skill in
countering what must have seemed
deliberate dimwittedness. He agreed
on the floor to retention of the oath,
and when (in the form of the Javits
amendment) the point was formally
yielded, the Senate gave de facto
recognition to the distinction be-
tween oath and affidavit. The attack
then turned on what his opponents
supposed was the indecision reveal-
ed by the concession.

Senator Mundt, accordingly,
moved to amend the Kennedy-
Clark bill by substituting for the
disclaimer affidavit the standards
and penalties of the Smith Act—in
slightly different language of un-
tested meaning:

(f) (1) No person shall hereafter
accept any funds, payment, loan, or
other benefit made available under
the authority of this Act if such per-

son (A) advocates the overthrow of

417

the Government of the United States
by illegal means, or (B) is a member
of an organization that advocates
the overthrow of the Government of
the United States by illegal means,
knowing that such organization so
advocates,

(2) Any person who violates
paragraph (1) of this subsection
shall be guilty of a felony, and shall
be fined not more than $1,000 or im-
prisoned for not more than one year
and a day, or both.

The Mundt maneuver was unsuc-
cessful. When his supporters, admit-
ting Senator Kennedy’s claim that
this was indeed no more than “a
little Smith Act,” argued that there
was surely no harm in placing the
same provisions on the statute books
a second time, the Senator—quoting
Lord Faulkner—answered with the
most effective epigram of-the debate:
“When it is unnecessary to act, it is
necessary not to act.” There was
also a question of the constitutional-
ity of the Mundt amendment. “If a
student,” Senator Clark argued, “re-
ceiving benefits under the act has
to disqualify himself because of in-
eligibility under the terms of the
amendment, he is virtually admitting
liability under the Smith Act and is
forced to incriminate himself in vio-
lation of the Fifth Amendment.”
There was the possibility, too, that
the broad prohibition against advo-
cacy of overthrow of the govern-
ment might violate the First Amend-
ment. (The first amendment also
seemed jeopardized by the original
affidavit disclaimer, though this
point was not made by any sup-
porter of the Kennedy-Clark bill:
while it is permissible and, on occa-
sion, necessary for the government
to exert control over the placing of
any belief into action, the First
Amendment clearly implies that no
control may be exercised over the
mere holding of an intellectual be-
lief.)

The most effective arguments ad-
vanced by the anti-affidavit forces
were on grounds of the discrimina-
tion against—the insult to—Ameri-
can students, especially needy stu-
dents, implicit in the disputed pro-
vision of the act. Even the oppo-
nents of the bill admitted that
neither oath nor affidavit was of any
use in actually screening out a sub-
versive student who, committed to

418

ak.

a sinister ideolooyt uel ene”
sign anything—the more cheerfully,
perhaps, since a little touch of per-
jury might provide him with a fine
immunity from investigation. The
Senators might have extended this
line of reasoning a little further and
concluded, with President Kirk of
Columbia, that such an oath is not
only useless but worse than useless
since “A false sense of security is
perhaps the most perilous of all puta-
tive assets a country can have.”

The kind of discrimination found
objectionable was made ludicrously
plain by Senator Clark who, in a
parliamentary maneuver that would
have delighted W. S. Gilbert, moved
still another substitute amendment
to the effect that not only students,
but farmers receiving price supports
and businessmen accepting subsidies
(at this point Senator McCarthy of
Minnesota, getting into the swing of
things, suggested that Clark also in-
clude school children who get free
lunches)—that the whole kit and
caboodle be compelled to swear a
loyalty oath with one hand if, with
the other, they were dipping into the
public trough. This tactic cleared the
air, but did not impress the Mundt-
men across the aisle.

IN THE most lucid and compelling
speech of the debate, Senator Mc-
Carthy then dissected the loyalty-—
affidavit requirement in terms of
principle and propriety. The Senate
was reminded—though the reminder
seemed hardly necessary—that a
fundamental concept of democratic
government is the assumption that
a citizen, insofar as crime is con-
cerned, is innocent until proven
guilty; that, insofar as his general
behavior as a citizen is concerned,
the assumption must also be that
he is loyal until it has been proved
that he is other than loyal. The as-
sumption of the affidavit provision
of the National Defense Education
Act is just the reverse of this.

A second principle, less widely
held perhaps, is that professional
groups have the responsibility and
the right to govern their own mem-
bers—the authority of government
intervention being reserved in a de-
mocracy to occasions when the com-
mon good is threatened by the failure

of self-discipline in a parti lar pro-
‘Se rs es
‘ ‘ ae ’ .. ne: "

ef eee "
sion: The integrity of the acade
aamamnity — though apparently
questioned — cannot be insured, nor
can it be undermined, by the taking
of oaths and affidavits. We in the
teaching profession all have a lot of
disagreeable things to put up with,
but somehow students generally are
able to hold their own against the
faculty, the faculty survives despite
the administration, the administra-
tion manages despite regents and
trustees, and—in the case of state
universities—the board of regents
seems to survive despite the state
legislatures. It cannot be said that as
a community we have failed in self-
discipline. Until substantial evidence
to the contrary is produced, the gov-
ernment has no need nor, it would
seem, any right to intervene with
measures which purport to guaran-
tee the loyalty of our students.
There is finally the question of pro-
priety. In the Judaeo-Christian tra-
dition of Western civilization, an
oath has always had a special char-
acter, and the taking of an oath
long considered an act of great re-
ligious as well as civil significance.
Today there is reason to doubt that
this is any longer so; the civil signifi-
cance of an oath seems to have
rubbed off with its sacred patina. So
at least one might conclude from the
massive perjury by some hundred

respectable citizens called to testify |

before a grand jury in connection
with the recent television nonsense.
It is not enough to explain this away
by the routine manner in which
oaths are commonly administered.
The individual citizen cannot abdi-
cate his responsibility—to himself,
or to his government, much less to
his God, if he has one. Despite rou-
tine, an oath remains a matter of
personal dignity and solemn affirma-
tion. Its occasions are special. It will
lose something of its luster and sig-
nificance, as well as its effectiveness,
if taken lightly or without due cause
and ceremony. But making a loan to
a college student is an ordinary con-
tractual piece of business, trivial in
itself, perfunctorily undertaken. It
diminishes the dignity of the oath,
in itself and possibly in the eyes of
the student, to compel it on occa-
sions of inconsequence. A man who
takes his wife too much for granted —
may be laying the ground for adul-

a ew. Se The Na

t
veo
7 Ales

PION

a a
a2 _
eld and

Pr V5 a
taking an oath for granted—he must
go through the routine at the be-
ginning of each school year—may be
unconsciously involved in remote

preparation for perjury.

ON JULY 23, the Senate voted 49
to 42 to send the Kennedy-Clark
bill back to committee for further
study. Its sponsors intend to reintro-
duce it at the next session of Con-
gress and they have well-grounded
hopes of meeting with success on this
second try. Their hopes are ground-
ed in the arguments advanced during
the debate of last July and are
further supported, I think, by a de-
tectable change in the intellectual
atmosphere of the Senate itself.

It is inconceivable that when the
National Science Foundation Act was
discussed in the Senate a decade
ago, such a debate as occurred
in the past summer could have
taken place. That was the dawn of
the McCarthy era and Senators and
citizens were already looking about

| for a shady place against the hour

: ; ‘ ° e e *
| Moral Standards in Foreign Policy... by Robert paw Wop

IN RECENT years the vocabulary
of Ethics has been pre-empted in dis-
} cussions of international relations by
} zealots who see the world situation
} as a death struggle between West-
ern Christianity and Atheistic Com-
munism. They endow every twist
and turn of our foreign policy with
the sanctity of divine law, confident
that God is in their corner.

Many Americans have been re-
pelled by the smug arrogance of
this attitude. In a world of ideology,
they are suspicious of all self-serving
moralism, preferring to drop “right”
and “good” from the language of
foreign affairs. Typical is this state-
ment by George Kennan, in his
book Realities of American Foreign
Policy:

ROBERT PAUL WOLFF teaches
’ philosophy at Harvard University.

Decor aber 5, ee

aon. Te a Fe od od
student accustomed to

Morality, then, as the channel to.

Mien the full heat of McCarthy’ s

day should be upon them. The Na-
tional Science Foundation does re-
quire a disclaimer affidavit, and no
Senator at the time objected to it.
This may have been because the
provisions of the National Science
Foundation embraced areas of nu-
clear research which, conceivably,
touched closely on our national se-
curity. But this difference should
also be noted: the affidavit was re-
quired of a recipient of an N.S.F.
grant; the affidavit is now required
of an applicant for a federal loan.
The larger difference, however, is the
less easily definable one—the change
of air. There is perceptible impati-
ence in the Senate these days with
sloganized patriotism, anti-intellec-
tual innuendo, the exploitation for
home consumption of communism as
a bugbear, and that game-legged
rhetoric whose principal device seems
to be the ruptured enthymeme.
Meanwhile, as the Senators settle
down to their homework, educators
might look again to their lessons.
Originally only a handful of colleges

individual _ self-fulfillment yes.
Morality as the foundation of civic
virtue, and accordingly as a condition
precedent to successful democracy—
yes. Morality in governmental meth-
od, as a matter of conscience and
preference on the part of our people
— yes. But morality as a general
criterion for the determination of the
behavior of states and above all as
a criterion for measuring and com-
paring the behavior of different states
— no.

THIS view, in my opinion, is thor-
oughly mistaken, though I sym-
pathize with the motives behind it.
Amoralism in international affairs is
as wrong as the moralizing against
which Kennan protests. But it is not
enough simply to say that Kennan
is wrong. There are compelling ar-
-guments against the introduction of
Ethics into foreioseelgncus, and to
rebut them it is necessary to go into
"s the enhiegs at some length. In this

Fr +

and universities ‘refused on eae
ciple to participate in the program.
(At least one, it is reported, refused
not on grounds of principle but be-
cause of the fuss, bother and ex-
pense of administering the law.)
Most institutions have chosen to re- Bs
main in the program while continu- ei
ing to press for an amendment to the

act such as that proposed in the Ken-
nedy-Clark bill. This is an accept-

able if expedient course. The dra-
matic action of Harvard and Yale

in withdrawing from the program is
perhaps more exemplary and, because ie
of the prestige of these institutions,
may be considered particularly ef-
fective.

But how much more effective it
would be if, instead of Dr. Pusey eas
phoning Dr. Griswold, a vast net- ts
work of telephone conversations an?
among presidents of American col--
leges and universities resulted in con-
certed action by leaders and spokes-
men of American higher education.
This is of course Utopian, a comfort- ;
able thought, in which we cannot as
yet take comfort. ;

article I can only hope to touch on
the main aspects of the problem.
First of all, we must clear up a
recurrent confusion over two com-
monly used terms, “idealism” and
“realism.” Every time we ask what
to do in a given situation we are
really asking two questions. First of
all, we look at the facts and ask,
What can we do? If there is literal-
ly only one possibility, then we
needn’t go any further, for of nec-
essity that is what we will do. (Re-
member that unpleasant alternatives
are still alternatives. Even self-sac-
rifice is a possibility, as so many
martyrs have taught us.) But if —
there are two or more courses open
to -us, then we must ask a second
question, What should we do? '
What things can we do? Which of
them should we do? This is the
structure of every human decision.
Now some people ignore the first
question. They make all sorts of -

lovely plans, but forget to ask
whether any of them is workable.
This tendency we can call Unrealism.
Realism, then,
at the facts and sort out real pos-
sibilities from unreal fantasies.

Other people ignore the second
question. After finding out what can
be done, they choose on the basis of
whim or self-interest, never:troubling
to think about what is right or
wrong. These people we can call
Amoralists. By contrast, the Idealist
is the man who is willing to ask the
second question.

Using these definitions as a basis,
we see that there are four types of
people: (1) the unrealistic amoralist,
a self-confessed egotist who looks out
for number one — and does a bad
job of it; (2) the realistic amoralist
who knows the score, but plays it
for himself alone; (3) the unrealistic
idealist, who substitutes wishful
thinking for a knowledge of reality
and then blames the world when his
schemes don’t work; (4) the realistic
idealist, who knows there is no con-
tradiction between the real and the
ideal, that only by seeing the world
as it is can we ever make it more as
it ought to be.

My whole argument can be sum-
med up by the dictum that Ameri-
cans should be realistic idealists in
foreign affairs. This is not to be con-
fused with some wishy-washy, mid-
dle-of-the-road formula like “dynam-
ic conservatism” or “moderate liber-
alism.” I’m not asking for a com-
promise between ideals and reality.
I’m trying to show that facts and
values play complementary roles in
the determination of policy. Facts
are a map, ideals are the destination.
Without a map we will lose our way.
Without a destination we will wander
aimlessly, always sure of where we
are, but never of where we are going.

THE MOST powerful objection to
realistic idealism comes from think-
ers who insist on distinguishing
strongly between internal and ex-
ternal political problems. In the
passage quoted above, Kennan makes
it quite clear that he is not denying
the relevance of Ethics to personal,
civic or national issues. He only
wishes to exclude morality free in-
ternational relations.

is a readiness to look ~

: Ss 7 ore i

So far as I can see, there are three
different lines of argument by which
one could deny a moral dimension
to foreign policy. These I will dub
the sociological, philosophical and
practical approaches. Let us examine
each one in turn.

The sociological argument takes
as its starting point the observable
differences in moral standards from
one culture to the next. Some people
love their enemies, other people eat
them. This makes the people who
love their enemies stop and wonder
whether eating them instead is really
so bad. Most men suppose, explicitly
or otherwise, that the validity of
their moral beliefs is dependent on
universal consensus. When they come
up against a whole nation which
holds different beliefs on the most
fundamental moral or political ques-
tions, they retreat into a modest
relativism — “Of course, I am only
saying what I believe; I am not
claiming it is true for everybody!”
This reaction is not confined to mar-
riage customs or standards of decen-
cy in dress — which aren’t moral
issues anyway. I have actually heard
well-intentioned people say, when
asked about Hitler’s mass murders,
“T can’t really call that wrong, be-
cause the Germans believed different
moral principles. I wouldn’t have
supported him, but... .”

THE problem becomes more com-
plicated when it is a matter of polit-
ical forms. Representative democracy,
such as exists today in England or
America, is not the only system of
government to which an honorable
man could give his allegiance.
Throughout history men have lived
under, and found much to praise in,
political systems which would be
abhorrent to Americans. Who are
we, then, to say that the Soviet Un-
ion and China should be condemned
for failing to ape the peculiarities of
our institutions?

Although the open-mindedness
and tolerance of this argument is
appealing, I think that it is wrong
from start to finish. The premise
cannot seriously be maintained by
anyone other than a_ philosopher,
and the conclusion is simply irrele-
vant to the problem of moral stand-
ards in foreign policy. | ae

7. hk ee

; (aera “|
‘The | premise Bates shat wee caunGh H
apply our moral standards to other
nations which have different and
conflicting standards. Now this no-
tion, if taken seriously, would make
nonsense out of most Ethical judg-
ments, even within the borders of
our nation. We say it is wrong to
kick little old ladies in the teeth,
even if the lady-kickers think it is
just grand. When a murderer an-
nounces to the court that he is a
superior being and may kill whom-
ever he chooses, we don’t take back
our condemnation on the grounds
that he doesn’t agree. The opinion
of the evil-doer himself is usually
the least reliable, not the most. (I
am talking only about the rightness
of the fact, not about the praise-
worthiness of the actor. Beliefs or in-
tentions might very well serve to
mitigate the guilt of the actor, while
yet not changing the wrongness of
the act itself.)

The same point applies to the ac-
tions of other nations. The horrors
of the Nazi concentration camps
were morally inexcusable, even
though the Germans were willing to
condone them.

But even if we were to grant the
premise, the conclusion of the “soci-
ological” argument would be entirely
beside the point, for we are con-
cerned with the status of owr ac-
tions, not those of other countries.
When I plead for a realistic ideal-
ism, I am not asking the State De-
partment to draw up a moral score
sheet on foreign governments. It is
our policies which should be guided
by our moral standards. We can try,
if we wish, to convince others of the
value of those standards, but we
needn’t wait till we get agreement
before acting on them.

THE SECOND attack on morality
in foreign affairs is the “philosophi-
cal” argument. I have given it this
name partly because it is based on
a carefully elaborated theory of the
nature and purpose of the state, and
partly because its exponents include
some of the best-known political
philosophers in the modern Western
tradition, According to this theory,
the state is a unique and_ special
political structure which marks a
natural boundary between different

The Nation”

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aa en em me

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7 neat

at war. A poet who has crawled through
gas-stinking shell holes into the perilous
silence of no-man’s land is eminently
equipped to render for us the night
foray of Odysseus and Diomedes.
Graves’s life on Majorca, moreover, has
its Homeric coloring. That island is one
of the few places remaining on the
modern map where the furnishings and
emotions of antique culture have real-
ness. Ancient carts still lumber up
through precipitous fields and the dark
olive trees twist under the wind; small
dinghies take shelter in the rocky in-
lets at the approach of those fierce
Mediterranean storms which play so
large a role in Homer; the cadences of
life and death are patriarchal and pas-
toral, and Graves himself resides on his
promontory like an archaic monarch.
Doubtless, he has long carried in his
passionate and singing mind this render-
ing of The Anger of Achilles. He has
told the tale of Troy after his own
fashion in The Greek Myths and given
his joyous solution to the riddle of the
authorship of the Odyssey in Homer's
Daughter. Now he has taken his long
dialogue with Homer and things Homer-
je to the point of actual translation.

THE result is wonderfully Gravesian:
brisk, lucid, intensely readable and
original. The bulk of the narrative is
rendered into swift prose. Invocations,
stock metaphors, major similes and
passages that are in some way formulaic
or incantatory are given in verse. Not,
however, in the ample, solemn measures

chosen by previous translators such as

Lattimore; Graves works, rather, in
short lyric rhymes akin to his own
poetry. The resulting alternation of
prose and verse gives to his transla-
tion (and particularly to the narratives

of battle) a vivacious brilliance which
‘no earlier version has matched:

Next, Prince Helenus, son of Priam,
dealt Deipyrus a mortal blow on the
temple with a Thracian broadsword,
which sent his helmet spinning; a
Greek picked it up as it rolled be-
tween his feet. Menelaus of the Loud
War-Cry then resolved to avenge
Deipyrus, by attacking Helenus.
Helenus, however, shot an arrow at
him before he could throw a spear.

When strong the sea-wind whistles,
Our threshing-floor we man,

Hf - Where swarthy beans or chick-

peas
Await a winnowing-fan. a
Into the wind we toss them,
__. For though the chaff goes flyin
__- They’ll tumble in a heap. ©

ae Re a’ aa

4 ‘

From fans both wide and deep; ,

The arrow glanced off Menelaus’
corslet, like a chick-pea tossed by a
winnowing fan; but Menelaus’ spear
drew blood. It pierced Helenus’ bow-
hand, and he retired, trailing the
shaft behind him. Prince Agenor re-
moved it; took some twisted yarn
which one of his squires carried for
such emergencies, and bound up the
wound.

There are nuances in the original which
this retelling misses (Agenor is the
“shepherd of the people”; hence the ap-
propriateness of the fact that he band-
ages the hand with a twist of wool
fleece). But the essential movement is
beautifully conveyed and Graves’s verse
brings out the way in which the simile
of the winnowing-fan is an exact coun-
terpart to the larger action.

The Anger of Achilles is not meant
to be a crib or a line-by-line translation.
It marks the passage of a great poem
through the sensibility and blood and
bones of another poet some three thou-
sand years later. Its essential unit is not
any given chunk of verse, but rather
the particular episode. Graves works in
paragraphs and thus the tumult of elo-
quence and battle moves across our
sight with as clear a grace as it does

on a Greek vase. The scholarship is that

of a poet, reinventing in order to be
more faithful to his text. Over the en-
tire XVIth Book hangs the shadow of
Patroclus’ impending death. Homer
compares the marshaled Myrmidons to
wolves. Graves discerns in the compari-
son the ironic note of the doom of their
beloved Patroclus:

Their jaws with blood are red
As in a pack they go,
Most sumptuously fed,
To where dark waters flow.

Thin-tongued they lie and lap
The surface of a pool

And belching, chap to chap,
Their throats at leisure cool.

Not quite the literal sense (Homer’s
wolves belch up clotted blood), but near
enough by the nearness of poetry. —
The principal objection to The Anger
of Achilles is Graves’s refusal to accord
the Homeric text its full measure of
pathos and rhetorical solemnity. He be-
lieves that much of the /liad was con-
ceived as satire and that Homer was “ut-
terly cynical about the Olympian gods.”
Agamemnon, in particular, would be a
comic, mean personage exposed to un-
varying ridicule. Throughout the epic

runs a broad strain of “concealed come-

dy.” Now whether: or not this theory

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makes scholarly sense is not very im-
portant. What matters is its effect on
the actual text. And here there are spe-
cific failures of tone. Nestor is not as
garrulous as Graves makes him out, nor
Achilles as consistently bombastic. And
at some of the pre-eminent moments —
Hector’s farewell to Andromache, Pri-
am’s night-visit to Achilles — Graves’s
virtues betray him. The luminous ease
of his style, its bias toward “entertain-
ment,” detract from the dark, profound-
ly tragic music of the Homeric lines.

This dissent bears on only a small
part of Graves’s achievement. But the
publishers have tried to force one’s hand.
Ronald Searle was commissioned to il-
lustrate The Anger of Achilles, and the
result is disastrous. These nervous, jag-
ged little drawings are meant to be
satiric in the broadest vein. All they do,
in fact, is to exploit one single aspect in
Graves’s view of Homer to the point of
farce. Thus, the prescription for the
proper use of Graves’s Iliad is as fol-
lows: should not be shown to the young,
but read to them. Read with joy, and
ferocity, and:a nose for blood. No trans-
lation will do more to send its listeners
back ‘to Homer, and that, surely, is the
mark of its excellence.

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QUEEN'S QUARTERLY

Queen’s University,
Kingston, Ontario, Canada

ART

Maurice Grosser

Paris
THE PLACE DES VOSGES, with its
uniform facades of pink brick and warm
gray stone, is one of the noblest examples
in Paris of seventeenth-century archi-
tectural design. No. 6, where Victor
Hugo lived—a corner house overlooking
both the square and the playground of
the school next door—is maintained as
a museum to house the great man’s per-
sonal mementos and literary relics. All
four floors of the building are decorated
after the taste of his times in dark red
damask and dark varnished wood. The
occasion for my visit was the small
additional exhibit now being held to
commemorate the centenary of La Lé-
gende des Siécles, an epic poem judged
by many to be the finest in French
since the Chanson de Roland.

French admiration for Hugo is grudg-
ing but sincere. Remember Cocteau’s
celebrated little joke that Victor Hugo
was a madman who believed he was
Victor Hugo; and Gide, when asked who
was the greatest French poet, said “Vic-
tor Hugo, alas!” All this one knows.
What one is less likely to know is that
Hugo was also an admirable painter. To
prove it, there hang in his museum—
alongside the family portraits and all
the insipid illustrations to his writings
by contemporary artists—some 350
drawings and water colors by Hugo
himself. Their freedom and vigor are in-
comparably more impressive than the
Victorian niceties of the professional
work on show beside them.

These pictures range from tiny album-
leaf sketches to water colors almost four
feet long. The colors are restrained and
somber — blacks, grays, browns and
tans — done in pen, brush, India ink
and sepia. The lighting is dramatic: the
tamest of the architectural drawings has
a nightmare quality. The boldness of
the brushwork and the systematic use
of spattering, smearing and scratching
to vary tone and texture make the pic-
tures strangely like the drawings of
Bérard, Tchelitchew, Brian Gysen and
the other neo-Romantic painters of our
time. Which is not surprising, since
Hugo was a real Romantic.

The subjects are elaborate and varied,
travel sketches from France, England,
along the Rhine; imaginary landscapes;
illustrations for his books; a castle in
Spain; the cathedral at Rheims, crouch-
ing on its low hill like a hurt animal;
the hand of an abbess raised in benedic-
tion; a nude in bed; an abandoned can-

non; a fisherwoman watching the sea
in storm; fanciful variations on his own
initials; the sewers of Paris seen from
within and portrayed as the bowels of
a leviathan; fantastic animals; horrid or
malicious caricatures such as Mlle.
George in Amorous Undress, wherein
the celebrated actress is shown standing,
a vacuous mountain of flesh, naked in
an open robe de chambre; The Eddy-
stone Lighthouse, flying the Union Jack
and laced with mottoes, as jerry-built,
improvised and rickety as the British
Empire itself, which it is most probably
intended to represent.

Painting skill of this order is surpris-
ing in a writer. A great many painters
write, some extremely well. The list is
unending — from Vasari and Michel-
angelo to Van Gogh and Dali. But the
writers whose paintings can be taken
seriously are very few. With the possible
exception of Leonardo (who I believe
thought of himself as man of science first
and painter afterwards), William Blake
is the only. other besides Hugo I can
recall offhand. And just as the paint-
er-writers for the most part write about
painting, it is not surprising that Blake
and Hugo, the writer-painters, both
paint about writing. That is to say, their
pictures announce moods, or illustrate
ideas, more fully developed elsewhere in
their literary work. And, satisfied with
the immediate effectiveness of water
color, neither Blake nor Hugo had any
need to attempt the more difficult prob-
lems of painting in oil.

BUT here the likeness ends. Blake lived
in England where the tradition of paint-
ing was insular and new: the English
School was begun by Hogarth only sixty
years before him. Blake, besides, was a
medievalist in revolt against his century
and his,century’s ways. The manner of
painting he devised for himself was a
form of pre-Rubensism, more limited
and insular even than the tradition he
refused to follow. Consequently, his
pictures, however interesting to the
literary world, are too affected and
provincial to have any place in the his-
tory of painting. Hugo, on the other
hand, had no such reserves about his
times. Living in a period of intense ar-—
tistic activity, in constant contact with
painting and painters, he was able to
turn out pictures whose foree, invention
and originality are impressive today, |
Not satisfied with being a painter, |
Hugo was a decorator as well, What a

one ee

ghtful dining room he designed and
xecuted for Juliette Drouet, his mis-
tress! Its style is a sort of nineteenth-
century Chinese-Rococo with racks and
cabinets and ornate fireplace made to
| frame a collection of Chinese plates and
porcelain figurines. The panels are in-
_cised in pyrography with dragons and
tiny comic Chinese personages, and
painted black and gold and green and
red in imitation lacquer — handsome
and extraordinarily professional. Of the
personal souvenirs the most touching
to me is a mirror, adorned by Hugo
with birds and flowers, which carries
this dedication to his young son:

Passereaux et rouges-gorges
Venez des airs et des eaux,
Venez tous faire vos orges,
Messieurs les petits oiseaux,
Chez Monsieur le petit Georges.

One is reminded, after all, that Hugo
was a poet.

‘THEATRE

Harold Clurman

THE NEW Rodgers and Hammerstein
attraction The Sound of Music (Lunt-
_Fontanne Theatre) with a book by
Lindsay and Crouse—suggested, the
program reads, by The Trapp Family

ingers by Maria Augusta Trapp—is a
_ bundle of sugar. Oklahoma and South

Pacific are stark realism when com-

pared to The Sound of Music.

I have no objection to sweets; a bit
of sugar is salutary. But I found, as the
performance of The Sound of Music
went on, that I lost my sense of taste.

he absence of contrast paralyzed my

apacity for specific response to what I

was being fed.

The candy is prettily packaged. The

ast is proficient, and Mary Martin is
perennially bright. Among the seven

“Trapp” children, one or two are dar-

ing, and they all sing and play together

in pleasing unity. There is hardly any
dancing. The tunes and lyrics are not
among the masters’ best.

ONLY IN AMERICA (Cort) is a
dramatization by Jerome Lawrence and
Robert E. Lee of the “life” and writings
of Harry Golden, whose first collection
of pieces from his newspaper The Caro-
ina Israelite bore the same name as the
play. The daily press treated it rather
harshly. This seems to me unfair. The
play is, no doubt, sentimental, indeed
‘orny, but since when have we sworn
ff sentiment or corn in our theatre?

Ae eet Ds ,

There are other faults. Herman
Shumlin, the-director, has permitted or
instructed Nehemiah Persoff (as Harry
Golden) and several other members of
the cast to press too hard, to shout too
much and to point everything up too
sharply so that the play’s shortcomings
are rendered more conspicuous than
they need be. Greater casualness in the
presentation of the play’s folksy mate-
rial might have served it much better.

Still, it is a genial show. Harry Gold-
en’s story—the emergence of a New
York East Side young man as a popu-
lar and beloved figure on the Southern
and ultimately on the national scene—
is attractive and touching. Representa-
tive too. For what is Harry Golden but
a mixture of rabbinical and Will Rogers
humor? Perhaps it is too late now to
speak of America as “the melting pot.”
(Someone has compared American civi-
lization to a “tossed salad.”) But is it
not a fact that remnants of Jewish hu-
manism in the citified form it takes in
some of our popular entertainers (from
George Gershwin to Eddie Cantor),
mingled with the quizzical forthright-
ness of the old-time cracker box philos-
opher, is unmistakably and beneficently
American?

Only in America is moralistic with
affable unction. It joshes us into a
mood of good-fellowship (what is some-
times intolerably called “tolerance”).
It is against “ghettoes”’—Jewish, Ne-
gro, Puerto Rican. This does not solve
problems. It does not probe to the root
of any of our ills. It hopes to kill evil
with kindness. It will not save us. But
it is nonetheless, for all the embarrass-
ment it might cause the tough-minded,
somehow ameliorative.

One more item worth mentioning in
regard to Only in America is the ques-
tion of its possible success. A good play,
according to a large number of people,
is one which achieves success. This
proposition may be a bit more complex
than it appears. For though Only in
America—due to the adverse press—
may prove a box-office failure, in which
case it would have to be set down as a
“bad” play, it is my belief that a pub-
licity campaign a la David Merrick
(Broadway’s baby Barnum) might
turn it into a hit—in which case it
would have to be declared a “good”
play.

NO TRIFLING WITH LOVE (St.
Mark’s Playhouse) was written by
Alfred de Musset to be published
(1834); it was first produced on the
stage of France’s state theatre in 1867.
It has held the boards in France almost

continuously since then and is ac-

counted a masterpiece by most critics
there. I first saw it in 1923 with Pierre
Fresnay in the leading role (the sets
were by Marie Laurencin) and was
wholly charmed.

[ still like it, even in its present very
humble production in which only two of
the young actors are adequate to their
task. Most other reviewers regarded
the play as having at best only anti-
quarian interest, though the French
still enjoy it thoroughly when acted by
someone like Gérard Philipe. Though
it loses much in translation, it is an ex-
quisite piece: sentimental and, even in
its own time, rather quaint.

Alfred de Musset’s sentiment is made
poignant not only by the melodious-
ness of his writing but by a kind of
self-mocking sense of disappointment
with the inadequacy of his own roman-
tic idealism. For all the heritage of our
classic discipline, the superiority and
skepticism of our modern education,

FES IR RE EO EEA A ED
“BEST PLAY.32°":

aT.

aisin in the

starring CLAUDIA McNEIL
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the new-found freedom from ancient
prejudice and superstition, the poet
seems to say, we are still not wise,
truthful, or happy. The greatest of our
sins and the source of our confusion is
pride. But if our confusion corrupts us

“02

wae

% 4
_

and makes us suffer, it is in this very
suffering that outeworth lies. Whatever
the value of the statement in terms of
thought, as art the play still retains the
bitter-sweet freshness and glamour of a
Chopin étude.

MUSIC

Lester Trimble

TWO YEARS AGO, when the daily
press was fence-straddling the question
of Leonard Bernstein’s accession to the
New York Philharmonic directorship, I
said here that I was glad he had been
given the job. I had two main reasons.
One was a conviction that the Philhar-
monic—and, indeed, all major American
orchestras—should ultimately be placed
in the hands of native-born and trained
musicians. This is not a matter of
chauvinism; it has to do with the rap-
port essential between a director and
his audience, as with his relation to
American culture as a whole. The sec-
ond reason was my respect for abilities
Bernstein had already shown, and my
hope that, given this opportunity, his
stature would develop still further.
Since then I have had moments of
misgiving. Certain musical aspects of
Bernstein’s directorship continue to dis-

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428

turb me, and the insistent publicity for
his personal glamour is sometimes al-
most unendurable. But I still believe
that this gifted, enigmatic conductor
has it within his power to make a huge
and lasting contribution to American
cultural life. It is evident that he thor-
oughly understands the complex of dif-
ferent functions that must be performed
by an American musical leader. Many
of these would not confront an eminent
European musician. An American con-
ductor cannot discharge his duty simply
by directing a fine performance of the
Eroica. For Bruno Walter, that would
be enough. For Monteux, it is sufficient
if he makes Le Sacre sit up straight, or
so performs a German masterwork that
we can marvel at the brilliance of the
French intellect in dealing with an alien
mode of thought. But an American
conductor, especially in the 1950s, must
be a complete musician, an educator, an
uncoverer of new national musical re-
sources, and the possessor of a person-
ality capable of winning a broad mu-
sical public. A good portion of this new
public would doubtless settle for the
personality; it is certain that without it
a conductor cannot hold them long
enough to perform his other functions.

Bernstein is fulfilling his educational
duties with an imagination and élan
that few could match, His Thursday
night “previews” have satisfied a seg-
ment of the audience that wants to be
educated through words. His Omnibus
television programs have had an im-
mense impact on the whole nation, and
I am sure that repercussions from the
Philharmonic’s Moscow appearances will
be considerable. As a discoverer of ex-
ecutant talent and as sponsor, Bern-
stein is also exemplary. He has insti-
tuted a system whereby three young
assistant conductors will be appointed
to the Philharmonic each season—an ef-
fective step toward the day when the
majority of our conductors will be
Americans. Seymour Lipkin (who is
also being heard with the Philharmonic
as piano soloist), Stefan Bauer-Mengel-
berg and Kenneth Schermerhorn are the
three for this season, It is required that
they prepare the entire repertory of

scheduled works, so that they wil! be
ready to step up on the podium in any
emergency. That is a staggering assign-
ment! These men will advance more in
this one season than they would other-
wise have done in a decade.

The roster of soloists for the season is
similarly youthful, and carries the
names of a number of artists who, save
for Bernstein’s desire to give them a
proper place in our concert life, might
have no immediate hope of playing with
the Philharmonic. Lipkin, Jacques
Klein, Claude Frank, David Bar-Illan,
Byron Janis, Philippe Entremont, John
Browning—the list goes on. I heard
Jacques Klein in his debut with the
orchestra, and he gave a performance of
the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Con-
certo that set my nerves tingling for
days. It was playing of top caliber, by
a man completely matured and_bril-
liant at twenty-nine. Whether the “dis-
covery” of this Brazilian pianist should
be credited to Eleanor De Carvalho,
the Brazilian conductor who led the
orchestra that night, or to Bernstein, it
was a part of the Philharmonic’s new
policy that he appeared.

NEVERTHELESS, there are still nega-
tives to be weighed in the Bernstein bal-
ance. One of these is that his programs
do not always sound as interesting as
they promise on paper. Last season, for
example, works were scheduled by Ives,
Ruggles, Riegger, Becker and Schuman,
and when they were played it was ap-
parent that they were the wrong pieces
by the right men. This year’s schedule
bears the mark of a much surer pro-
graming hand. And yet, for one reason
or another, the concerts I have so far
attended have not been ones to send
you away glowing. The Gala Opening
Concert, for example, grouped Beetho-
ven’s “Egmont” Overture, his Concerto
for Piano, Violin, Violoncello and Or-
chestra, and the Shostakovitch Fifth
Symphony. I had forgotten, until re-
minded by the music, that the Beetho-
ven T'riple Concerto is a dull piece. Not
all the program-note salesmanship in
the world will revive it from the neglect
it deserves. Moreover, it was not well
played. I have never heard John Corig-
liano, the orchestra’s concertmaster,
scatter sO many uncertainties and out-
of-tune notes through a performance.
And Mr. Bernstein’s conducting from
the piano, although it always goes
perfectly well, has become an annoy-
ance to more than a few members of
his audience, It is, I’m afraid, a conceit
that has worn thin in a hurry. People |
at the intermission that night were won=
dering aloud whether the “Philhar-
monic couldn’t afford another soloist.”

4 eh at ta

Crossword Puzzle No. 844

oe FRANK W. LEWIS

ACROSS:

1 The top monarch Ophir. turned out
like a human, yet godlike. (15)

9 Make too many copies of the book,
or just put one type on top of an-
other? (9) ~

10 Proving art is virtually friendless.
(5) -

11 and “8 Would it come up with a
number of ideas of Woolworth, for
example? (6,7)

12 Give up, albeit unwillingly, the re-
sult of ejection in the army, per-
haps. (5,3)

14 Metal cap which might go under
the plate. (5,3)

16 This town should get an E for Ef-
fort. (5)

17 Dispose of kid, wrong side out. (5)

18 Betsy, perhaps, in her needlework,
would prove game. (8)

20 What not to do to the beans on the
road? (It’s water over the dam!)

21 Silly geese, to make a joke on a
broken leg! (6)

24 It might cost you money to.see one.

25 Is the quality of refusing to com-
bine with some liquids missing in
stannum? Quite the reverse! (9)

26 Seems to imply a Government-con-
trolled Church, but Marco and
Giuseppe ran on little errands for
one. (8, 2,5)

_ December 5, cd 959

Sar)
ie

ee PERERA

DOWN:

Be rich in one jump. (6)

But the nurse may not do it for

nothing! (5)

Filled with this, people find fault,

and so prefer lunch as a change.

Brace by means of soft breeze? (4)

Find one branch like another,

though perhaps light at one time.

Implies at least one turn.with a

ram, but the 8 type don’t advocate

a change. (15)

7 They should be in agreement, but
cause mischief with shattering noise.

13 Combine this with a bad French
state in short, partner! (10)

15 India coal is not particularly warm!
(9)

17 An old Egyptian shaker is coming
up to play the banjo. (7)

19 One of the things accompanying

Baba Yaga on her ride might bray.
22 Great actress, by name? “(B)
23 The capital of Czechoslovakia? (4)

a oF Cw Ne

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 843

ACROSS: 1 Compound; 5 Asecots; 10
Right; 11 Slatterns; 12 Orating; 13
Prussia; 14 Richly; 15 Drayman; 18
Bandits; 21 Quails; 24 Roasted; 26
Opinion; 27 Absentees; 28 Breve; 29
Trends; 30 Stresses. DOWN: I Car-
boy; 2 Migration; 3 Ostrich; 4 Nose-
gay; 6 Setsuma; 7 Orris; 8 "Sustains;
9 Camped; 16 Moldiness; 17 Aberrant:
19 Intoned; 20 Sadden; 21 Quonset;
22 Amiable: 23 Angels; 25 Aisle.

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$8 BILLION STOCKPILE

FIASCO Edward W. Ziegler

‘

THIS POST-CHRISTIAN

Gabriel Vahanian

being done to a little boy? Were they
operating under some kind of monstrous |
medical code which required them to

training in subject matter for capable
students. What is forgotten is the ef-
fect on mediocre or poor students when

LETTERS

Looking Upward

Dear Sirs: I gave a weekend series of
lectures on Jung’s book, Flying Saucers,
in November of 1958, and can therefore
claim a good acquaintance with it. David
Cort (“Sorcery and Flying Saucers,”
The Nation, November 7) has given a
most unfair account of its content.
From his description, it 1s impossible to
guess that this is a serious book on the

psychology of the Unconscious. .... It (oiers of the selene’ Ont age grou EDITORIALS

describes in detail the development of a When such good examples are ee ee 429 '@

modern mythright under our eyes, dis- 4p. vacuum js filled with bad ania E
cusses a number of dreams, a few books ” ARTICLES

and some other material as evidence of
the existence of the myth and its pos-
sible meanings.

I am very ceampeintad that The
Nation, which usually proves that it
senses the pulse of historical develop-
ment where others are obtuse, failed to
see that here is a great book by a
grand old man....

James Kirscu, M.D.

West Los Angeles, Calif.

Dear Sirs: 1 thought David Cort’s
article was a good attempt to deal with

But

an increasingly esoteric subject... . 443 e@ B 5
i ae e ooks for Christmas
it didn’t seem to work out the way he money. — ee aah
anted it—perhz ips because the subject With this sort of thing increasing in 445 @ Arts and Monuments
is too esoteric. May I suggest: (1) That the high schools, college teachers are by LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
the subject be explored further, apart peices to find lela among their 451 @ Books by Nation Contributors
: ae gales a fee oye ee ceaeaa uture students. It is true, the new , 4
from Carl Jung’s weird “contributions”; : ae : > ‘ 458 @ Second Impressions
(2) That Mr. Cort look up the book, patos eb pi now ow to study, by ROBERT M. WALLACE :
When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festin- ut tor what! I
Eee. a 454 @ Records of the Year
ger and associates. Francis P. JENNINGS by LESTER TRIMBLE
And may I add the parting thought Philadelphia, Pa. es
456 ‘@ How Still the Hawk (poem)

that I sincerely hope our mutual skep-
ticism will not predispose us to a closed
mind with regard to the possibility of
the saucers, whatever they might be.

Paut E. KILLincer
Bloomington, Ind.

Class Leadership

Dear Sirs: A phrase in Allan Brick’s
“Campus Rebels Find a Cause” [The
Nation, Nov. 28] has suddenly crystal-
lized: my reasoning on a matter only in-
directly related to the subject of that
article. Mr. Brick speaks of discovering
“the practical and moral reasons for
being responsible toward others.” Failure
to consider the need for such discovery,
it seems to me, is what is wrong with
the current effort by educators to separ-

ate gifted students from their less talent-
ed schoolmates.

It is true, as the Gd aes of te

mogencous grouping say, that the by a reporter long after the event. oe Gries to Mesias ature,
Q 4 oe at view Digest,
separation makes possible an enriched Didn’t those ham know what was Affairs, Informa aD arvioe, Drama na Bal
{ ‘ ’ ~~ : a 4 y meth i aa
7 con ? ee D wee ee
I" als : } f {aie

natural peer leadership is removed from
them; forgotten also is the moral effect
on the leader group of the loss of ex-
perience in fulfilling social obligation.
To add yet another item to the long
list of reasons for juvenile delinquency,
let me point out that when constructive
peer leadership is removed from high
school youngsters, they turn to their
gang leaders. No moralizing by teachers
can substitute for good examples by

and these are followed devotedly. Why
not? The gangsters have no real com-
petition.

On the other side, the able leaders are
deprived of their natural follower groups
and set in artifically intensified compe-
tition against each other. They do not
learn to feel responsible toward others;
rather, they learn to use every dodge
possible, including the cheating we have
heard so widely deplored, to triumph
over other students and teachers. Valu-
able scholarships depend on victory. The
love of knowledge and truth, which
talented students are supposed to learn,
is transmuted to a crass scramble for

Doctors’ Dilemma

Dear Sirs: I have just finished reading
your October 31 issue on “The Shame
of New York,” and I must admit that
the picture of political corruption was
shocking. But what struck me most
forcibly was the unexplained code—if
it was some kind of code—which caused
doctors and other hospital personnel to
keep mum and allow the victimization
of little Dean Nimer.

Reporters Cook and Gleason write
that two doctors—friends of the family
—had verified Dean Nimer’s story of
being choked. They report that Mrs.
Nimer’s entirely rational testimony in
the hospital verified Dean’s story and
that the doctor who operated on Mrs.
Nimer verified that the wounds couldn’t
have been inflicted by a little boy.

But these facts had to be unearthed

ake ‘Aa

hide their evidence as
bombs”? Why couldn’t those doctors
have reported what they knew to the
newspapers?

Fort Worth, Tex.

“concealed time

R. E. Torney

In This Issue

431 @ Whose Business Is Birth

433 @ The Peace-Loving Irish

434 @ $8 Billion Stockpile Fiasco:

488 @ This Post-Christian Era

BOOKS AND THE ARTS
442 @

Control?
by W.

D. BORRIE
by JANE STOLLE

The Cold War in Storage
by EDWARD W. ZIEGLER

by GABRIEL VAHANIAN

The Tragedies We Need
by KENNETH REXROTH

by CHARLES TOMLINSON

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 456)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

George G. Kirstein, Publisher

Carey McWilliams, ‘Editor

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Wuditor
Robert Mateh, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre

Maurice Grosser, Art

M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry

Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, Nuropean
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Dee, 12, 1959. Vol. 189. No, 20.

The Nation published weekly (except for omis-
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Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A. by
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Information to Libraries: eat Nation ts

, 1959

Ee Cae Ae Pare, NAD PY ee

EDITORIALS

on Voyage, Mr. President

With these words, expressing a sentiment practically
ll Americans share, the New York Herald Tribune
luted President Eisenhower as he started on his world
our. The editorial also made a point worth noting:
. Increasingly governments find themselves playing
‘to the world gallery, forced to seek popular support in
ther lands as well as their own.” It is to the President’s
credit that he has come around to recognizing this new
d, on the whole, salutary development, and it is for-
unate that by character and motivation he is well fitted
for the role to which history now calls him. He can
‘never approach the mileage John Foster Dulles accumu-
lated, but Mr. Dulles was scarcely an idol of the masses,
‘or even of the diplomats with whom he carried on his
‘confabulations. General Eisenhower is a far more win-
ning personality; and he must be aware, at the present
juncture, that this in itself ranks as a national asset
more important than tanks and rockets.
_ The Presidential tour, taking in eleven countries and
| a span approaching the circumference of the earth, is
evidence that General Eisenhower is determined to use
this asset to the full. It is also evidence of the remark-
able change that has come over the President in the
past year. During his first term and most of the second,
he was a cautious President and, despite his popularity,
1 disappointing one. The times called for courageous
action; he temporized and left action to others. All this
he has evidently put behind him. At a more advanced
age than any of his predecessors, he undertakes a tour
which is not only precedent-shattering, | but which would
tax the energies of the youngest and most virile of
statesmen. Most important of all, he goes in the name
of peace. It is only a word, but a potent one — a word
found in all languages, not only in the Russian.
Still, a word of caution is in order. Eighty-four re-
sorters and photographers will accompany the Presi-
lential party, and in every country of the eleven e

ank 5s will be swelled by the represen aap he
Mi “<{uve ;

| + natn a Tage An te date
/ ; bi LE ie LRN Sik ‘

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Sob ¢
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press and radio. The lights will be blinding and the
clamor deafening; in that sense the trip cannot but be a
success. But only so much can be expected of a journey
of three weeks following almost fifteen years of cold war.
The crucial fact of world politics is still the tension be-
tween the United States and the Soviet Union. Numer-
ous developments attest to the lessening of hostility and
a cautious willingness on both sides to explore the pos-
sibilities (and perils) of a live-and-let-live policy. But
only a beginning has been made. The President’s trip
will be a real success only in proportion as it furthers
the change which has been initiated, but still has a long
way to go.

Roving Nemesis

By 1965, perhaps sooner, the United States should be
rich in missiles, as well as in dream kitchens and proudly
finned automobiles. There will not be as many ICBMs
as dish washers, but there will be hundreds of them,
perhaps thousands, in contrast to the lone Atlas that
now deters the bloody Russians at Vandenberg Air
Force Base. But the Russians will have missiles too, The
problem is to keep their missiles away from our mis-
siles, and one solution is to keep ours always on the
move. The Pentagon is actively planning for missile
trains which will roam the nation’s 225,000 miles of
trackage and compensate in some measure for the loss
of passenger traffic. The missile train will always know
where it is, so that it can hope to place its burden more
or less accurately on pre-selected Russian targets; but
the Russians, not knowing where the trains are, will
only be able to exterminate two-thirds of the American —
population living in cities. The best insurance of sur-
vival will be to get a ride on a missile train or, for the

marine, For the air-minded, the plan contemplates nu- —
clear- owered aircraft always on the move, doing their ‘¢
part to baffle and terrify the Muscovites.

area no pipe ea: American Machine & Foundry

M+ i 1 i
,\ sb

AES

maritime-minded, on a missile-carrying nuclear sub-

and ACF Industries are even now designing rail cars for
launching. But it has a flaw, as all schemes involving
nuclear warfare seem to have. For land-based missiles,
if the Russians feel like making them mobile, they have
much more room in which to roam than we have. In
fact, they have so much Lebensraum that to a consider-
able extent they may be able to shoot from fixed bases
which not even the genius of Allen Dulles will be able
Admiral Harry D. Felt, our Commander-
in the Pacific, reveals that 8,700-mile Soviet
“impacting” in the Pacific between
Hawaii and Alaska. It is not known how many have
been fired, but more than one has been observed. They
appear to come from the Caspian launching area, not
from Siberia, where the Russians also have launching
From the latter, any point in the United
States could be reached with 5,500-mile missiles which
the USSR is now producing.

The Pentagon is enterprising, but so are the Rus-
sians, and when it comes to dispersal, they Enugy cer-
tain advantages.

locate.
in-Chief

missiles have been

facilities.

The Needle’s Stuck in the Groove

With so many disc jockeys being fired, a new job, be-
fitting his talent, might be found for Henry Cabot Lodge,
our undistinguished Ambassador to the United Nations.
As usual at this time of year, he insisted on putting the
Hungarian threnody on the U.N. agenda. Except for
Nationalist China and a few other allies, he found no
enthusiastic supporters, but that mattered little; he knew
he could get a majority. It probably never occurred to
him to ask whether he was benefiting the ones most con-
cerned — the Hungarian people. Not the American Hun-
garians, but the Hungarians in Hungary, where, after all,
most of them remain, by choice or otherwise.

Writing in the London Observer, the strongly anti-
Communist Nora Beloff, just back from Hungary, ap-
proaches the question from this angle, the only one which
makes sense, The Hungary Hungarians, she reports,
“have no use for our oratorical solicitude. They know
that Soviet Russia took the biggest ideological beating
of her history in Budapest in October, 1956; they also
know that nothing in the world — least of all Western
admonitions — will induce the Russians to withdraw
their 50,000-odd troops now stationed in Hungarian
barracks, unless (or until) they can rely on the local
Communists to keep the Red Flag flying.” The Hun-
gary Hungarians do not cherish the memory of Radio
Free Europe urging them on into the cannon’s mouth
when the United States had not the least intention of
giving military help, and France and England were too
busy invading Egypt to give aid, even if they wanted
to.

What the Hungarians would like, now, is a relaxation
of tension between East and West, To the New York

430

% a 3 en i) oa
Hungarians, picketing the Soviet U.N. headquarters
may be a sacred duty, partaking also of the nature of
sport, but the equally anti-Communist Budapest Hun-
garians would like freedom from arrest or, if they are
in prison, they would like amnesty. They would like the
measure of freedom that a Communist Hungary pat-
terned on Poland would afford. It would be limited and
precarious enough, but it would be far better than what
they have. In short, they are tired of being catspaws for
the West, and it is about time that the West, and Henry

Cabot Lodge in particular, found a better use for the
U.N.’s time.

And Wow Again!

This is the season when our hearts are asked to give
their nickels and pennies to the poor, the handicapped
and the forgotten. A deserving recipient under all three
categories is the University of Houston, the second
largest college in Texas.

This university’s troubles all stem from one source —
it was a beneficiary of the late Hugh Roy Cullen, a Texas
oil millionaire whose flamboyance was a match for his
wealth. Being given to the large public gesture, Mr. Cul-
len wrote a will that left the University of Houston,
through a foundation, $160 million in oil lands. Wow!

And wow again. But the fact is that the income from
those holdings is by no means as large as people naturally
think, and the further fact is that Mr. Cullen’s gift has
effectively shut off any other philanthropy. The result of
all this is that the handsome buildings on the Houston
campus are badly leaking, classes are being held in Army
surplus prefabs and the chancellor of the university sits
in his 650-foot, wood-paneled office (provided by Mr.
Cullen) and dreams up ways of getting his drive for
funds off the ground. The school needs a $50 million en-
dowment fund and $50 million for additional buildings.
So far, the total received is $4 million. The college will
accept any gift, however small — in fact it would prefer
a lot of small gifts to the disastrous benevolence of an-
other oil millionaire.

Murphy’s Round

Speaking to the NATO representatives in Washing-
ton, Dean Acheson expressed disbelief that anything
could come out of a conference on Berlin except “a re-
treat and acceptance of Russian terms.” He added one
of his famous cracks: the Administration’s foreign
policy, he said, consists of locomotion and not much
else. Secretary of State Christian Herter answered Mr.
Acheson effectively, but so politely that no one paid
much attention. Undersecretary Robert Murphy finished
the job which Secretary Herter had begun, He pointed |
out that good-will tours are now a recognized instrus J
ment of dynamic diplomacy and charged his forng 7

i
, : tl
vine -

‘
“ ~

as to who won. The question is,

but so is Mr. Acheson.

ee, eae

a al Ua

‘boss with advocating “a policy of the broad behind.”
Quips don’t prove anything, but no one who heard both
the Acheson and Murphy speeches will have any doubt
however, why Mr.
Murphy won so easily. He is a redoubtable scrapper,
Indeed, when the former Sec-
retary is in form, he is a wit of the first order; at all
times he is a civilized man and, what is even rarer, a
practicing Christian. And he is the principal architect
of NATO. What is the matter with him, then?

After an initial silence following on his departure from

rt we oe Mae

affairs, as was his right and duty;
voiced only sterile, static views. The trouble seems to
be that he has never gone beyond NATO, any more
than Harry Truman has. The spectacle of talent bog-
ged down in bygone preconceptions is as familiar as it
is sad. Mr. Acheson should realize that NATO had only

a limited and transitory usefulness, and that we must

office, he has commented from time to time on foreign

unhappily, he has

go on from there. If he can’t begin thinking afresh, lesser
sluggers than Robert Murphy will be landing haymakers
on his handsome visage.

Whose Business

RECENT controversy on the ‘birth-
control issue has had at least two
_salutory aspects: it has caused a lot
of people who matter to declare
where they stand, and it has given
- public an opportunity of extend-

ing their knowledge about the na-
ture of the world? s population prob-

_lems.

Yet the controversy has also had
its unfortunate and confusing as-
pects. It has tended to encourage

| the views, first, that the solution of
| problems of overpopulation can be

easily found, either by universal ap-

plication of some new birth-control

B device or (in the case of those who
are morally opposed to artificial
birth control) by expansion of food
resources; and second, that decisions
of Congress to grant foreign aid
should be governed by the birth-
_ control issue.

The latter suggestion is prepos-
_ terous, To grant aid with the pro-
-viso that it should be used to dis-
seminate birth control would, among
other things, be interpreted by the
_ Communist world as another sign of
_ Western capitalism’s inability to de-
feat the Malthusian bogey through
_ increased production. To tie aid to
the proviso that it should not be so
used would both insult the right of

W. D, BORRIE, professor of ~de-
mography at the Australian National
Unwwersity, and visiting professor this
year at Princeton University, is the
author of Population Trends and
Policies and other books on p
t Siagablemi- M, it:

das 1959 bs

tunately the evidence i
a- way. In some cases, —

. has. been dra:

Is Birth Control?..

the people of recipient countries to
make their own decisions on this
matter, and ignore the fact that in
many parts of the world, both “de-
veloped” and “otiteideweloped,”
birth control is already prevalent in
the form of abortion, infanticide and
other less socially desirable methods.
The problem goes much deeper
than this. Since World War II, there
has been a vast extension of inter-
national aid and international co-
operation. In many cases, the moti-
vation may have been related to
the cold war, but the fact of the
existence of such cooperation § re-
mains. Throughout the world, inter-
national agencies are assiduously
working to extend it for the benefit
of mankind. The cooperation con-
cerns the “indivisible” benefits now
internationally accepted as the rights
of every person, such as adequate
food, maximum health that medical
science can provide, and _ literacy.
Through the many agencies of the
United Nations, collaboration to give
effect to these rights knows neither
class nor creed. For any nation, par-
ticularly the United ‘States, to have
foreign aid become the plaything of
sectarian controversy would be
morally disastrous and a propaganda
scoop for the Communist world.
Does this mean that foreign aid

may accentuate the population prob-

lem? It may if the peoples of the
world’s low-income natic 1s choose to
ignore the population issue, but for-
s the other

rastic andy

Pi ye
4) Coed

cy ata d 4

by W. D. Borrie

Japan, where the major method for
bringing the population into balance
with available resources has been
abortion. In others, the problem is
a live but as yet largely unresolved
issue, as in the case of India, where
birth control has been accepted as
an essential aspect of the struggle to
break from the Malthusian shackles
of famine and disease.

The essential point is that action
to control population trends must
remain essentially a matter of inter-
nal decision in the country concern-
ed, and not one that can be imposed
upon a people from without. Nor in
any democratic society is the final
decision whether or not to have chil-
dren a matter for anyone other than
individual couples. If Roman Cath-
olics do not practice certain forms
of birth control in the United States
or elsewhere, that is their concern.
If Protestants do, that is also their
concern. And in Western democratic
countries, both Catholics and Protes-
tants are free to make their own de-
cisions. Why presume to impose their
will on the outside world, whether
Christian or non-Christian?

RECOGNITION of the right of in-
dividual choice in the matter should
not, however, be permitted to detract
attention from the reality of a popu-

lation problem. Demographers have —

been pointing to that reality for
many years. Its dimensions are very
simply understood. The world has
today about 2,900 million people. |
It took 2,000 years to add the first
2,000 million. It seems quite incon=

tei

trovertible that the next 2,000 mil-
lion will be added before the next
forty years are up. This rate of
growth—some 1.7 per cent a year
is unique in the history of the world.
Western man started it all by break-
ing the balance of births and deaths
that had held mankind to a very
low rate of increase for over 2,000
years. By scientific agriculture, by
a technical revolution, by applied
medical science, he got rid of the
great killing diseases, moving toward
his biblical hence of three score
years and ten. He cledged death. His
next response? To cheat uncontrolled
births. How? Not by magic pills, not
by today’s fashionable contracep-
tives, not basically by abstinence or
restraint from marriage, but by all
the means of birth control then
known to him, and particularly by
coitus interruptus.

The moral of Western history is
clear enough. Given a situation of
improving material standards of life,
universal literacy, emancipation of
women, and above all death control
—in short all the things today’s un-
dernourished, technically backward
peoples are striving for—and the in-
centives and motivations for popu-
lation control arise.

HERE IS the apparent paradox of
the present world situation. Free peo-
ples everywhere are hell-bent on
development. The whole world is
searching for the way out of the
Malthusian dilemma by the paths
followed by the Western world a
century ago. But they cannot find
their way through by one path alone.
They have made one major leap for-
ward—death control, thanks to ap-
plied medical science. In twenty
years, infant-death rates have tum-
bled down from 200 and more per
1,000 live births to 100 and less. Ex-
pectations of life have leapt forward
in many Asian countries from some
forty years to fifty-five years and
more. The result has been a great
upsurge in the rate of growth, to 3
‘per cent a year in some instances

_—a rate sufficient to double a popu-

_ lation in about twenty-six years. |

__ The battle of food resources has

been scarcely Jess spectacular. ira ‘ h

Pi their own programs wi ithin 1
framewe 01 k of ae
7 h it

the world’s population may still h
undernourished, and people still”
of starvation; but vues are ae

Ves mt
great famines that wracked Asian

masses of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries? Food resources are
(so far) generally keeping up with
population growth. So, too, is the
battle of the “underdeveloped” half
of the world battling against illit-
eracy.

Yet all of these activities have for
the most part left birth rates as
high, and often higher, than ever. A
demographer watching this natural
increase—a steadily rising birth rate
and falling death rates—can only
conclude that the gap must be closed
somehow, and a whole century of
Western experience suggests that
with motivations arising as strongly
as they are today in much of the
Eastern world, the break in uncon-
trolled births must come soon. If the
history of Western Europe in the
century before 1930 needs further
support for such a conclusion, the his-
tory of most of Eastern and South-
ern Europe since then, and of Japan
over the past twenty years, provides
it; for here birth rates per 1,000 of
population have come
down—in many cases from thirty
and over to twenty and under.

The arguments that foreign aid
for economic development, for edu-
cation, for medical and maternal
health, or for any of the other “in-
divisible” benefits will. } accelerate
population growth for a period is no
argument for cutting it off. Such aid
is a major function of the U.N. in
any case. And if the United States
and other democratic powers do not
accept their responsibilities here,
either directly or through the U.N.
agencies, the Communist countries
will.

But responsibilities do not mean

only, or even mainly, money. The.
economic development,

funds for
public health or education, to take
only a few examples, must come
from within the countries concerned.
Independent nations do not want
charity and cannot be bought. What
they do seek in the field of social
welfare are technical advice, ex-
panding opportunities for training

persons in relevant skills, collabora-

tion in research and the ex change
of ideas, and the ch ance to work out
eir own

ew ey

tumbling |

right of the people themselves going

Ad |
ic!
[M

Finally, a view Bees s the |
long-term solution of the es of
overpopulation basically through in- |
creased production of food overlooks |
the very important fact that the §
final way out cannot be found by
this path alone. It did not happen —
this way in any “Western” countries
in their period of transition, even
where population densities were low
and resources were abundant. Much
less is the theory applicable to the
crowded countries of Asia.

Increased productivity per acre,
which is the key to the food issue, —
almost certainly means decreasing
density of population per acre, which
in turn means that vast numbers of
workers have to be moved from the
land to earn enough income to feed,
clothe and house themselves in non-
rural occupations. They have to gen-
erate the income to set the wheels of
balanced economic development in
motion.

HOW to deal with this ever-grow-
ing mass of non-agricultural workers —
is the basic economic problem— —
much more so than the mere produc- —
tion of foodstuffs. Some have suc-
ceeded in the process, at a terrible —
price (e.g., USSR and the liquida- |
tion of the Kulaks); some seem to —
be achieving it, at what price we do |
not yet know (China); and some —
are searching for ways and means ~
within the framework of democracy
(India).

That the whole process of bal-
anced economic development would |
be greatly assisted by limiting the
flood of recruits to be fed and em- —
ployed would seem incontrovertible; |
but equally incontrovertible is the —

through the process to say how and |
when the checks will be applied. W

That they must be applied soon |
seems inevitable. Again a simple —
arithmetical sum will show why.
Given a continuation of the current |
world rate of population growth, the _
world will have standing room only |
in less than 750 years time. It seems Hs
unnecessary to add that it has also”
been calculated that at present rates |
of growth, the weight of human be-
ings would equal the weight of the |
world in 1,700 ea he Pe oY

woe
+

United Nations
JUST BEFORE the twenty-sixth in
the series of secret ballots marking
the deadlock between Poland and
Turkey on election to the Security
Council, the Soviet delegation ap-
proached the Irish delegation and
urged it to switch its vote from Tur-
key to Poland. “But,” answered an
Irish spokesman, “we’ve been voting
for Poland right along!”

The Russians are not the only ones
at the U.N. to guess wrong on Irish
intentions. In terms of political or
geographical balance of power, the
Irish are as unpredictable here as
they are, by tradition, everywhere.
Beholden to no one, they play a free-
wheeling role that sometimes puts
them in the Western camp, some-
times in the Eastern, and most often
in between—playing the role of ref-
eree. Unhampered—as many of the
small nations are—by a vulnerable
geographic position in the cold war,
Ireland feels free to shout where so
many others are constrained to
_ whisper. It was Ireland, not India,
_ which sponsored the resolution con-
demning Chinese atrocities in Tibet.
But it was also Ireland which was
the first purely Western power to

advocate a reassessment of the “Chi-
nese question” at the U.N. After

India’s unsuccessful 1957 attempt to
seat Communist China, Frank Aiken,
Irish Foreign Minister, said:

— eee

——.

Re —s

We have no sympathy whatever
with the ideology of the Peking
Government. But the belief of my
delegation is that in the present cir-
cumstances progress can best be
made [towards the end of improving
the situation in Korea and China|
by having a full and open discussion
of the question of the representation
of China in this Assembly.

The U.S. delegation ignored this
suggestion from an “upstart” (Ire-
land had been admitted to the world
body only two years before), while
the United Kingdom which, unlike
Ireland, has diplomatic and trade re-
lations with Communist China (yet
finds itself able to sit comfortably
with Nationalist China at the UN. )

JANE STOLLE is The Nation’s
a N. epitet nena . é, ;

en,
eo

THE PEACE-LOVING IRISH

‘ie time during the gen

eee ee

looked the other way and smiled.
“It’s got to come some day, you
know,” an Englishman commented.
“But wouldn’t you know it would
be the Irish to say so?”

In that same session, Ireland had
some cogent things to say about get-
ting down to business on the ques-
tion of peace. During the debate on
Hungary, Mr. Aiken remarked:

We were struck by the fact that

Mr. Khrushchev recently repeated an

offer he made sometime ago. He said

he would withdraw Russian troops
from the territories which they oc-
cupy in Eastern Europe, including

Hungary, if the United States would

withdraw her troops completely from

the continent of Europe.

Well, continued Mr. Aiken, let’s
not reject this idea out of hand. Ad-
mitting there were obvious objec-
tions to the Russian “offer”—that it
was heavily weighted on the Russian
side—the Irish Foreign Minister pro-
posed, in essence, to call the Rus-
sians’ bluff, if it were one: “We are
here, I assume, not only to express
our moral disapproval, but to see
whether we can do something to
help . . . [the Hungarians].” If the
United Nations were to declare it-
self in principle in favor of a drawing
back of non-national armies and
military personnel on the continent,
he went on, the ultimate to be gain-
ed would be the peaceful liberation
of Eastern Europe; at the very least,
the Hungarians would gain some as-
surance that they had not been for-
gotten.

THIS WAS the genesis of what has
come to be known as the “Aiken
Plan,” which preceded the better
known Rapacki Plan by a year and
came at one of the coolest periods of
U.S.-USSR relations. Aiken did not
offer it as an agenda item. He point-
ed out that it was primarily the
Great Powers involved who must
cousider the suggestion he had made.
They didn’t, but for the next two
years the Irish hammered away at
their “plan,” expanding it to include
the explosive Berlin question.

_ On September 23, 1959, at the
14th General Assembly, Mr. Aiken

again brought up th

by Jane Stolle

There is, as far as we can see, no
peaceful and permanent solution for
Berlin except as the capital of a united
Germany. . . . Nor can we see, even
in the distant future, any peaceful
solution acceptable to both power
groups for the problem of European
security unless a reunited Germany,
together with Poland and _ other
Eastern European countries, agrees to
become an area of law, free from
foreign troops, free from weapons of
blitzkrieg and mass destruction, and
subject to United Nations inspection
and guarantee.

Germany, instead of being encour-
aged to become once more the
arsenal of Europe, the potential jug-
gernaut, ‘the Frankenstein, would
then emerge as the “prototype,” as
Aiken put it, “of the world we want.”
Disputes would be arbitrated by the
International Court of Justice and
the only troops permitted on Ger-
man soil would be those of a per-
manent United Nations Force.

Pie in the sky, some delegates said.
Again, Ireland did not offer its sug-
gestion as an agenda item. The Big
Powers—the ones responsible for
world peac
first. But in the meantime, Ireland
did have a very practical proposal
to make for avoiding war until a
true peace could be made. This was
the Irish-sponsored agenda item No.
67—“The Prevention of Dissemina-
tion of Nuclear Weapons,” more
commonly referred to as the “Nu-
clear Club” idea. The Irish resolu-
tion proposed that the U.N. recom-
mend to the ten-power East-West
disarmament conference, scheduled
to meet early next year in Geneva,
a study of means to prevent “the
wider dissemination of nuclear arms.”
It proposed that the conference

. examine the feasibility of ar-
riving at an international agreement

subject to inspection and control,
whereby the nations producing nu
clear weapons [Great Britain, United
States, USSR and, tacitly, Franc
would refrain from handing over
control of such weapons to any
tion not possessing them and whe e-
by the powers not possessing §
weapons would refrain from manu
facturing them. ce,

In an article in The a of

su ch

November 29, 1958, Mr. Aiken said:

The danger of nuclear weapons to
humanity does not merely increase
in direct ratio to the number of those

It seems likely to
increase in progression.
Those who nuclear
weapons are a few great and highly
developed states, with great urban
populations, with much to lose and
little to gain in a nuclear war. Their
potential adversaries are in the same

possessing them.
geometric

now possess

situation and have the power to
retaliate.
But, he went on, other nations

may feel they have less to lose, and
as nuclear weapons become easier to
obtain, may use them to gain what
they consider even a temporary ad-
vantage.

MOST OF the smaller countries—
the potential villains of the piece—
backed the Irish resolution whole-
heartedly. If adopted by the disarma-
ment conferees, the proposal would
lift the threat of nuclear bombs at
their backs and their flanks. It would
give them more chance to get on
with the business of developing their
countries’ resources, of becoming re-
sponsible members of the world com-
munity without worrying about a
hostile neighbor.

The real breakthrough would
come, of course, when the Big Pow-
ers themselves decided to live per-
manently in peace. Meanwhile, the

THE BEGINNING of the end of
the national stockpile of strategic
materials came quietly. It came in
the form of a bland announcement
by the Office of Civil and Defense
Mobilization in December, 1958, to
the effect that its stockpile was $1.85
billion “overblown” and that there
would be a disposal of surpluses.

A. distinct shock radiated in-

EDWARD W. ZIEGLER, a former
newspaperman, is now an editor at

McGraw-IIill.
434

ie) ey) CM. Ae

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pile) Va

Piel bata a4

Irish resolution promised a big step
in the right direction. It was passed
by the General Assembly’s Special
Political Committee, 66-0, with thir-
teen states abstaining (the nine
members of the Soviet bloc, plus
France, China, Spain and Peru). So-
viet opposition was based on its for-
mal position that there must be
total disarmament — or nothing.
China, France, Spain and Peru gave
various reasons for not going along,
but France’s Jules Moch’s explana-
tion was perhaps the most candid:
“France would not renounce a weap-
on which other countries, in whose
arsenals it was already included,
would continue to produce.”

France, apparently, already has
the bomb, and for reasons of prestige
and—some say—political blackmail,
is determined to blast her way into
the “Nuclear Club” via projected nu-
clear tests in the Sahara. The Irish,
by tacitly including her among the
nuclear “have” nations, feel they
have made their point even ‘clearer:
Who next will be knocking on the
door?

The U.N. area of activity in which
Ireland’s role was most predictable—
and which has won her the appella-
tion of “Afro-Asian bloc” leader—is
that dealing with underdeveloped
countries. Both in economic ques-
tions, handled largely by the Eco-
nomic and Social Council — and in

THE COLD WARIN STORAGE:

stantly to London, New York and
the grim mining towns of at least
three continents. Before a full day
had passed, the protests of one of this
nation’s most vocal special-interest
groups rose in outrage.

The OCDM spent the 1958
Christmas holidays reassuring the
mining interests that its announce-
ment meant only that there was go-
ing to be a reassessment of U. S.
strategic stockpile needs; OCDM
continued “firmly on record” against
the unloading of surplus commodi-

political questions before the Trus- —
teeship Council, Ireland plumps un-
swervingly for what she considers
“practical” aid and comfort for the
evolving nations. Here she often runs
head-on into both the former coloni-
al powers and the Soviet bloc; the
first because they are loath to give
up their hegemony, and the second
because they would like to extend
theirs.

THE IRISH delegation includes
among its eight permanent represent-
atives a poet (Miss Maire Mac-
Entee; a _ historian and _ literary
critic (Dr. C. Cruise O’Brien); and
an author-archaeologist (Mr. Eoin
MacWhite). Ambassador Frederick.
H. Boland, the permanent head of
the delegation, is a veteran diplomat
who got his training in world or-
ganizations as a youngster at the
League of Nations. Aiken, who heads
the delegation temporarily during
most of the General Assembly, joined
the Irish Nationalist movement at
the age of fifteen and worked up to
I.R.A. chief of staff at twenty-five.
Today, as Foreign Minister, he. is
still a nonconformist.

The country that has produced a
Swift, a Joyce and a Parnell, and
whose gravest immediate foreign-
policy problem is the free flow of
agricultural produce to England, is
living up to its lively heritage.

ties that might cause market disrup-
tion. In any case—the reassurances
continued—disposal was “a _ long
way off,” would require at least six
months’ notice to industry, and
would not apply to “sensitive” cases.

The underlying fact was that
Uncle Sam wanted * from an
estimated $8.1 billion stockpile of —
copper, lead, zine, aluminum, tung- —
sten, and even such odd strategic |
materials as duck feathers, coconstaa
oil and opium. Sooner or later some-

thing aaa hare to be done. :

? ‘ : 4 ar a7 ne NATION

’

“But you promised!”

- That was the sum of the objec-
tions hurled at the government. And
Uncle Sam had, in effect, promised.
He had done more than that. He had
used every incentive within his
enormous reach to increase the out-
put of metals producers to the point
where even today there is a weak-
ness in nonferrous metals prices
throughout the world.

“But the national security de-
mands. . . .” cried the mining in-
terests.

That is just the trouble. The needs
of national security—even though it
seems to have taken the Pentagon
thirteen years to discover the point
—began to be phrased in entirely
new terms at 8.10 A.M. on the morn-
ing of August 6, 1945, when an
- atomic fireball smote Hiroshima. By

December, 1958, it was perfectly clear

to everyone that a stockpile that

would see us through a five-year war
had very little utility in a two-week
atomic war. But it wasn’t until then
that the government was officially
willing to admit that the next war,

if and when it came, would be a

short one.
|} _ The metabolism of war got us into
| the stockpile fiasco. Yet the impera-
|} tive of peace (or, in the OCDM’s
| view, the necessity for “reappraisal”

of national security) put the mining

|| interests in an _ understandable

| quandary. For the subsidy they have

|| enjoyed by means of the stockpiling

of past years cannot continue with-

} out the imprimatur of national se-

curity. And now the hope of using

this imprimatur is gone, probably
forever.

a + Sed.

. ALREADY thers are those who are
preparing a full-scale search for a
solution to the mining industry’s
problem.

When Congress reconvenes, one of
the first things that will be thrust

before it will be a set of demands

from a group of mining-state Con-
_ gressmen presented under. the col-
_ lective label of a “National Minerals
Policy.” In a sense, this demand for
a policy will be nothing more than
an attempt by U.S. mining interests.
to push back the day when they will
have to Bes! their economic ob-_

n the f ce of the srl
Ig i

able pressure that the end of stock-
piling has put on them.

So much is at stake in erecting a
workable minerals policy that only a
miracle can produce one that is logi-
cal and equitable. The tangled causes
and effects of stockpiling, mining,
tariffs, import quotas, domestic min-
ing unemployment, labor strife, re-
cession in underdeveloped lands, and
the American farm problem produce
a complex that will not yield easily
to a rational solution.

Yet so much has happened in the
past eighteen months in international
relations that a gloomy assessment
may prove unwarranted. Peace is the
essential precondition to a realistic
and fair minerals policy. Assuming
peace, the lessons taught by war
should point the way to an eventual
solution. The history of stockpiling
sheds light on possible approaches.

STOCKPILING as we know it be-
gan back in 1946 when the sour
memories of the early days of World
War II were still fresh. Mobilizing
for total war had been difficult, com-
ing, as it did, after a decade of in-
dustrial torpor. Consequently, the
79th Congress passed the Strategic
and Critical Materials Stockpiling
Act of 1946 for the purchase and
storage of materials of critical stra-
tegic importance in time of war. The
81st Congress, under the Defense
Production Act of 1950, subsequent-
ly expanded the size and function of
stockpiling. Other legislation (the
Domestic Minerals Program Exten-
sion Act of 1954) so broadened the
fields affected that today, when we
speak of the stategic-materials stock-
pile, we are speaking of three dis-
tinct stockpiles that occupy 300
storage sites in military depots, gov-
ernment warehouses, industrial plants
and commercial storage facilities: a
vast hoard of materials sprawling
over an estimated 23 million square
feet of warehouse space, 60 million
square feet of open space, and 2 mil-
lion barrels of tank space—a cache,
valued at $8.1 billion, that would
make any “have-not” nation a
“have” overnight.

In the interests f clarity, the
stockpiles will be taken up one by
ye and this i inquiry will concentrate

1 the materials ie ve produced

most of the rotitical heat: copper,
lead and zinc. What is here said of
them is true in one connection or
another for most of the other ma-
terials in the stockpiles.

The first—and still the largest— ae
stockpile is the hoard called the Na- Ba
tional Stockpile, or the Strategic and oy
Critical Materials Stockpile. In it ws
are seventy-three materials including ie
many metals and minerals, natural
rubber, petroleum and a sizable dose a
of castor oil (presumably for high- i
altitude aircraft lubrication). By the a
time of Korea, there was a strong, ,
largely tacit understanding that this ae
stockpile should be managed spe- a
cifically to support the domestic pro- i
ducing industries.

The Defense Production Act of a
1950 set up a second stockpile filled ,
by companies who rushed to take
advantage of the attractive long-term 5
procurement contracts let by Uncle

Sam. The mischief of that frenzy "
still plagues international copper, di
lead and zinc prices.

Eventually—and inevitably—even iy

the farm bloc insinuated itself into
the strategic-materials game. This
happened when the third stockpile—
the so-called Supplemental Stockpile
—was set up in 1954. A desperate
Administration, up to its ears in ex-
cess farm goods, got into the com-
plex business of bartering surplus
foods to needy nations in exchange
for foreign metals and minerals un-
der the Agriculture Department’s
disposal program.

DURING the acquisition of these
materials, the first faint doubts crept
into certain military minds. The mes-
sage from Hiroshima was getting — J
through to military planners at long.
last, and by the mid-1950s they were
opeisher questioning the basic utility —
of a five-year (or even a three-year) —
defense framework. And finally, the —
short-war theory burst full-grown —
from the Pentagon, striking a re
sponsive chord in the budget-minded
Administration and spreading a thick ke
coat of pessimism over the mining
interests. Yet, throughout the 1957-
58 “commodity recession,” when the
price” of raw materials continued
weak, stockpiling continued at Con-
gressional i insistence that only in this
way could world-wide copper, lead

2 =
45S

ies

and zine overproduction be balanced.
(Overproduction was also causing
great discomfort in aluminum and
oil, among other resources. )

By this time the OCDM decided
that it needed outside appraisal of
its stockpiling activities, and it asked
Chicago banker Holman Pettibone
to review the program. By January,
1958, Pettibone returned a report
suggesting that instead of stockpil-
ing metal for war, it would be better
to stockpile drugs, food and clothing
for postwar rehabilitation.

In no hurry, the OCDM waited
till June, 1958, to say it liked what
Pettibone said, and planned to put
most of his recommendations into
effect. The OCDM added that it
would no longer work on the expecta-
tion of a five-year war but would
consider a three-year war as its basis
for operation. At the same time, the
budget surgeons were seeing to it
that the Agriculture Department’s
barter program was sliced down (to
take the pressure off Stockpile No.
3) and that no significant appropri-
ations for stockpiling were included

in the 1959-1960 budget.

TODAY the three stockpiles break
down like this:

I. The National Stockpile. All
basic objectives are filled for its
seventy-three materials on a three-
year basis. Of the old five-year goals,
fifty items are full, including copper,
lead and zinc. The items that have
not been brought up to three-year
levels are amosite asbestos, Jamaica
bauxite (aluminum ore), certain
cordage fibers, small diamond dies,
jewel bearings, chemical-grade man-
ganese, palladium, selenium and
crude silicon carbide. Only the as-
bestos, diamond dies and jewel bear-
ings remain on the purchase list in
1959. Total dollar value of this stock-
pile is officially said to be $3.88 bil-
lion, but $5.5 billion is more like it,
informed observers believe. If
brought up to three-year levels, the
stockpile probably would be worth
$6 billion. (For the sake of simplic-
ity, the government’s tin stockpile
and the Interior Department’s stock
of price-supported commodities are
here considered as part of the Na-
tional Stockpile.)

2. The Defense Production Act

436

Murray (D.-Mont.), has
\ *

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J #4) ' ae Cees ee ’ ay

=a Sh ae = ,

Stockpile. Basic objectives are near-
ly complete, with the inventory val-
ued at $1.37 billion. Included in this
stockpile are 680,000 .short tons of

aluminum worth $345 million, 136,- ’

000 tons of copper worth about $75
million and 7,400 tons of lead worth
about $3 million. (Interestingly, all
one has to do to find out how much
of any sort of material is in this
stockpile is to ask; the cloak of se-
crecy shielding the National Stock-
pile’s contents is here absent.) Then
there are about $808 million worth
of “put” clauses still in effect where-
by a metals producer can require
Uncle Sam to buy from plants that
received governmental financial aid.
Two outstanding contracts are for
265,000 tons of aluminum and for
97,000 tons of copper, worth $131
million and $55 million respectively.

3. The Supplemental Stockpile.
This farm-surplus-turned-into-met-
als-surplus is now valued at more
than $800 million. It is difficult to
establish its exact worth because un-
der the early barter deals (the fore-
runners of the 1954 barter program)
the proceeds of the swapping went
into the National Stockpile.

ALL these confusing accretions pro-
vided the background for the
OCDM’s announcement, just a year
ago, that it would begin disposing
of certain materials. After the first
flurry died down, there was a de-
ceptive period of quiet and the issue
faded from the center of the stage.
But it was back again, twice as
raucously, last spring. The General
Service Administration said it would
dispose of 128,000 tons of copper to
alleviate a short-run shortage that
was threatening to run spot prices
far above the basic copper price of
about 30¢ a pound. Fabricators had
asked for help, G.S.A. explained.
The price of copper sagged immedi-
ately on the London Metal Exchange.
There were four days of near-panic
as the price went down as much as
4 cents a pound. Then the G.S.A.
came back and said it wasn’t going
to dispose of the copper, but was

merely considering such action.
Nevertheless, the nagging fears of
the mining interests continue. Their
Senate champion, Senator James
ed every

$24 F

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| ii ik ih
bit of his influence as chairman. of
the Interior Committee to bring
some semblance of order out of the
long-term chaos his constituents are
facing. As far back as the middle of
1958, he saw the bill he co-authored
with Interior Secretary Fred A. Sea-
ton pass the Senate, only to run afoul
of the House. It was a sweeping met- -
al-mineral subsidy program that
would have had the effect of prolong-
ing the life expectancy of the Amer-
ican nonferrous mining industry well
past the time when unfettered min-
ing economics would have consigned
it to the dust bin.

For want of such a bill, the Ad-
ministration relies today on import
quotas on lead and zinc and a tariff
on copper. These controls have the
effect of restricting trade with cer-
tain uncommitted nations.

Meanwhile, the stockpile hangs
over the marketplace. The mere exist-
ence of debate as to its usefulness
tends to depress prices.

Elsewhere, the critics of the mas-
sive stockpiling began to have their
innings. No doubt they were roused
by the brief flurry over the 128,000
tons of D.P.A. copper. The Maga-
zine of Wall Street in mid-August
warned that overstocking of materi-
als is a waste of our dollars “for
which there is neither economic nor
military justification.” One of the
better-known confidential business
letters said that the entire program
“has gotten to be a racket, full of
deceit and mercenary motives. The
thing goes on . . . never ends.”

As indicated above, a large por-
tion of our economy rests on the
production of copper, lead and zine.
That we have sent much of our
high-grade copper and lead roaring
out machine-gun barrels in the form —
of bullets is only of passing interest
at this point. Suffice it to say that
one way or another we have man-
aged to get rid of the best of our
ores. (The best of the Mesabi Range —
is at the bottom of the Pacific in |
sunk planes and ships, or rusted be- |
yond repair on some atoll in the |
form of old tanks; the highest grade |
of our petroleum is similarly gone |
forever in a spasm of military waste; |
our bauxite, nickel, and even our
topsoil, are gone in large part — and-
gone in vain.) We are approaching

un TO

a
a
i
Li

ae a %
ree.

a plateau of high-cost ore produc-
tion. So high grow these costs that
only something like a stockpile pro-
gram can make mining economical-
ly feasible in the long-term future.
“The richest hill on earth,” as they
used to call that incredibly large
copper lode that Butte, Montana,
sits upon, once contained ore com-
posed of 35 per cent copper. That
was high-grade ore in the late nine-
teenth century. Today high-grade
copper ore is anything over 4 per
cent. At Butte, the Anaconda Min-
ing Company today mines ore of only
0.8 per cent richness. Phelps-Dodge
Corporation’s Lavendar pit in the
Bisbee East section of Arizona pro-
-vides ore ranging from 0.4 per cent
to 1.15 per cent. Kennecott Copper
Company’s immense Bingham Can-
yon, Utah, open pit (which supplies
about one-third of domestic copper
ore) yields 0.9 per cent ore.
According to one metallurgist, 80
per cent of domestic copper costs
more than 25c a pound to mine, mill,
leach and refine. This cost compares
with the going price of about 30c a
pound for copper. The margin, once
all other costs are figured in, is
dangerously thin by the companies’
standards. They do not hesitate to
confront their laboring men with

_ these figures at bargaining time.

Yet copper miners have made steady
increases in productivity. In Butte,
Anaconda today can mine as much
ore as in 1956 with half the men.
The 1.7c copper import tax that
was reimposed in July, 1958 (along
with import quotas on lead and zinc,
imposed in September of that year)
materially restricts imports. In zinc,
for example, imports were 30.2 per

~ cent lower (in tons of finished metal )

in 1958 than in 1957. Through-
out the first three quarters of 1958,
zine sold for 10c a pound. When the
Administration announced its im-
port quota, the price reacted pre-

dictably, leaping to 11.5¢ a pound.

According to Charles Ince of the
St. Joseph Lead Company, writing in

Engineering &§ Mining Journal, “The -

government was a material influence

in the market throughout the year

[1958]. During the first six months
the continuance of [stockpile] pur-
chases of domestic metal . . . buoyed

up the market through . . . the re-

December 12, 1959

cession. . . . Otherwise prices [for
zinc] might have broken to the 1954
low of 9%c a pound.”

As for lead prices, they stood at
10%c a pound on August 13, 1958,
(about six weeks before the import
quota went into effect) and rose to
12, 12%, and finally 13c directly
thereafter. (Secretary Seaton had un-
successfully sought legislation earli-
er to stabilize the price at 14%c a
pound. )

Just before the copper import tax
was reimposed, the price of copper
had gone as low as 24c a pound
(making 80 per cent of our domestic
supply uneconomic,. based on the
metallurgist’s statement above).
But the price made a rapid recovery
once imports were resticted, and at
this writing (partly as a result of
strike-induced shortages) prices have
risen in some markets to as high as
38c. Even though, at this writing,
the copper strike has gone on for 111
days, the copper companies can con-
sole themselves with their vast for-
eign holdings. Kennecott’s Braden
Copper Company in Chile, Anacon-
da’s La Africana and Portrerillos
holdings in Chile and its Cananea
Consolidated holdings in Mexico, or
Phelps-Dodge’s Toquepala holdings
in Peru (with a reported 1 billion
tons of 1 per cent copper ore) all
stand as insulators from domestic
cost problems.

That leaves the American miners

a dwindling group of workers who

have not drawn regular pay for more

Ben Golden
than three months as a result of the
present strike. And it leaves them,
even when they go back to work, the
first victims of any sizable disposal
of the national stockpile. For let the
prices fall close to 25c a pound for
copper and much domestic mining of
copper, lead and zinc will come to a
halt.

Given the choice between domestic
mining unemployment (with the ul-
timate loss to us of the skills of non-
ferrous metals miners) and the far-
removed distress in a nation like
Peru, Chile, or the Belgian Congo,
there can be little doubt as to which
course politics will point out,

HAVING reached this juncture, it is
no more unrealistic to suggest a new
set of requirements for our national
minerals policy than it is to accept
the necessity of peace in planning
the future course of national stock-
piling and of our military policy.

It is in that connection that the
suggestion made by Antonio Carril-
lo-Flores, Mexico’s Ambassador to
this country, before the recent Na-
tional Foreign Trade Convention in
New York, deserves a wide hearing.
Carrillo-Flores argued with close
logic that the world’s underdeveloped
nations depend on their raw-materi-—
als exports and that they are at the
mercy of world commodity price
trends. Why, asked Carrillo-Flores, —
shouldn’t the developed countries

(and specifically the United States)

withdraw by stages from trade in

437

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*

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Pita ar. 4 ey el) Pry Pee oe tae
Shih ih ae peer ‘
’ ro tee -

raw materials and take to themselves
the profitable fields of manufactured
and capital goods? (Implicit was the
deeper suggestion that these coun-
tries can afford to withdraw from
production as well.)

As indicated above, the impartial
testimony of rising mining costs (and
of dwindling grades of ore) makes it
economically feasible for the United
States to point to the day when it
can depend on imports for its raw-
materials. The argument takes fur-
ther support from the clear certainty
that these emerging, raw-materials-
producing nations will be our biggest
customers for such capital goods as
heavy turbines, which take great
quantities of copper, for example.
We can reasonably expect to demon-
strate our system’s superiority if we
consent to increasing the buying
power of these nations.

The argument that “national
security” demands a domestic min-
ing industry regardless of cost can
carry no more weight than that “na-
tional security” demands five-year
supplies of “strategic” materials. If
the national security is really tested
in a war, will any argument truly be
relevant? Will anything, for that
matter, be relevant? Would war be
possible for a nation that had its
destiny firmly interlocked with na-
tions that can grow and prosper by
partner-to-partner trade?

Or, if you prefer, put it in terms

of America — America the beautiful.
Demands for a long-range national
minerals policy to guarantee a strong
and profitable domestic mining in-
dustry (such demands dominated
the American Mining Congress’
meeting in September) sound good
enough now in the last days of our
national adolescence. But the fact of
the matter is that the “strong and
profitable domestic mining industry”
finds itself searching frantically for
new sources of ores, as most of the
good ore bodies have long since seen
their best days. And where is it look-
ing? In woodland preserves set aside
for farms, forests, fishing streams; in
the public domain. The Engineering
€F Mining Journal, reporting on the
Mining Congress meeting, said:

Interviews with mining men at the
convention and elsewhere indicated
that many areag of the U. S. are un-
attractive to venture capital because
of discouraging state politics and
state tax policies. We mention poli-
tics . . . because each time we asked
why efforts to encourage mining
were defeated, we met with the same
answer—the farmers, the fishermen,

and hunters, the Jaborers, the con-—
servationists, and non-mining busi-
nessmen outnumber mining voters.

The editorial went on to point out
that most of these ore bodies “are so
low in grade that they are virtually
valueless in the ground. Their real
value accrues in the amount of work
that has to be done to mine, mill,
smelt and refine them.”

One industrial-materials expert
foresees the day when the Appala-
chian Range will be studded with
chemical-mining plants that attach
themselves to similar low-grade ore
bodies and suck the valueless ore in-
to process tanks where it will be up-
graded to economically significant
percentages. One may ask, what is to
become of our remaining wilderness
under these conditions? Why should
we go to such great cost when the
underdeveloped and uncommitted
nations can do far more at greater
efficiency and at less monetary or
scenic cost and, in the process, be-
come our firm economic allies?

Thus what began with war may
continue with peace. For the next
decade — and more — the prepara-
tion for peace can have no better
starting place than in a realistic,
equitable and deliberate solution to
the hitherto baffling question: What
do we do with $8.1 billion worth of
copper, lead, zinc, aluminum, tung-
sten, coconut oil, opium, duck
feathers and castor oil?

THIS POST-CHRISTIAN ERA e « by Gabriel Vahanian

DESPITE the overt, proselytizing
religiosity of our present culture and
society, we live in a post-Christian
era. People try God, or original sin,
as others try the newest medicine.
The historian Arnold Toynbee ac-
knowledges this fact, while the Ox-
ford-Cambridge Christian — scholar,
C. S. Lewis, ponders over the “un-

GABRIEL VAHANIAN, who trans-
lated and wrote the introduction for
Karl Barth’s The Faith of the
Church, is a member of the Depart-
ment of Religion at Syracuse Unwer-
Sity.

438

christening” of Europe, particularly
noticeable in literature, as the most
important turning point since its
christening.

A number of reasons may. be
brought forward justifying the use
of the phrase, “post-Christian era” to
describe our time. At least three
reasons are cited here, which indi-
cate the perspective of this article
and lay down the path of its argu-
ment. ,

First, Christianity is today syn-
onymous with religiosity. Its appeal
to the masses is almost entirely

based on a diluted version of the

original faith. The gap between the
gospel and “the power of positive
thinking” is greater than the one
which, according to Tertullian (160-
220 A.D.), separated Athens from
Jerusalem — pagan wisdom. from
biblical truth. For the sake of easy
consumption, the radical character
of biblical faith is diluted into re-
ligiosity: purely formal, innocuous
and somewhat hygienic. The Chris-
tian vocabulary has very little or no
meaning for modern man except for
the victim—let us say, zealot—of re-_
ligiosity. And religiosity often is but |
the cunning by which secularism tri- |

, be INA r1ON
a .

_
o

-umphs over and wipes out faith in

God and, instead, sets up faith—faith
in anything—as an end in itself. Such
religiosity only fulfills civic ends: to-
day it is socially fashionable to be
religious. Religious observance has
reached an all-time high; and reli-
gious affiliation has attained peaks
which Jonathan Edwards would not
have dreamed of.

Second, in proportion as Christian-
ity is displaced by religiosity, it no
longer inspires contemporary cul-

ture; its spirit does not impregnate
the ethos of our time. As a result,

Christianity stands in apposition, if

not in opposition, to the modern

world. The cleavage between them
becomes more and more grievous.

Nor does modern man look at all

like any of the Big Fisherman’s con-

temporaries. To be sure, attempts —
and valid ones — are made to bring
together the essence of Christianity
_ and the realities of the modern world,
to correlate the Christian answer to
the questions of modern man (as
Tillich does, for example). Never-
theless, a sword of Damocles hangs
over Christianity. For the question
cannot be held back: is Christianity,
supposing that it has not yet lost,
fighting a losing battle?
\ Third, Christianity has at any rate
lost its hegemony. Whether spiritual-
ly or politically considered, or both,
this hegemony, arduously established
in the course of centuries, is now
_ disputed. Certainly, it does not make
itself felt in international relations,
except as it finds expression in the
blunder of a diplomat inviting Jews
and Arabs to settle their differences
in a Christian spirit. It has already
lost its scepter. It has lost even
more on the national level — what
with the assimilation of democracy
with syncretistic religiosity, of
which politicians, among others,
speak eloquently and fervently.

Let us develop these three points
successively in order to clarify and
substantiate the assertion that we
live in a post-Christian era.

An observation by Norman Birn-
baum will provide an adequate
starting point. He once said that “the
typical American today is, in fact,
a Calvinist with neither fear of hell

December 12, 1959

be
E
c

nor hope for heaven.” A contradic-
tion in terms? It would have been
in another age. Today, however,
this description is significant in three
respects, depending on what heaven
and hell mean for this American.
The first, which deals with the de-
valuation of biblical terms and sym-
bols, is offered here as the least like-
ly, though a theologian would wish
it were the most significant. Indeed,
if heaven and hell rather literally
mean “pie in the sky up there” and
“onashing of teeth down _ below,”
then no doubt the typical American
is better off today, provided of
course he has preserved his faith in
the sovereignty of God, which is
what these terms symbolize; just as

he is better off if they mean a future
life which deprecates and negates
this life, and if they imply turning
one’s back on this world. But this is
not likely. The second respect in
which this description is significant
is therefore closer to reality. Most
probably, Norman Birnbaum’s re-
mark underscores the fact that the
typical American’s religion is a re-
ligiosity without marrow. The third
implication hangs on the likelihood
of the second. The average man is
at once too religious and not reli-
gious enough. There is nothing sur-
prising in that. The latent religiosity
of every man has purely and simply
taken over wherever Christianity
(seen here under the aspect of Cal-
vinism) has abdicated. The vacuum
created by this abdication is filled
with a religiosity as shallow as it is

intense, because religiosity means
that one believes merely for the sake
of believing and because the bibli-
cal terminology is increasingly for-
eign to our self-understanding.

To be sure, the concepts of heaven
and hell are not so essential to the
structure of the Christian faith as
foes and fundamentalists alike nar-
row-mindedly claim. The Christian
faith centers on the immediacy of
God’s transcendent presence in this
world of things and beings. This, of
course, requires today other modes
of thought in order to convey what
in a previous era the traditional
concepts adequately expressed. The
faith itself does not hinge on those
concepts, but on their content. To
be more specific, the world of the
New Testament, as Rudolf Bultmann
keeps reminding us, is like a three-
story edifice, since the earth is
thought to be flat, lying between
heaven above and hell below. But
new dimensions force us to correct
ancient perspectives, though the
question, “Who am I?” remains as
central or fundamental now as then.
Moreover, constant reinterpreta-
tion is a task which the perspectives
themselves demand of every genera-
tion. To be sure, this reinterpreta-
tion also carries a danger — that of
watering down the essential tenets
of the faith, which are independent
of their linguistic vehicles. But this
task is as difficult as it is urgent.
It is difficult because no common
language, religious or artistic, girds
even Western culture itself. It is
urgent, because of those who clamor
for a return to raw traditional con-
cepts.

IN THIS respect, Paul Tillich’s en-
terprise must come under consider-
ation, even.if to give only an idea
of its scope and magnitude. His is
today a unique attempt to mold
a language at once consonant with

the biblical and traditional Chris-—

tian symbols and with modern man’s
self-understanding. The nature, if
not the method, of his undertaking
recalls the work of synthesis effected
by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth
century. Without hesitation, Tillich
substitutes, for example, terms like

439

tee et

ser

NAL a

RR ee

“estrangement” for sinfulness and
“courage to be” for salvation. But it
is also Tillich who is considered an
arch-heretic by traditional Christians
and is suspected by those — often
non-Christians — for whom Christi-
anity remains inextricably bound up
with crude and rudimentary beliefs
such as hell and damnation. Be that
as it may, by contrast with that
of Thomas Aquinas, in the world of
Paul Tillich — that is, in our modern
world—God is a superannuated pro-
jection: He is dead. There is no ab-
solute. Ours is not only the world
of relativity, it is also that of in-
finitesimal | compartmentalization.
And it is infantile, which means
etymologically that it does not speak
a common language, if it speaks at
all. It is a world of primeval, even
primitive, religiosity. It defeats the
well-meaning, if not always the ma-
ture, professional religious thinker.
Followers of Tillich’s modern-dress
Christianity sometimes resemble
those of Peale, Graham or Sheen.

NOT surprisingly, “God is a livin’
doll,” said the Hollywood actress
turned Sunday-school teacher. Here
is iN many ways a more damning
pronouncement than Nietzsche’s de-
cree of the death of God. Increasing-
ly, one has been able to detect a
tendency, especially typical of popu-
lar but also of some high-brow reli-
gious literature, to emphasize God’s
love to the exclusion of the no less
biblical idea of God’s wrath. How
could a livin’ doll be wrathful? No,
we have not become more refined in
our religious feelings and language.
That is not the reason why we stress
an inoffensive God’s love. Actually,
we have domesticated God in such a
way that, as Waiting for Godot seems
to imply, He evaporates into a tragi-
comic mythological atavism; or He
has become so diminutive as not to
be recognizable any longer. To the
actress’ livin’ doll corresponds
Lucky’s fractured existence and his
broken mental record of self-under-

standing:

Given the existence as uttered forth
in the public/works of Puncher and
Wattmann of a personal/God qua-
quaquaqua with white beard/qua-
quaquaqua outside time without ex-
tension/who from the heights of di-
vine apathia divine/ athambia divine

bee i iee SOEs a ek ea

aphasia lover
exceptions for reasons unknown but
time/will tell and suffers like the
divine Miranda with/those who for
reasons unknown but time will tell/
are plunged in torment plunged in
fire whose fire/flames if that con-
tinues and who can doubt it will/
fire the firmament that is to say
blast hell to/heaven so blue still and
calm so calm....

After twenty centuries of Christi-
an influence, the play laconically
takes note of the irrelevance of
Christian categories of thought and
patterns of existence:

Vladimir: Do you remember the
Gospels?

Estragon: I remember the maps of
the Holy Land. Coloured they were.
Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale
blue. The very look of it made me
thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used
to say, that’s where we'll go for our
honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be
happy.

Can you think of a better way to
describe God as an anachronism and
to point out the irrelevance of
Christianity? Strangely — or per-
haps not so strangely — what Es-
tragon is yearning for is no different
from the promises made to the dev-
otees of inspirational literature,
whether it is called peace of mind
or of soul or “brilliant success”
thanks to which “you will be glori-
ously happy” (Emmet Fox).

Now, the Bible does speak of the
wrath of God. Some regard this as
another aspect of the generally an-
thropomorphic nature of biblical ut-
terances about God. This is not
wrong, but to put it merely like this
misses the point. Surely, biblical man
yearned after happiness as much as
modern man. Yet he did not think
that God lost His majesty because
He could be angry. Rudolph Otto’s
interpretation of this biblical insight
seems most sound. In his book, The
Idea of the Holy, he shows how in
the biblical writers’ apprehension
God is.all that their anthropomorphic
descriptions imply and something
more. He is love and something more,
which the unexpected stress on His
wrath intends to convey. At any
rate, He is not a livin’ doll. Such an
unbiblical familiarity quacifig bly calls
only for an iconoclastic retort like
that of the French poet, i acques

\ Aad
Aiken

bs =

us ene Teh eae ar, te: vee Our rhe which

heaven, comma, stay where you are,”
Not oni has modern religion in-
serted a comma, it has also opened
wide a chasm between God and man,
when it has not simply sublimated
God, what with all that sweetness
and Ri sar een nonsense. The net
result is that religion looks more and
more archaic, even tends to resemble
magic. But inspirational books are
not alone responsible for that.

Quite recently, the Archbishop of
Paris, acting on behalf of the Vatican,
was reminding the priest-workers
(priests who took jobs in factories)
that they owe the Church uncondi-
tional obedience. Apparently some
are still carrying on their apostolate,
though it was forbidden by order of
the Vatican. Not unlike the heroine
of The Nun’s Story, they felt that the
needs of disinherited men came be-
fore ecclesiastical routine and sacer-
dotal discipline. They did not look
or act like conventional priests, but
understood that if Christianity wants
to preserve some degree of relevance
in a society which unlike the medi-
eval is no longer sacred, the Church
cannot afford the luxury of thinking —
that people center their lives upon
itself; they felt that the Church must _
be present where people work, eat,
drink, suffer, kill time or make love.
Instead, the Church condemned their
venture, because these priests, as a_
Jesuit said of their fictional counter-—
parts in some contemporary novels,
seemed to act as if they were sent
directly by God and were not minis-
ters of the Church. It seems, does it
not, that one cannot these days be

III

But then why worry about all.
that? one might ask. Some years ago,
Elio Vittorini put this question even |
more incisively. The medieval syn-_
thesis, he observed, relied on Cathol-
icism; bourgeois growth and progress”
on Protestantism: how could Chris-—
tians, he asked, concern themselves —
about the Christian quality of an
age which will be neither medieval —
nor bourgeois? Indeed, “technologi-
cal” and syncretistic religiosity has

begun to succeed Christianity. De es |
it have anything to do with faith,
biblical ait] Obviously not, sit nee

Th Nai ric

do-it-yourself religion is that it
biresked no difference what kind of
faith it is. Religion thus loses its
~ nerve. Quite logically, it also becomes
- more and more a civic matter, as it
_ was in ancient Greece and Rome.
; American democracy, in particular,
- is so religious that it would horrify
}| the most Calvinist among the Puri-
i tans. Like clothes, religion is mass-
4 produced according to standard sizes:
in this case, Protestant, Catholic
and Jewish. The Protestant Rein-
hold Niebuhr would not convert
Jews, and Jacques Maritain, a Ro-
man Catholic, in his botial, theory
advocates pluralism, including reli-
gious pluralism so long as the social
_ structure and underlying under-
standing of human nature are based
on the recognition of an absolute
(which, contrary to Pascal, need not
be the God of Jesus Chick): Ts. 16
any wonder, then, that the agnostics
_or atheists ghonld feel that they are
“squeezed out? They have been had
by religionists themselves, though it
is also their own fault if they let
this happen. :

THE question is not whether Nie-
buhr and Maritain are right or
__ wrong; or whether it is preferable to
_ advocate a return to the ways of past
religious expressions and experiences,
to the Catholic corporate society, or
to the proselytizing zeal of Protes-
tantism. Not enly is this historically
impossible; it is theologically unde-
sirable. To take a biblical example:
when the Children of Israel were set-
tled in Canaan, the prophets kept
reminding them of the unique exist-
ence they had lived through the
desert. What they meant was not a
_return to the social and cultural con-
ditions of desert life, but that mu-
tatis mutandis Israel should live now
in the same spirit of faith in the true
God which enlivened it then.
Incidentally, our condition today
is not very different from that of the
ancient Hebrews. As the world con-
tinuously shrinks, man becomes by
the same token more and more of
a nomad. In one form or another,
this generation is one of displaced
_ persons. Of course we don’t have to

But what is more important is that
spiritual and geographic paca
D cen Bie ee

i; oh aq

itch a tent now here, now there.

meee ee io ig

oe ene ea vd ST eee
Pe of the premises ie techno ogical is no longer valid, much less foler-

able. What kAipent in Algeria af-
fects the United States; and what
happens in the South is no longer
purely civil or national; it has diplo-
matic and international repercus-
sions. And when it is our job that
conditions the place where we re-
side, we are ironically more nomadic
despite the routine of our provision-
ally sedentary occupation. Regard-
less of astronauts, we are nearer
where we started from than we com-
monly think. Our religion is as crude
as that of the fetishist.

One might draw this inference:
social, political and _ international
events, rather than religion itself,

have forced religious groups to tol-
erate and sometimes to borrow from
each other. Contemporary society is
a melting pot which affects not only
national or ethnic origins, but also
religious affiliations, even while its
syncretistic religiosity is affected by
the pressure of international relations.
The nascent ritualism of certain
Protestant denominations may be a
gain insofar as a rapprochement
between Protestantism and Roman
Catholicism is concerned. It is not
a gain if the rapprochement depends
on a loss of nerve in Protestantism.
Similar remarks could be made about
Catholicism or Judaism. But this is
the point I wish to make: a blanket
of anonymity is descending upon re-
ligion, whose resurgence in the last
decade perhaps is just a cover-up for
the absence of faith in God, a luxury
necessitated by the “death of God.”
But this resurgence hardly con-
ceals the loss of hegemony suffered
by Christianity. There was a time
when people, i.e., European people,
considered Christianity as the only
religion. With the advent of the mod-
ern period, Christianity became the
“best” religion, especially when it
was put in that position with the
help of imperialist powers. Today,
the Continent has lost its prominence
and America does not want to offend
the parts of the free world which
are not Christian. Maybe this is why
the fight against communism is en-
visioned as a Christian crusade: it
is the only area where Christianity
can still proclaim its superiority
without offending anybody, includ-
ing those who wield the power of in-
ternational blackmail. re.

Are we, indeed, iwine In a post-
Christian era? "hc answer is two-
fold.

1. We are living in a_post-Chris-
tian era when Christianity sinks into
religiosity. When this is the case, no
longer can Christianity vitally de-
fine itself in terms of biblical faith.
Instead, it acquires the attributes of
moralism, or those of a psychological
and emotional welfare-state. Further,
we live in a post-Christian era be- .
cause modern culture is gradually a
losing the marks of that Christianity }
which brought it into being and
shaped it. Whether from a Aeclonal
or an_ international perspective,
Christianity has long since ceased to
be co-extensive with our culture,
which day by day comes under ex-
traneous influences. And we live in
a post-Christian era when tolerance
gives way to religious syncretism, an
amalgam of beliefs and attitudes
without content or backbone. In-
deed, faith, hope and love have noth-
ing to do with these substitutes, no
more than God with an idol, or my
authentic self with the masks I am
wearing.

2. Admittedly, these statements
or, more precisely, the statement that
we live in a post-Christian era, may
seem somewhat rash. Yet, one must
ultimately come to terms with the
reality here uncovered, even though
partially and imperfectly. Undoubt-
edly, in the nineteenth century,
Kierkegaard already complained
about the tepid quality of the church
and excoriated the Christianity of
his day; and many others could be
cited who before him took a similar
stand.

Undoubtedly, therefore, every
age is post-Christian. But, so far,
this has been true only theologically
speaking. Aside from this, however,
one would have to admit that, until
now, the formative tradition of West-
ern “culeute has been imbued with
the spirit of Christianity. Regardless
of how approximately, our culture
has been a variation on the trans-
lation of this spirit into the artes
the sciences, into a style of life. But
the novelty, or tragedy, of our si
tion lies in the fact that our ag
post-Christian both theologically a

culturally.

eee

)

a ———

me er a

BOOK

} he

a
yn a

S and

The Tragedies We Need

THE COMPLETE GREEK TRAGE-
DIES. Edited by David Grene and
Richmond Lattimore. (Various trans-
lators). 4 vols., boxed. University of
Chicago Press. 2088 pp. $20.

Kenneth Rexroth

NOTHING gives a case-hardened re-_

viewer more pleasure than the chance
to say, “This is it. No qualifications. Go
out and buy it everybody.” I haven’t
felt like this since I did the first job on
Needham’s history of Chinese science.
As the plays have come out over the
past few years in small volumes I have
said that the project was a major event
in American scholarship and far from
a minor event in American poetry. Since
the Renaissance, one of the symptoms
of cultural health has. been the ability
of a given period of national culture to
raise translation to the level of high
literature, to assimilate the past on the
most noble level. Perhaps American civ-
ilization isn’t as badly off as we readers
and writers in the liberal weeklies some-
times think. We have produced some-
thing over here to match the great Tu-
dor and Victorian translators. (Yes, the
Victorians were great translators. We
just aren’t Victorians, so they seem
Victorian to us.)

Where do you begin with such a feast
of good things? David Grene, William
Arrowsmith, Rex Warner are all very
good poets and for my taste Richmond
Lattimore and John Frederick Nims
are especially fine ones. I have always
considered Witter Bynner’s translation
of Yuan Ch’en’s “Lament for His Wife,”
in The Jade Mountain one of the best

Vases: The Hearst Collection,
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

442

ry s Pe ida .
Bho * Nie VACAeS TR 6: ee

American poems of the twentieth cen-
tury, quite the equal of Pound’s more
famous translations. Many of the others
may have published good poetry under
their own names that I am not familiar
with; certainly here, working with the
Greek text, they come off very well—
without exceptions. Of course, some are
better than others, but none are bad.
None of the plays are anarchronistic
or hobby-horse perversions of what the
Greeks actually said. They are all clear,
accurate reflections of the Greek in well-
polished mirrors of contemporary Amer-
ican language and taste.

Not just language and taste: although
they are far from being playbook “treat-
ments,” they are eminently actable —
at least they are when the Greek is. I
have only the mildest objection. Eurip-
ides, on the whole, has been cleaned
up. A good deal of nonsense has been
uttered, following T. S. Eliot, about Gil-
bert Murry’s Swinburnean translations
of Euripides. If Ehot had had more
Greek, he would have known that Eu-
ripides does sound like Swinburne—
given the idiom of his time. He was a
hysterical neurotic, and for the turn of
the century, Murry conveyed very well
the special vertigo of his verse. It is a
pity he was never translated by Baude-

laire, but alas, Baudelaire, financed by '

an American millionaire, translated
a bit of Hiawatha! The translations of
the choruses of the Jon and the Hip-
polytus that H. D. did long ago, and
which can be found in her Collected
Poems, hit off the Euripidean vertigo
exactly, and it is a great pity they
couldn’t have been incorporated in these
versions. But who will quarrel on this
score? The translation here is more ac-
curate, and lines like David Grene’s,
“Aphrodite has broken her spirit/With
the terrible sickness of impious love”
catch exactly the Euripidean accent.
The beautiful typography, the satisfy-
ing paper, the chaste decorations, all
of which have become familiar as the
small volumes came out, have been
climaxed in the complete work by a
stroke of genius. The box is an “off
black,” with a terra cotta band, white
letters and two small decorative black

animals, and the books—four volumes

lined up, Aeschylus, Sophocles, two vol-
umes of Euripides — in beautifully
graded tones of terra cotta, volume by
volume, from cream to Venetian red,

“+ }

the

black vertical lettering and little white
people off the vases. What a joy to see!

Why should these books be, as they
say, in every home? And why these
books especially in every American
home? Because we of all people need
most the Greek tragedians. Hard as it —
may be for you and me to believe, ir-
refutable evidence is piling up that an
appreciable number of Americans really
do believe the Great Fraud of the mass
culture, what the French call the hal-
lucination publicitaire. They know only
what they read in the papers. They think
it is really like the movies. Try saying
to a well-educated American, even a
psychoanalyst, or a fashionable minister

of God, “Life is tragic.” Nine times out
of ten he will answer, “Oh, well, now, I
wouldn’t be so pessimistic as all that.”
He doesn’t know that the art of being |
civilized is the art of learning to read
between the lies. He is very far indeed
from knowing that the deepest, the
most unshakable optimism is based on
the tragic sense of life, as one good Eu-
ropean once called it. They say our
civilization is based on the Bible, Homer
and the Greek tragedians. For my taste,
the Bible is a dangerous book, because
it can be, and with few exceptions has
been, interpreted to give guarantees to
life that life in fact never offers. Here
in these plays, as in Homer, is life as it
really is, men as we really are, when we
beat our wives or cheat our grocer or
plan our perfect societies or run for of-
fice or write our poems — but projected
against the empty and splendid heavens,
and made noble, Take away the cos-
tumes and the grand language, the same —
pride, the same doom, that haunts —
Orestes also haunts every public ac- j
countant, every housewife, every sales-—
man. How much nicer people, and how
much happier they’d all be, if they only
knew it. Here is their chance to learn,

KENNETH REXROTH, poet and crix
tic, is the author of Bird in the Bush, —
recently published by New Directions.
1, > & ST he Natio |
v4 gle es a

POISE Fa 6 OS EE TE Se FR IE I EN,

As 2 ee

The Long Way Through. By James

Ee; The

The mood of optimism may be engendered by the
season, but the despairing cry, raised often and in a
kaleidoscope of formulations, that our culture is being
submerged by fear, selfishness, material accumulation
and the lemming-weight of population, seems to be chal-
lenged, if not refuted, by the artifacts that the culture
continues to produce. Too much is produced — from
lyric poems to six-lane highways, much too much —
and the panning for ore becomes more laborious year by
year. But the lode does not give out.

The list of books immediately below was selected by
the literary editor from those reviewed in The Nation
during the past twelve months, and is offered as a
broadly varied Christmas shopping list. It will also serve
as evidence that, about midway in the twentieth cen-
tury, men were acutely aware of their past, their nature,
their associations and their immortal souls. The list has
been kept short, because brevity itself seems a virtue in
the holiday chaos, and it contains none of those books
touted as “just perfect for Aunt Gertrude.” These are
titles for people who use books as part of the structure
of life; for such readers the list is almost foolproof.

In the pages that follow, we publish the customary
choices by Nation contributors, a critical survey of the
year’s art books, a list of works published in the year
by Nation writers of the year, and an extended list of
paperbacks. The roundup ends with a list of records
compiled by the music editor.

Culture and Society. By Raymond Williams. Columbia. $5.
Evelyn Waugh. By Frederick J. Stopp. Little, Brown. $4.

Three Novels: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable. By
Samuel Beckett. Grove. $6.50.

Henderson the Rain King. By Saul Bellow. Viking. $4.50.
Borstal Boy. By Brendan Behan. Knopf. $4.50.

BOOKS FOR

CHRISTMAS

Below the Tide. By Penelope Tremayne. Houghton Mifflin.
$3. Cu

The Shores of America: Thoreaws Inward Exploration. By
Sherman Paul. Illinois. $6.75.

Star Wormwood. By Curtis Bok. Knopf. $3.95.

The Harmless People. By Elizabeth Marshall
Knopf. $4.75.

The Way It Was. By Harold Loeb. Criterion. $5.95.

The King’s War. By C. V. Wedgwood. Macmillan. $7.50.

The Logic of Scientific Discovery. By Karl P. Popper. Basic.
$7.50.

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky.
and Robert Craft. Doubleday. $4.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. By
World. $5.

The Empire City. By Paul Goodman. Bobbs-Merrill. $6.95.

The Cool World. By Warren Miller. Little, Brown. $3.75.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. By Yukio Mishima.
Knopf. $4.

A History of Western Morals. By Crane Brinton. Harcourt
Brace. $7.50.

The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. By John Willett. New Direc-
tions. $8. ;

Life Studies. By Robert Lowell. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.
$3.50.

Conviction. Edited by Norman MacKenzie. Monthly Review
Press. $4.

James Joyce. By Richard Ellmann. Oxford. $12.50.

A Kindly Contagion. By Walter Toman. Bobbs-Merrill.
$3.95.

The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky. Vol. II. By Isaac Deutscher.
Oxford. $9.50.

The Body’s Cage. By Benjamin De Mott. Little, Brown. $4.

Pickett’s Charge. By George R. Stewart. Houghton Mifflin.
$5.

A Biography of Edward Marsh. By Christopher Hassall.
Harcourt Brace. $6.75.

Law as Large as Life. By Charles P. Curtis. Simon & Schuster.
$3.50.

The Elizabethans and America. By A. L. Rowse. Harper. $4.

John Jay Chapman. By Richard B. Hovey. Columbia. $6.50.

Report from Palermo. By Danilo Dolci. Orion. $4.

Thomas.

By Igor Stravinsky

Simone de Beauvoir.

Nelson Algren

‘Ballard. Houghton Mifflin. $4.50.

Borstal Boy. By Brendan Behan.
Knopf. $4.50.

Lover Man. By Alston Anderson.

Doubleday. $3.75.

Flame Trees of Thika.
Elspeth Huxley. Morrow. $4.

A Kindly Contagion. By Walter
Toman. Bobbs-Merrill. $3.95.

Cast the First Stone. By John M.
Murtagh and Sara Harris. Mc-
Graw-Hill. $4.50.

Crane Brinton

The Search. By C. P. Snow. Scrib-
ner. $3.95,

Digabrher 1aeieyo

The Prophet Unarmed. By Isaac
Deutscher. Oxford. $9.50.

The Structure of Nations and Em-
pires. By Reinhold Niebuhr. Scrib-
ner. $5.

The Age of the Democratic Revolu-
tion. By R. R. Palmer. Princeton.
$7.50.

France. By Albert L. Guérard. Mich-
igan. $8.75.

Emile Capouya

$3.50 cloth; $1.50 paper.

Gods and Men. By Henry Bamford
Parkes. Knopf. $7.50.

Henderson the Rain King. By Saul

443

The Causes of World War III. By . |
C. Wright Mills. Simon & Schuster,

Ae!

Bellow. Viking. $4.50.
Conviction. Edited by Norman Mac-
Kenzie. Monthly Review Press. $4.
Tidings. By Ernst Wiechert. Mac-
millan. $4.50.

Harold Clurman

The Tradition of the New. By Har-
old Rosenberg. Horizon. $4.95.

The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. By
John Willett. New Directions. $8.

The Human Condition. By Hannah
Arendt. Chicago. $4.75.

A Life in the Theatre. By Tyrone
Guthrie. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

Letters of Strindberg to Harriet
Bosse. Edited by Arvid Paulson.
Nelson. $5.

David Cort

Advertisements for Myself. By Nor-
man Mailer. Putnam’s. $5.

Little Business in the American
Economy. By Joseph D. Phillips.
Illinois. $3.50 cloth; $2.50 paper.

Beloved Infidel. By Sheila Graham
and Gerold Frank. Holt. $3.95.

The Day Nothing Happened. By
Corey Ford. Doubleday. $1.50.

Thailand. By Noel F. Busch. Van
Nostrand. $3.50.

Mina Curtiss

Mistress to an Age: A Life of Mad-
ame de Staél. By J. Christopher
Herold. Bobbs-Merrill. $5.95.

The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot. By
Angus Wilson. Viking. $4.95.

100 Selected Poems. By E. E. Cum-
mings. Grove. $1.95.

Proust. By Samuel Beckett. Grove.
$2.50 cloth; $1.25 paper.

The Swinburne Letters. Edited by
Cecil Y. Lang. Yale. $15 set.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni

Voices of Dissent. By Erich Fromm
and others. Grove. $3.75 cloth;
$1.95 paper.

Report from Palermo. By Danilo
Dolci. Orion. $4.

Life Studies. By Robert Lowell.
Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. $3.50.
The Blasters’ Handbook: A Manual
Describing Explosives and Practi-
cal Methods of Using Them.
(Fourteenth Edition). EF. I. du
Pont de Nemours and Co.,, Wil-

mington, Del. $1.75.

444

ee i ee he note

Carl Dreher

Last Essays. By Thomas Mann.
Knopf. $4.50.

The Wall Between. By Anne Braden.
Monthly Review Press. $5.

James Joyce. By Richard Ellmann.
Oxford. $12.50.

Edison. By Matthew Josephson, Mc-
Graw Hill. £6.95.

The Eavesdroppers. By Samuel
Dash, Robert E. Knowlton and
Richard F. Schwartz. Rutgers.
£6.50.

William Eastlake

The Optimist. By Herbert Gold. Lit-
tle, Brown. $4.50.

Angers of Spring. By Joseph White-
hill, Little, Brown. $4.50.

Fade Out. By Douglas Woolf. Grove.
$3.50 cloth; $1.75 paper.

George P. Elliott

Hearts Needle. By W. D. Snodgrass.
Knopf. $3.75.

The Optimist. By Herbert Gold. Lit-
tle, Brown. $4.50. _

A Strangers Privilege. By Robert
Pack. Macmillan. $3.50.

The Body’s Cage. By Benjamin De-
Mott. Little, Brown. $4.

Satires and Epistles of Horace.
Translated by Smith Palmer Bovie.
Chicago. $1.95 paper.

Horace Gregory

We. By Eugene Zamatiatin. Dutton.
Paper. $1.45,

100 Selected Poems. By FE. E. Cum-
mings. Grove, $1.95. .

The Masks of God. By Joseph
Campbell. Viking. $6.

The Writer and the Absolute. By.

Wyndham Lewis. Hillary House.
$4.25, ;
;

o gs
i le *- i ue

James | ] oyce. By Richard Biman Bi
. Oxford. $12.50. sf

Ramon Guthrie

The Stones of Florence. By Mary -
McCarthy. Harcourt Brace. $15.
Modern Verse in English. Edited by
David Cecil and Allen Tate. Mac-

millan. $5.

Warrior's Rest. By Christiane Roche-
fort. McKay. $3.95.

The Devil in Bucks County. By Ed-
mund Schiddel. Simon & Schuster.
$4.95.

Petit Larousse: The New 1959 Edi-
tion. Tudor. $7.95.

Alan Harrington

Sight and Insight. By Alexander
Eliot. McDowell Obolensky. $3.50.

Arturo’s Island. By Elsa Morante.
Knopf. $4.50.

The Optimist. By Herbert Gold. Lit-
tle, Brown. $4.50.

The Pledge. By Friedrich Duerren-
matt. Knopf. $3.

The Law. By Roger Vailland. Knopf.
$3.95.

Alexander Laing
Graffiti. By Ramon Guthrie. Mac-

millan. $1.
Mosaic and Other Poems. By Fred-
eric Will. Pennsylvania State. $2.
John Paul Jones. By Samuel Eliot
Morison. Little, Brown. $6.50.
When Negroes March. By Herbert
Garfinkel. Free Press. $4.
The Years With Ross. By James
Thurber. Little, Brown. $5.

Dilys Laing

The Night of the Hammer. By Ned
O’Gorman. Harcourt Brace. $3.75.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,
By Yukio Mishima. Knopf. $4.

The Sleepwalkers. By Arthur Koest-
ler. Macmillan. $6.95.

Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythol-
ogy. Edited by R. Aldington,
Putnam. $15.

Heraclitus. By Philip Wheelwright.
Princeton, $4.50.

Jean Martin

The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form,
By Kenneth Clark. Pantheon,
$7.50.

The Elements of Style. By William
Strunk, Jr. and FE. B. White. Mac- |
millan, $2.50. Be:

The Nation” i

WE December 12, 1959

emia ire hin ee
By ys 2 ry

The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and

Her World. By -John Malcolm
Brinnen. Little, Brown. $6.
Leonardo da Vinci. By Kenneth

Clark. (Revised) Penguin. $1.50.

Hiroshige’s Tokaido in Prints and
Poetry. Edited by Relko Chiba.
Tuttle. $2.50.

Vivian Mercier

James Joyce. By Richard Ellmann.
Oxford. $12.50.

J. M. Synge:1871-1909. By David
H. Greene and Edward M. Steph-
ens. Macmillan. $6.75.

The Irish Novelists: 1800-1850. By
Thomas Flanagan. Columbia.
$6.75.

A Reader's Guide to William Butler
Yeats. By John Unterecker. Noon-
day. $1.45.

The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin
Verse. Edited by Frederic James
Raby. Oxford. $3.40.

Songs. By Christopher Logue.
Hutchinson (London). $3.25.

Eve Merriam

The Survivor. By Carl Marzani.
~ Cameron. $5.95.

The Little Disturbances of Man. By
Grace Paley. Doubleday. $3.50.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. By
Simone de Beauvoir. World. $5.
Inside the Khrushchev Era. By Giu-
sepp! Boffa. Marzani & Munsell.

Crahilis: By Ramon Guthrie. Mac-
millan. $1.

Fairfield Porter

A Season on Earth. By Kenneth
Koch. Grove. $3.50.

Poetry of Boris Pasternak. Putnam.
$4.

Alfred and Guinivere. By James
Schuyler. Harcourt Brace. $3.75.

The Tradition of the New. By Har-
old Rosenberg. Horizon. $4.95.

Kenneth Rexroth

Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers.
Ed. by James Strachey and others.
Basic Books. 5 vols. $25.

History of Science: Hellenistic Sci-
ence and Culture in the Last Three
Centuries, B.C. By George Sarton.
Harvard. $11.

Science and Civilization in China.
Vol. 3: Mathematics and the Sci-
ences of the. Heavens and the

Earth. By Joseph Needham and

bi tier
x os

Wang Ling. Cambridge. $22.50.
M. L. Rosenthal

Life Studies. By Robert Lowell.
Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. $3.50.

Heart's Needle. By W. D. Snodgrass.
Knopf. $3.75.

Selected Poems. By Robert Duncan.
City Lights. $1.

Ladies Day. By Aristophanes.
Translated by Dudley Fitts. Har-
court Brace. $4.

Light and Dark. By Barbara Howes.
Wesleyan. $1.65.

A Red Carpet for the Sun. By Irving
Layton. Jargon. $2.50.

Odell Shepard

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen
Coburn. Pantheon. 2 vols. $12.50.

Darwin's Century. By Loren Eiseley.
Doubleday. $5.

Philosophy of History in Our Time.
Edited by Hans Meyerhoff. Dou-
bleday. $1.25.

The Shores of America:
Inward Exploration.
Paul. Illinois. $6.75.

Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry.
By Jacques Maritain. Pantheon.
$6.50.

T horeaws
By Sherman

George Steiner

The Prophet Unarmed. By Isaac
Deutscher. Oxford. $9.50.

James Joyce. By Richard Ellmann.
Oxford. $12.50.

Mountolive. By Lawrence Durrell.
Dutton. $3.95.

The Complete Letters of Vincent
Van Gogh. Edited by V. W. Van
Gogh. 3 vols. New York Graphic
Society. $50.

The Two Cultures and the Scientific
Revolution. By C. P. Snow. Cam-
bridge. 75c.

Dan Wakefield

Goodbye Columbus. By Philip Roth.
Houghton Mifflin. $3.75.

The Cool World. By Warren Miller.
Little, Brown. $3.75.

Acrobat Admits. By Alfred Gross-
man. Braziller. $3.50.

Pretexts. By Andre Gide. Meridian.
$5.

The Poison Tree. By Walter
Clemons. Houghton Mifflin. $3.50.

William A. Williams

World Without War. By J. D.
Bernal. Monthly Review Press. $5.

Men Die. By H. L. Humes. Random
House. $3.50.

Conviction. Edited by Norman Mac-
kenzie. Monthly Review Press. $4.

The Two Cultures and the Scientific
Revolution. By C. P. Snow. Cam-
bridge. 75c.

The Big X. By Hank Searls. Harper.
£3.50.

Drawings by Bartoli.

Arts and Monuments

Lincoln Kirstein

GREEK PAINTING. By Martin Rob-
ertson. 100 reproductions in color.

Skira. 196 pp. $25.

Of all the great schools of painting,
what we have left of classic Greece
seems to suffer least from reproduction
in black and white. Lacking the fa-
mous walls of Zeuxis and Apelles, vases
and pots are the chief remains; these
are so clearly delineated in their wiry
silhouette that we can almost recall the
color if we remember a few live proto-

types. But this lovely book gives us
the added luxury of the tint of fired
and glazed earth, surfaced with rich
pigment, that enhances the delineation —
of form and delicacy of cursive brush-
work. Details are big, undistorted; small

irregularities in paint, even cracks and

restorations give more life and meaning
to the individual objects. We too often
pass the great collections of vases in
New York and Boston; they sit, un-
enjoyed. The excellent text greatly in-
creases attention and pleasure.

44500

JAPANESE PRINTS: From the Early
Masters to the Modern. By James A.
Michener. 257 plates, 55 in color.
Charles E. Tuttle. 285 pp. $15.

It is a sensuous pleasure to have this
glorious book in one’s hands, from the
exquisite raw silk binding with its bro-
cade lady, to the fine paper and many
delicate color plates. Meredith Weath-
erby and Kaoru Ogimi of the house of
Tuttle have surpassed themselves in
this triumph of book production, which
is not expensive by home standards.
Mr. Michener has the infectious en-
thusiasm of the devoted amateur, who
loves every scrap of the old papers as
sacred relics; yet this never dulls his
qualitative judgment. He has seen
more prints, looked at them _ longer,
hunted them down, compared them,
bought more of them than anyone
alive; he is giving his great and growing
collection to Hawatu. To supplement his
joy, there are expert notes on each
print by Dr. Richard Lane. The best
part ends in mid-nineteenth century.
The story then resumes with the ac-
tivity of printmakers since the last war;
examples shown incline toward cuteness.
It is a pity that the early schools of

Ching P’ing Mei

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeEEee

The extraordinary sequel to the

“Chinese Decameron,”

Now available in English for the first time, this is a novel of
palace intrigue in the ruinous years of the twelfth century, A
lusty classic, it teems with rascals, lechers, women of easy
virtue, treacherous and loyal servants, and corrupt officials, all
caught in the moral chaos of a decaying empire.

$6.00. PANTHEON

Nagasaki and Yokohama, the late Meiji
and Taisho prints, fine in spite of ana-
line dyes, were not thought worthy to
be included. These, starting from the
Dutch and Portuguese traders in the
eighteenth century, chronicle initial
contacts with the West, are handsome
in their own right, but today lie under
a cloud of implied “bad taste,” once re-
served in Japan for so many pictures
shown in this marvelous book.

ETRUSCAN ART. By Raymond
Bloch. 100 plates, 71 in color. New
York Graphic Society. $25.

A huge book (11% x15 inches); the
folding-plates of tomb-walls are very
suggestive in tone, scale and narrative
sequence. But it is, as a whole, a lux-
urious disappointment; the _ pictorial
editing is neither careful nor consistent.
Beautiful lemon-gold jewelry is photo-
graphed against shrieking crimson; de-
tails are stripped of their photographic
backgrounds, the resultant silhouettes
snipped at and coarsened. Some black-
and-white pages have a horrid institu-
tional-green mat surrounding their frag-
ile forms. Colored plates of large pieces
face black-and-white details of the same

FLOWER
SHADOWS
BEHIND THE
CURTAIN

Translated from the German
version of Franz Kuhn

BEER EER EE EE EEEEEREEEEEEEEEEEEEe

ee ip Ces .
: “4 w my s “—'t “aet tied AS
. - ¢. 7 A 5

figures that are less clear than the color.
The plates of murals give good value;
the brief text is good. The art depicted,
unknown to most Americans, 1s ex-
tremely strong and mysterious. But the
whole production is overblown and ex-
pensive. Readers willing to sacrifice
the text in English can find Italian
books full of better pictures.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA, Romanesque and
Gothic Iiluminated Manuscripts. By
Jan Kyvet and Hanns Swarzenski.
32 color plates. New York Graphic

Society. $18.

This volume of Romanesque and early
Gothic manuscript illumination main-
tains the very high standard of these
large books sponsored by UNESCO,
but here there is a marked improve-
ment in reproducing gold-leaf areas, in-
dispensable to the life and luxury of
such magnificent pages. Great care has
been spent to gain an underlayer of ton-
ing, representing naked vellum, over
which gold is laid. In early days of
reproduction, a single blinding sheet
represented a brash surround for deli-
cate pinks, tans or blues. Here, even
the indentation of the illuminator’s
stylus is tactfully visible. A slight milk-
iness overcasts many of the miniatures,
but this may be a characteristic of a
provincial school rather than technical
failure; it is impossible to know without
recourse to originals which are shut to
us. Hanns Swarzenski’s excellent pref-
ace insists on the essential originality of
Bohemian art. .

MAINSTREAMS OF MODERN
ART: David to Picasso. By John
Canaday. 15 color plates. 700 half-

tone reproductions. Simon & Schus-

ter. 576 pp. $12.50.

This imposing work might more cor-
rectly have been labeled “The Back-
grounds of Modern Painting.” Per-
haps for the first time in English, a
historian and critic has tried to relate
the entire nineteenth century, first of
all to itself within itself, then in this
complex integrity, to our whole present.
We are so accustomed to think of paint-
ing as French, or Paris, controlled that
we limit our standards and pleasures
by ignoring England, Central Europe
and Scandinavia. America we know as
a duty. The newly appointed principal
art critic of The New York Times has
made an excellent use of parallels and
unfamiliar examples; nor has he skimped
the official academies, against which the
great revolts of the century were made,
and without knowledge of which the

triumph of the advance-guard is mean-

yt a ns
ingless. His discussion of the function
of the salons has hardly ever been
stated in English before, yet it is
vaguely presupposed by everybody.
The end of the book is hurried and
summary, but can serve as an introduc-
tion to a second volume which would
be equally useful.

P.]

FAUVISM. By Jean Leymarie. 71
plates in color. Skira. 166 pp. $6.50.

One of the most recent volumes in
Skira’s “Taste of Our Times.” A mono-
_ graph in miniature, well presented with
many bright, clean and decent repro-
ductions, not all well-known, with a
simple, academic text. There are nice
__juxtapositions of the same subject, by
_ Braque and Friesz, odd early Dufys
and Derains unfamiliar in this country.
_ The German section is perfunctory,
Switzerland and Scandinavia are not in-
cluded, but this is a book of French
origin. Perhaps the Northern painters
are “Expressionists” and will be treated
later, although they worked at the same
time, with the same sources as Paris.

CUBISM. By Guy Habasque. 71 plates
in color, Skira. 172 pp. $6.50.

A handy small survey with many ex-
cellent color-plates, reproduced with dis-
cretion of palette and less surface glaze
than in previous books in this series.
The whole influential movement is
made to seem’ perhaps more inevitable
and monolithic than when one looks at
the independent work of individual art-
ists. Now, after fifty years, Cubism
seems more lyrical than rational, more
a poetic and evanescent style of the new
century than an absolutely novel tech-
nique in visual and plastic method. The
pictures reduce well; their harshness of
surface, deliberate poverty of execution,
disappear in miniature; the ephemeral

nature of collage and construction here
assume a security and severity that
rob them of some of their life, the fra-
gility and poetic pathos of the hap-
hazard which was part of their fra-
grance as lyric metaphor. Considering
its widespread effects, it is astonishing
how brief the actual movement was.

OF LL aE

Pas

-BRUEGEL. By Robert L. Delevoy. 53
color plates. 155 pp.; MATISSE. By

Jacques Lassaigne. 55 color plates.
138 pp. Skira. $5.75 each.

A small book can hold only useful
reminders of large panels, but the col-
ored plates in these efficient studies are
honorably detailed, telling much in re-

life-size, but clear. A good balance,

stricted space. Details are about half
designed and produced. —

aos
Sa

> ye ae 4 ied” .- a { i ar wt S5"
a TaN x ;

demonstrating the dark as well as the
cheerful, playful side of Bruegel. Often
his fantastic or toylike aspects hide
ferocity, compassion and horror. Lack-
ing the big Austrian monographs, this
is an attractive and acceptable substi-
tute on a modest scale.

Matisse on walls is never as brilliant
as in reproduction; his talent is espe-
cially suited to the four-color process;
the fat shapes reduce well; his generali-
zations shrunk to a tiny scale lose their
careless brutality and begin to resemble
those Islamic tiles and book illustra-
tions from which much of his styliza-
tion sprang. An attractive small book
with good text shows this artist as a
light-weight decorator in the line of
Boucher, not as serious as Fragonard,
but whose function was similar: to pro-
vide domestic walls with areas of lux-
urious warmth which, nevertheless,
would not disturb the pattern of small-
talk or dinner conversation. It is a pity
that the Vence chapel is not included,
gay as a playroom, but there are two
cut-paper panels that show his canni-
ness with gross forms and bright colors,
so influential in posters and packaging.

OBSERVATIONS. Photographs by
Richard Avedon. Comments by Tru-

man Capote. Simon & _ Schuster.
152 pp. $15.
Fashion photography, like fashion

drawing, is a branch of graphic art use-
ful to historians. It is good to have a
criterion of dandyism at a given mo-
ment. Here two experts determine the
chic of the fifties. Avedon is a superla-
tive commercial photographer for the
luxury trades; he has developed a per-
sonal manner of showing clothes against
famous sites, in living cities and human
situations which intensify the piquancy
and glamour of the desirable commod-
ity. His portraits of famous folk re-
verse the process. Those for whom we
have a familiar public mask of glamour,
awesome in auras of fame and beauty,
are torn down to the ultimate destruc-
tive minutiae and accidental revelatory
betrayal. Avedon is a consummate cour-
tier; he has convinced his victims that
they could not possibly be as hideous
as the prints he shows them (which is
true). His models are not Maugham,
Elsa Maxwell, Ezra Pound, Isak Dine-
sen, but a menagerie of starved cranes,
spoiled pugs, snapping turtles, nets of
broken veins and age’s cruel jeweller’s
work. The captions are by Truman
Capote; his brand of dedicated prose
bridges High Bohemia, High Society,
High Fashion, High Camp and Madison
Avenue. The large Books is beautifully
‘

= €

“Sumptuous

“I doubt whether anything
more sumptuous will appear in
book stores this season than the
Tuttle Company’s new collec-
tion of Japanese prints, with
text by James A. Michener.”

JOHN BARKHAM

JAPANESE
PRINTS

from the
early masters
to the modern

by JAMES A. MICHENER

The author of the Hokusai
Sketchbooks, “A surprise best-
seller in the Christmas gift book
field” (P. W.), brings us another
magnificent volume, a perfect gift
for this Christmas.

912" x 1212”, over 200 black and
white prints, 50 color prints, $15

--AND THE REIKO CHIBA
SERIES OF CHARMINGLY-
ZF = CRAFTED GIFTS

MAKING OF A
JAPANESE PRINT

This delightful book shows step-
by-step how Harunobu created his
well-known Ukiyo-e masterpiece,
“Heron Maid.” Ten hand-carved
and hand-printed wood blocks
are used.

BIA" x BY”, 22 PpPs., printed in 8
colors, accordion-style binding, $2.50

HIROSHIGE’S TOKAIDO
IN PRINTS AND POETRY

Wood block prints and poetry,
a delightful treasury of Japanese
culture. With 55 prints in full
color. Bound in multicolored cloth,
beautifully cased. $2.50

SESSHU’S LONG SCROLL:
A ZEN LANDSCAPE ,
JOURNEY

A complete gravure reproduc-

tion of the great masterpiece of
Japan’s most honored artist. Ac-_
cordion binding extends the oll
to a 12-foot length for viewing
in its entirety. Covered in fra-

grant cryptomeria wood, it makes

a jewel-like gift. Transpar
case. ( 2.95
. a
CHAS. E. TUTTLE CO.
oer | Publishers Rn

TOKYO & R

AND
» ie

v
hy

}

ea ate oak ee

MONDRIAN. By Sam Hunter. 16
color plates. Harry N. Abrams $3.95.

Excellent color plates which, in the
case of this painter, improve on the
originals, except for scale. The dry,

mechanical surface of his ethical desic-
cation becomes delicate and lapidary, as
if neatly executed in squares of enamel.
Black-and-white illustrations, facing
each page, supporting the structure of
every important composition are appo-
site and well reproduced. The text is
clean and well organized, There is much
moral beauty in Mondrian’s career;
while its results, in terms of innovation
and breadth. of vision, seem to have
been overhauled by the industrial de-
signer and architect, nevertheless there
is an exemplary pattern in his passion
for determined order in differentiated
space. That he is not the bad conscience
of abstract expressionism rather than
its tutelary genius is one more instance
of the general contempt for craft which
is worn like a badge by many compul-
sive workers today.

WILLEM de KOONING. By Thomas
B. Hess; THOMAS EAKINS. By
Fairfield Porter; JACKSON POL-
LOCK. By. Frank O’Hara; WINS-
LOW HOMER. By Lioyd Goodrich;
ALBERT P. RYDER. By Lloyd
Goodrich; STUART DAVIS. By E.
C. Goossen. George Braziller. $3.95
each.

This series has cloth binding, about
128 pages, eighty reproductions in half
tone and gravure and_ sixteen color
plates, each. Further monographs on
Audubon, Marin, Shahn and Gorky are
promised. The price of $3.95 is not bad,
although the poorest part in each case
is the reproductions. Prefatory essays
are interesting, in particular Fairfield
Porter on Eakins and Thomas Hess on
de Kooning. Porter is himself an able
painter, an admirable critic with an eye
and mind as candid, penetrating and
exact as his subject. His brief essay
cannot replace Lloyd Goodrich’s classic
study, but it has deeper insight and
broader historical placement. Hess on
de Kooning has a remarkable series of
plates showing the progress of an un-
comfortable talent whose odd conflict

of personal charm and willful graceless-
ness has achieved a tense and powerful

success. Frank O’Hara is a poet and

_rhapsode; his hymn to Pollock has dol-
lops of amateur art-history:

The Deep is the coda to this tri-
umph. It is a_ scornful,

Manet. And it is. one of the most

ks pobeeiy ‘espe of our time, an ¢
] miley ads nf dari npr st

bar ad th

technical
masterpiece, like the Olympia ‘ot: pation the *
' !

Th fi 5 eee ate 7 .
f eo M ars

abyss of glamour encroached upon
by a flood of innocence.

Mercy. . . . Mr. O’Hara selects photo-
graphs which make Pollock seem more
monolithic than he was; the pictures
chosen by Dorothy Sieberling (Life,
November 2, 1959) were more compre-
hensive and illuminating. But Pollock
needs life-size; reduced, the big pictures
seem only samples of marble-paper.
Goodrich’s Winslow Homer is a tactful
reduction of his standard biography;
his Albert P. Ryder is a good promise
of his big forthcoming work on this
overrated figure; the plates in both
books are poor. Stuart Davis by E. C.
Goossen is a faithful study of a loyal
professional practitioner in this time.

OUR HOUSE. By Olgivanna Lloyd
Wright. Horizon Press. 308 pp. $4.50.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow, a Mon-
tenegrin lady of noble lineage, has in-
dited an awesomely inspirational vol-
ume, less memoir than a series of un-
connected short pieces, unedited, off the
top of mind and memory. However,
here are a number of revealing sidelights
on the domestic rituals of the great
architect’s various establishments, his
amusements, pets, visitors, students, al-
though little is deeply personal, all seen
through an elevated haze of tacit adora-
tion. A few (faintly) harsh words are
nudged at James Johnson Sweeney, di-
rector of the Guggenheim Museum, for
being so wicked as to want the pic-
tures, for which he is responsible, to be
visible to the public in insolent compe-
tition to the Master’s Monument.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT TO 1910:
The First Golden Age. By Grant Car-
penter Manson. Reinhold Publishing
Corp. 256 pp. $10.

In the ever-growing bibliography of
Wright, this book is among the most
fascinating. Presented with a mass of
previously unreproduced photographs
and plans from the Taliesin archives,
this full album chronicles what was in-
deed “The First Golden Age,” up to
but not including the Imperial Hotel in
Tokyo. There is, among many other
facets never before so clearly identified,
an excellent analysis of the presence or
absence of Japanese influence on Wright,
from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893,
to his first Oriental trip in 1905, The

grandeur, clear vision, fantasy, vulgarity

ies tyrannical idiosyncrasy, dar-
itial co neepts and careless exe-
nual return to mess

in det
ing of

ee ogic, rays Nero ne care.

text documents the parade of exeraorde
narily powerful and peculiar structures,

TRIUMPH ON FAIRMOUNT: Fiske
Kimball and the Philadelphia Mu-
seum of Art. By George and Mary
Roberts. J. B. Lippincott. 321 pp. $6.

We tend to take for granted the huge
collections in our museums. They grow
imperceptibly, constantly; their increase
swells our pleasure. But how is it all
done? By every legal method this side
of blackmail, theft or murder. Before
museums, there were collectors. Each
made wills and changed them often.
Curators naturally hunt collections.
Collectors are suspicious of curators;
there may always be more favorable
homes in which ultimately to house
one’s precious objects. This defiantly
honest book details the creation and

growth of the Philadelphia Museum _

through the quixotic character of
Fiske Kimball, to whom, among many
other fruits of taste and mind, we owe
the restoration of Monticello.

SHADOWS FROM INDIA: An Archi-

tectural Album. By Roderick Cam- _

eron. 199 plates. British Book Cen-
tre. 213 pp. $12.50.>

This most brilliant book of architec- :

tural photographs, printed in England,

is certainly the richest coverage avail- —

able generally. Mr. Cameron has a
transparent eye, but without any ambi-
tion to shine as stylist; he loves India,
has traveled far, has seen much un-
known
the India of the British raj, the colonial

empire, the eighteenth-century residen- |
cies, the English India of Kipling, down |

to the fine government buildings at New

Delhi by Baker and Lutyens, now in-—

herited by the Indian national govern-—

ment. What is chiefly lacking is people —
to provide both a human and a visual

scale, as often the size of the structures |

their hugeness. Mr. Cameron’s India is

what people have built there; the aichionl 7
tectural design, plan and detail is a .

tastically sumptuous and grand, down —
to contemporary princely pavilions. The

most beautiful. of this year’s photo-

graphic collections.
THE VERSAILLES I LOVE, Photo-
graphs by Robert Descharnes. a
color plates, 93 in gravure; THI
ROME I LOVE. Photographs —
Patrice nat ae color plates
in gravure. udor ee ih :

‘ o
Hh

The ei

to most Westerners—notably —

~ ae

. a

is so gigantic that we have no sense of | %

‘
wo

i
“/
ie
5

‘

-
iy

be
an

CPS weary

| EO

Save Up to 85%

51. A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM by
K. Zilliacus. The stormy petrel of the
British Parliament gives an exciting
account of his stay in the Socialist
lands of Eastern Europe.

Orig. $5, $1.29

Fl. THE ECSTASY OF OWEN MUIR
by Ring Lardner, Jr. A Candide-like
satire about an upper class young man
in present day America.

Orig. $3.50, $2.49

F7. THE ACCIDENT by Dexter Mas-
ters. A tense novel of atomic scientists
vs. the military mind set in Los Ala-
mos dealing with the biggest issue of
our times. Orig. $4, 99c

_—_eC"

23. INSIDE THE KHRUSHCHEV

ERA by Giuseppe Boffa. A sophis-
ticated, frank and up-to-date ac-
count of the Soviet Union cover-
ing the last five years. The most

significant book of the decade on
the USSR, guaranteed to please
its friends and give pause to its
detractors. Orig. $5, $3.49

21. JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING
by Edgar Snow. The author of the
classic Red Star Over China has a
meaty book of high adventure and pol-
ities covering the last stirring dec-
ades. Orig. $5, $3.49

28. STALIN, A POLITICAL BIOG-
RAPHY by Isaac Deutscher. The
finest biography of that contro-
versial giant now extant. A sig-

nificant, thoughtful, absorbing his-
torical work of major stature.

Orig. $6, $2.99

46. WE CAN BE FRIENDS by Carl
Marzani. The phophetic book on co-
‘existence and the Cold War. Makes
thoughtful reading today for your con-
servative friends. Orig. $3.50, $1.99

Fil. MASTERS OF THE DEW by Jac-
ques Romain. A great classic of Haiti
with a tender love story intertwined
with the struggle for life of the work-
ers on the land. Orig $3.50, $2.49

P5. JEWS AND THE NATIONAL
QUESTION by Prof. Hyman Levy. A
provocative discussion of this problem
in the USSR with a strong rebuttal by
R. Palme Dutt. Orig. $1.50, $1

48. THE GREAT ROAD by Agnes
Smedley. The biography of Chu
Teh, head of the Chinese Red

armies. A profoundly moving his-
torically sweeping book that will

hold any reader. Orig. $6, $2.98

49. THE WORLD THE §$ BUILT by
Gunther Stein. A penetrating analysis
of contemporary United States with
very revealing statistics and ideas on
our economy. Orig. $3.50, $1.49

plus an additional 20%

discount on these already

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FREE with bvery ornDdDmR~ ONE COPY OF THE POWER BLITE by C. WRIGHT MILLS

27. RUSSIA IN TRANSITION by Isaac
Deutscher. Fourteen challenging and
brilliant essays on the chief problems
of socialism by the friendly but trench-
ant critic of the U.S.S.R.

Orig. $4.50, $2.39

F8. THE UN-AMERICANS by Alvah
Bessie. A tense novel about friends,
lovers, and traitors with its story set
in our times and its seeds in the Span-
ish Civil War. Orig. $4.75, 99¢

22. MY NATIVE GROUNDS by Royal
France. The life story of a lawyer who
has had the engaging American mulish-
ness to decide twice to swim against
the current. Orig. $3.75, 69c

42. THE DOUBLE BED from the
Feminine Side by Eve Merriam
Cuts to the heart of male-female
relations in our money society....
Discusses who is emasculating

whom, and why; what makes some

women turn into moms; why di-
voice seems to be the other side of
the coin in so many American
marriages. Positively, it presents
a passionate portrait of erotic
love. $3.50

29. ORIGINS OF AMERICAN SCI-
ENCE (New England), by Dirk J.
Struik. A brilliant, absorbing book on
the sociology of science by one of the
foremost American thinkers on the
subject. Orig $6, $3.99

43. PRISONERS OF LIBERATION by
Allyn and Adele Rickett. The true and
heartening story of a young American
couple who found the strength to re-
turn to their native land and face the
consequences of their confession in a
Chinese prison. Orig. $4.75, $3.75

F2. A SEASON OF FEAR by Abraham
Polonsky. What happens in the time
of compliance when a free mind fails
to protect itself against usurpations
of society. Orig. $3.50, $1.49

F6. THE BARBARIAN by Naomi
Mitchison. 728 pages of action-
packed historical ‘fiction which is
literate, adult, informative, and
authentic (on a timeless theme),
and already a story-telling classic.
Set in ancient Sparta, Egypt, and
the barbaric area of the Black Sea.

Orig. $6.50, $3.99

30. SCIENCE IN HISTORY by J.

D. Bernal. A social history of sci-

ence from Stone Age to Sputnik
which reveals the interconnections
between the history of science and
the societies which have produced
The major work of one of
world’s greatest scientific
minds. If you have been over-
whelmed by the vast complexity
of science, this is your book.

Orig. $12, $7.50

24. THE DEMOCRATIC ROOSE-
VELT by Rexford G. Tugwell, an
intimate sympathetic biography of
the man FDR, of the high drama
of his life and of our own lives
when the democratic way was the
American way. Mr. Tugwell gives
the fascinating inside story of the
still unresolved struggle between
the ‘‘economic royalists’? and the
American people.

Orig. $8.50, Special $4.50

F3. EPISODE IN THE TRANSVAAL
by Harry Bloom. A compelling novel

of what happens when ‘‘the roar of
the lion is heard’’ from the barbed
wire ‘“‘locations’’ of South Africa’s
“imprisoned peoples.”” By a _ lawyer
novelist from Johannesburg.

Orig. $3.95, 99c

41. CHOSEN PAGES FROM LU HSUN
by Lu Hsun. ‘The selected stories from
the works of a writer and critic of
major world significance whom the
Chinese call ‘‘the generalissimo of the
China cultural revolution.

Orig. $4.75, 69¢

F5. THE SURVIVOR by Carl Mar-
zani. Thoughtful, questioning novel
of philosophic import, yet a story
which bristles with action of high
policy, love and State Department

intrigue in cold war U.S.A.
$5.95, $3.39

Orig.

31. STUDIES AND FURTHER STUD-
IES IN A DYING CULTURE by
Christopher Cauldwell. Both books in
one volume containing the stimulating
ideas of the well known English
Marxist. Orig. $5.75, $3.50

40. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BIG
BILL HAYWOOD. A thundering voice
from the most militant epoch of
American labor, the story of a Wild
West labor leader who became one of
the Founders of the industrial Work-
ers of the World. Orig. $4.50, $1.99

LE LE LE LE LE LE LE ELE OE DEE EDIE DE DELS DEDEDE DE DEDEDE DE OE IE IEE

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P4. A VISIT TO SOVIET SCIENCE
by Stefan Heym. A leading world nov-
elist takes you into the laboratories
and institutes of the USSR. Complete-
ly contemporary. $1

26. BACK OF HISTORY by William
Howells. A penetrating, non-technical
biography of man both as a physical
and a cultural figure. Orig. $5, $2.75

37. THE GENESIS OF PLATO’S
THOUGHT by A. D. Winspear. The
highly readable account for the gen-
eral reader of the social origins of
ideologies. Orig. $5, $2.50

F4. HE WHO RIDES A TIGER by
Bhabani Bhattacharya. A compelling,
moving, ironical tale about contem-
porary India. Orig. $3, 50c

38. SPUTNIK INTO SPACE by Do-
bronravov and Vassiliev. An extremely
simplified and popularized account of
the past, present, and future of Soviet
rockets, massiles and sateilites.

Orig. $3.75, 79e

32. BALZAC by Stefan Zweig. A
classic biography of the towering gen-
ius whose life and novels embraced a
whole society. Orig. $4, $1.49

P12. OPEN MARXISM OF ANTONIO
GRAMSCI translated and annotated
by Carl Marzani. Brilliant insights by
the foremost Italian Marxist of the
last fifty years. Orig. $2, 79c

F10. TWO LEAVES AND A BUD by
Mulk Raj Anand. Written by India’s
outstanding novelist, author of COOLIE,
this book is a classic and heroic tale
of good and evil, of passion, of lust
and the splendor of plain people.
Orig. $3.50, 59¢

P6. THE DOCTOR BUSINESS by
Richard Carter. A hard hitting, docu-
mented expose of the medical racket,
the AMA, the health plans and the
drug business. Paper, $1

P9. NO MORE WAR by Prof. Linus
Pauling. The Nobel Prize scientist
gives the lowdown on fallout, con-
tamination, the danger to health and
to the future of the world of the
atomic race. Paper, $1

P8. RETREAT TO INNOCENCE by
Doris Lessing. A leading English nov-
elist writes a tale of conflict between
love of woman and love of countrv.

Paper, $1

P7. COMRADE VENKA by Pavel Nilin.
A contemporary Soviet novel on the
conflict between an individual con-
science and the needs of the State.

Paper, SL

P13. THE WALL BETWEEN by Ann
Braden. The deeply compassionate and
human story of a well-to-do Southern
woman slowly coming to grips with the
racial issue in contemporary America.

Paper, $1

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ZONE_____ STATE

but so is the site. However, the former
has also an editorial cohesion, a sense of
congruous scale related to page and re-
duction on it, and superior photography.
Plates are by Braun, color by Draeger,
both technically expert; the color is not
shiny, the pictures are direct, there is a
sense of lively past in. living present.
But the texts are passive, and the two
books add up to middle-expensive gift
books. It is a pity that famous places
cannot have their portraits organized
through the hours of the day, as well as
through the four seasons, for time and
weather are always clearly defined part-
ners to stones and people.

ANCIENT INDONESIAN ART. By
A. J. Bernet Kempers. 353 gravure
plates. Harvard University Press.
478 pp. $22.50.

Cultural imperialism advances. Japan,
China, now India have become proy-

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Vis strstr imo esas ts ek ee i ae a ete a

inces of our taste and pleasure, along-
side Greece and Rome. Our frontiers
now advance to Southeast Asia. It is
still difficult to get to Barabadur, Ang-
kor and Pagan, but it won’t be in five
years. For the interim, this is a fine
book by the Dutch director of archael-
ogy in Java from 1936 to 1956. We are
accustomed to see only fragments of
stones snatched from their matrix.
Here we can visualize the enormous
scale of the carved mass of hewn rock
in their jungles, frequently saved or sal-
vaged by Dutch conservationists. The
almost. vegetable proliferation of human
and plant forms, the suspended bland
beatitude of the holy narratives produce
a narcotic effect, as if the swarming
stones were cut with a mixture of mes-
cal. The sharpness and delicacy of carv-
ing, imgenuity of dry-stone- -setting,
above all the overpowering weight of
the monuments is a mysterious, provoc-
ative and quite novel delight. Text and
photographs are excellent.

THE STONES OF FLORENCE. By
Mary McCarthy. 128 photographs,
principally by Evelyn Hofer. Har-
court Brace & Co. 130 pp. $15.

A lovely book, with some of the best
architectural photographs that have
been taken of this city. Well produced
in Switzerland, it follows Miss McCar-
thy’s similar study of Venice. She aims
to make us see cities as coherent per-
sonalities; she takes their portraits in a
mosaic of history, photographs and the
acute philosophical observation of a
sharply trained mind and eye. She as-
sumes towns have souls in spite of the
constant compulsive rape by the casual
visitor, unwilling student and the pas-
sage of time, which sully the original
intention of great artists and patrons
who made these monuments. This re-
quires strong medicine and an acid per-
sonal tone; it accounts for what might
seem at first perverse allocations of
space or enthusiasm. But she really
prefers Pontormo to Michelangelo, has
looked hard at both, and the color plate
of the former is surely a shocker. Miss
McCarthy writes only about what she
has seen and thought of at first hand,
after many seeings, and agreement or
disagreement is beside the point. She

may be writing the most stimulating
guidebooks of our time.

THEY WERE THERE: The CivillWar
in Action as Seen by Its Combat Art-
ists. By Philip Van Doren Stern. 18
reproductions in color, 179 plates in
offset gravure. Crown Publishers,
168 pp. $7.50. yi

A neatly im well repro oduced

ve dour at | ee

album of more than 200 paintings and
drawings by artists who saw the Civil —
War in actual combat. Mr. Stern has —
wisely and carefully avoided pictures
which have previously appeared. While
the greater part has slight claim to in-
dependent aesthetic worth, much has
vitality, quick observation and a vivid
candor; all of it is more evocative than
the present welter of writing about the
war. There are many quotations from
Whitman; it would have been good to
have had also some of Melville’s poems
which, while rough and odd, are often
more direct, focused and exact parallels
to these battle pictures.

DUBUFFET. By Michel Ragon. 12
color plates. Grove Press. 62 pp.
Cloth $3.95; paper $1.95; FERBER,
HARE, LASSAW: Three American
Sculptors. By E. C. Goossen, R.
Goldwater, I. Sandler. 9 color plates;
30 black and white. Grove Press. 75
pp. Cloth $3.95; paper $1.95.

Grove Press has used the same color
plates as the French edition of these
cheap monographs; they are quite good
enough. However, the American edi-
tion, compared with the Paris letter-
press, binding and over-all presentation,
is coarse and awkward. Dubuffet is an
interesting artist, who started like a bad
joke. Although he always had painted,
at the age of forty he began to work
seriously and abandoned business. But
he has made an _ excellent business
through the intensity of his mud-pie
manner, his poetic disgust, his nostalgie —
de la boue, a reflection of the post-
Occupation purge by nastiness and self-
pity. Many imitate him, sharing a com-
mon ancestry in Klee, but he is always”
ahead of the pack in ingenuity, wit, in-
spired beauty (or ugliness) of surface.

The sculptors Ferber, Hare and Las-
saw share one small volume. They make _
linear designs in several dimensions, are —
more interested in texture, color and |
calligraphic enclosure than plastic mon- —
umentality. They seem at once sad and —
playful; too serious for games, too slight
for sculpture. a

AFRICA, By Emil Schulthess, 127 |
plates, many in color. Simon &
Schuster. $20.

An enormous book, with the boatl
quality color and gravure, records a_
trip through the center of all Africa, |
north to south. The vastness and vari= |
ety of the continent is amply spread
out; the editorial pattern displays lan a
andl clouds, then characteristic acce ents:
in focus, specific faces and bodi oe
feasts and eet, BM cpt ind

a ° .
unfamiliar people and animals, massive
diabolic two-horned rhinoceros, great
sympathetic blimps of hippos, volcanoes
afloat in flame, nothing merely pictur-
esque or peculiar, everything related to
place and time of day. An incompar-
_ able album, functioning photography at
its most useful, to document with love
and beauty by the most scrupulous eye.

VICTORIA R: A Biography with 400
Illustrations Based on Her Personal
Photograph Albums. By Helmut and
Alison Gernsheim. G. P. Putnam’s
Sons. 307 pp. $12.50.

A fine study, printed in Britain, ed-
ited as a biography of the great Queen,
based on her private photographic al-
bums, with more than 400 illustrations.
Both as English history of the nine-
teenth century and as a parallel record
of the beginnings of photography this
is a fascinating collection, with dozens
of arresting images which few beyond
the Windsor family can have seen be-
fore. Costume, interior decoration, soci-
ety portraiture, the military and naval
services are not only photographed but
opposed to contemporary drawings and
supplemented by magazine illustration,
painting and sculpture. The method of
the Gernsheims is forthright, balanced
and complete; their own text is as capa-
‘ble as their editing, more amusing and
important as history than most such
picture books.

IMAGE: The Journal of Photography
and Motion Pictures, is a quarterly now
in its eighth volume (George Eastman
House, 900 East Avenue, Rochester 3,
‘New Vork. $5 per year or $2 per copy).
_Admirably edited, very carefully manu-
-factured, it is of great interest to any-
one occupied with the art, craft and
history of the camera. Articles of the
“past year include Ansel Adams giving
clear and much-needed basic definitions,
critical as well as technical; Beaumont
_ Newhall on Fox Talbot and his early
lasterpieces, with a wealth of well-
roduced, unique prints; a survey of
the English Gernsheim collection and
‘its: Unexpected treasures; a catalogue of
t early Edison films, etc.
country, museum staffs issue, by way
of their local pee some of the best

SCE. treated ih Sroka) reference and
complete pictorial coverage. The best
that of the Metropolitan Museum of

corresponding to the variety and
nar-

y of its s collections; but in

Books by NATION Contributors

Listed below are books published in
1959 by writers who have also con-
tributed to The Nation in that year.
We have prepared such lists as a service
to readers and contributors in previous
years and we are always impressed by
the size and scope of the compilation.
They are evidence, we believe, of the
authority and energy that goes into the
material published week by week in
the magazine.

Books published in England are in-
cluded here for the record. They are
available on special order through most
dealers.

Ropert M. Apams. Stendhal: Notes on
a Novelist. Noonday. $5 cloth; $1.45
paper.

Strains of Discord. Cornell. $3.50.

Gene Baro. Northwind and Other
Poems. Scribner’s. $3.95.

Jerome Beatty, Jr. The Saturday Re-
view Gallery. Simon & Schuster. $6.
Show Me the Way to Go Home: The
Commuter Story. Crowell. $3.95.

Joun Berry. Krishna Fluting. Macmil-
fan., $3.95;

Curtis Box. Star Wormwood. Knopf.
$3.95.

Micwaet Brecuer. Nehru: A Political

AWN
Swit
ee

We
or

HO SES

Biography. Oxford. $8.50.

Cranzé Brinton. A History of Western
Morals. Harcourt Brace. $7.50.

KennetH Burke. Attitudes Toward
History. Revised edition. Hermes.
$6.75.

Haypen Carrutu. The Crow and the
Heart. Macmillan. $1.50.

Reo M. Curistenson. The Brannan
Plan: Farm Politics and _ Policy.
Michigan. $5.

Henry M. Cnristman, editor. The
Public Papers of Chief Justice Earl
Warren. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

GeorceE A. Coppinc, Jr. Broadcasting
Without Barriers. UNESCO. $3.

Apert K. Conen. The Study of Social
Disorganization and Deviant Behav-
ior in Sociology Today, Problems and
Prospects. Edited by Robert K. Mer-
ton, Leonard §. Cottrell, Jr. Basic
Books. $7.50.

Frep J. Cook. What Manner of Men:
Forgotten Heroes of the American
Revolution. Morrow. $5.

The Golden Press Book of the Revolu-
tion. Golden Press. $4.95.

Rospert CreeLey. A Form of Women.
Jargon. $1.50.

GrorcE Cuomo. Becoming a Better
Reader. Rinehart. $1.

mr THE FALCONS WING DRESS

INDIAN HILLS. COLORADO

‘Publiches distinguished books for the thoughtful

readers me important contvibetionn to the human

comprehension of philosophy, religion aad: science.

Whe most beautiful invitation to pearihal and,

spiritual Shmalation ever designed is yours for the
ashing; it tells about unussal and beaut ull books

that are collectar’s items before they are printed.

“These are not ordinary books for ordinary people;

they are thoughts, ideas and experiences of some o,

the world’ s most discerning and: articulate authors
ap published, of course, for the appreciation of

discriminating readers.

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Ch gaia!

Please send your invitation

but especially at

SYMPOSIUM
ON BASIC RESEARCH

16 leading contributors
including Dwight D. Eisenhower
and J. Robert Oppenheimer

presented May 1959, published October 1959
308 -+- 20 pp. eloth, $3.00

List of other Symposia on request

Amer. Assoc. Advancement of Science
1515 Mass. Ave., N.W., Washington 5, D,C.

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armed. Oxford. $9.50.

Ropert Duncan. Selected Poems. City
Lights. $1.
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Second Impressions

Review of Paperbacks

Robert M. Wallace
THE SURVEY of paperbacks, here

somewhat expanded for the Christmas
season, contains some titles that have
been described earlier. In such cases,
the listing is made without comment.

Poetry

A Child’s Christmas in Wales by
Dylan Thomas, woodcuts by Ellen Ras-
kin (New Directions, $1). Tender rem-
iniscence full of wonder and familiarity.

Poems by Wallace Stevens (Vintage,
$1.25). “Part of the never-ending medi-
tation ... Part of the res itself,’ with
a fresh introduction by Samuel French
Morse. |

The Confucian Odes by Ezra Pound
(New Directions, $1.45). The classic
anthology, its “language charged with

_ meaning to the utmost degree.”

: Collected Poems by Louise Bogan
_ (Noonday, $1.25). Work of great del-
icacy, strength, understanding and virtu-
osity.

The Achievement of T. S. Elliot by
F. O. Matthiessen (Galaxy, $1.95) with
a chapter on the later work by C. L.
Barber; The Art of T. S. Eliot by
Helen Gardner (Everyman, $1.15), es-
pecially in Four Quartets. Basically tech-
nical analyses of Eliot’s fusion of method
and substance, explaining the nature of
poetry.

Complete Poetry and Selected Prose
by Walt Whitman, James E. Miller,

PY OE oes gz T

editor (Riverside, $1.15). Includes
poems rejected as Leaves of Grass
changed.

The Solitary Singer by Gay Wilson
Allen (Evergreen, $2.95). Standard crit-
ical biography of Whitman.

Collected Sonnets and Collected Lyr-
ics by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Wash-
ington Square, 50c ea.).

PRR RE

Existentialism

Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard (An-
chor, Vol. 1, $1.45; Vol. 2, $1.25). Kier-
kegaard’s earliest study of the individ-
ual’s relations to aesthetic and ethical
bases of action.

Nausea (New Directions, $1.25) and
The Age of Reason (Bantam, 75c) by
Jean-Paul Sartre. His first novel (1938)
and first of the Roads to Freedom
tetralogy (1945), showing his existen-
tialism through vividly realized narra-
tive.

Existentialism and Religious Belief
by David E. Roberts, Roger Hazelton,

Sayre Tes,

Ermer e es

December 12, 1959

editor (Galaxy, $1.95). Mutations and
Pascal through Kierke-
Sartre, Jaspers and

relationships,
gaard, Heidegger,
Marcel.

Politics

Karl Marx: His Life and Envtiron-
ment by Isaiah Berlin (Galaxy, $1.50).
A durable brief masterpiece (1939) on
the man, his work and his time.

Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on
Politics and Philosophy, Lewis Feuer,
editor (Anchor, $1.45). An _ excellent
selection. Feuer argues that no current
theory explains anywhere near as much
of social reality as Marxism does.

We by Eugene Zamiatin (Everyman,
$1.45). Banned Russian counter-utopia,
anticipating 1984, in which “nobody is
one, but one of.”

War with the Newts by Karel Capek
(Bantam, 50c).

Reflections on the Revolution in
France by Edmund Burke (Rinehart,
$1.25). Meticulous new text and para-
phernalia by William B. Todd.

Lectures on the French Revolution
by Lord Acton (Noonday, $1.95).

The Spirit of Liberty by Learned
Hand, Irving Dilliard, editor (Vintage,
$1.25).

On War by Raymond Aron (Anchor,
95c).

Strategy for Survival by Wayland
Young (Penguin, 65c).

Science

The Crime of Galileo by Giorgio de
Santillana (Phoenix, $1.75). Lucid, ex-
citing, presently relevant study of the
scientist as humanist.

The Logic of the Stiences and the
Humanities by F. 8. C. Northrop (Mer-
idian, $1.45). The varied methods with
which logic must operate in solving prob-
lems of fact and value.

New Pathways in Science by Sir
Arthur Eddington (Ann Arbor, $1.95).
Philosophical outlook of modern science
with stimulating sections on the statistic-
al type of law and its effect on the
foundations of physics.

Soap Bubbles by C. V. Boys (Dover,
95c). An ingenious science classic com-
plete with color plate. This is also in
Anchor’s popular series in a cut version.
It was originally addressed to teen-
agers, though it is not an easy book.

Apes, Angels and Victorians: Darwin,
Huxley and Evolution, by William Ir-
vine (Meridian, $1.45). Fresh, reliable,
humane biography and intellectual his-
tory.

The Fitness of the Environment by
L. J. Henderson (Beacon, $1.95).

Time’s Arrow and Evolution by Har-

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A BEAUTIFUL GIFT: A NEW FOLDER
AMERICANS: POEMS AND DRAWINGS
Edited by Daisy Aldan; Foreword by Wallace Fowlie
43 pcets include O'Hara, Kerouac, Ginsberg,
Garrigue, Eberhardt; 30 painters include Pollock,
Kline, DeKooning, Knaths, Hartigan, Rivers.

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old F. Blum (Princeton, $1.75).

The Ancients

The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art of
the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C. by
Rhys Carpenter (Midland, $1.75). The
congruence of structure, shape, mean-
ing and use. Helpful small revisions.

The Greek Experience by C. M. Bow-
ra (Mentor, 50c). Distinctive accom-
plishments and modes of thought among
the ancient Greeks.

A Handbook of Greek Mythology by
H. J. Rose (Everyman, $1.55). Ten gen-
eral chapters with full indexes, bibliog-
raphy and notes.

The Satires of Juvenal translated by
Rolfe Humphries (Midland, $1.50). Re-
produces the scornful indignation of all
sixteen satires.

The March Up Country, a translation
of Xenophon’s Anabasis by W. H. D.
Rouse (Mentor, 50c). The very feel of
the retreat from Babylon.

The Jewish War by Josephus, trans-
lated for general readers by G. A. Wil-
liamson (Penguin, $1.25). The ill-smel-
ling but gripping basic account of the
Jewish-Roman war of 66 A.D.

Development of Religion and Thought
in Ancient Egypt by J. H. Breasted
(Torchbooks, $1.95). Basic but contro-
versial study (1912) moving from the
nature gods to priestly rule.

History Begins at Sumer by Samuel
Noah Kramer (Anchor, $1.45).

American Scene

Symbolism and American Literature
by Charles Feidelson, Jr. (Phoenix,
$1.85). Methods and concepts of literary
history and the, new criticism in ex-
planation of Hawthorne, Whitman, Mel-
ville and Poe as sharers and shapers
of a tradition.

The Comic

Kenneth _ S.

Tradition in
Lynn, editor

America,

(Anchor,

$1.45). The comedy of illusion and dis-
illusion in excerpts from Franklin’s Wid-
ow Do-Good to Mr. Dooley.

The American Experience by Henry
Bamford Parkes (Vintage, $1.25).
Stimulating interpretations of imported
and native forces that have shaped
American civilization.

God’s Country and Mine by Jacques
Barzun (Vintage, $1.25). Fluent essays

combining appreciation, banter and
polite lay sermons.
Miscellaneous

Folkways by William Graham Sum-
ner (Dover, $2.49) and Middletown by
Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd (Harvest,
$2.25). Germinal classics outdated in
some points of procedure and interpreta-
tion but basic and absorbing.

Giuseppe Verdi: His Life and Works
by Francis Toye (Vintage, $1.45). One
of the best books on individual com-
posers; lively, penetrating, thorough on
life and times, and compositions.

The Meaning of Art by Herbert Read
(Penguin, $1.25). A lucid examination
of the elements; sixty-four plates.

Nijinsky by Romola Nijinsky (Uni-
versal, $1.65). Deeply moving narra-
tive and appreciation of the art and
the artist by the great dancer’s wile.

Ballet: A New Guide to the Liveliest
Art by Walter Terry (Dell, 75c). In-
troduction, glossary and handbook to
250 ballets.

Seven Men and Two Others by Max
Beerbohm (Vintage, $1.10). Some of
Beerbohm’s most urbane satires.

Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell
(Everyman, $1.35). Revealing, hu-
mane, informal view of Cyprus and the
Cypriot public, 1953-56.

The Cruise of the “Nona” by Hilaire
Belloc (Penguin, 65c). Narrative of a
coasting voyage with random, casual
observations.

RECORDS of the YEAR

Lester Trimble

Among the year’s new record issues,
the following have been of particular
interest:

BACH: Swites for unaccompanied ’cello
(complete): Pablo Casals. Angel
COLH-16/18 (3 discs).

BEETHOVEN: Sonatas for violin and
piano, Nos. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8: Paul Makan-

itzky, violin; Noel Lee, piano.

Teese VRS 1038/39 (2. dises).

Mass in C, Op. 86: Soloists; Royal
Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus;
Sir Thomas Beecham, conductor.

EMI-Capitol G-7168.

yl
ea 4) e

7 ‘
» an ~ f ‘

BERG: Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op.
6 (with Webern: Six Pieces for Or-
chestra and Stravinsky: Agon): Siid-
westdeutsches Orchester; Hans Ros-
baud, conductor. Westminster XWN-
18807.

BRAHMS: Sonatas for viola and piano,
Op. 120; Nos. 1, 2. William Primrose,
viola; Rudolf Firkusny, piano. Capi-
tol P-8478. Symphony No, 4: Boston —

Symphony Orchestra; Charles Munch, |

conductor, RCA Wictor LM-2297,

COPLAND: A Lincoln Portrait (with |
Schuman; New England Triptych
‘ or as "h ’ NATIO *
e we 7 sb (ee , ~

eae Sf Ce Rio

and Barber: Intermezzo from Vanes-
sa). Carl Sandburg, narrator (in the

Lincoln « Portrait); New York Phil-
harmonic; André Kostelanetz, con-
ductor. Columbia ML-5347. Appa-
lachian Spring; (with Gould: Spir-
ituals). London Symphony Orches-

tra; Walter Susskind, conductor.

Everest LPBR-6002.
DEBUSSY: Prélude a l'aprés midi d’un

faune; Nocturnes: No. 1 (Nuages),
No. 2 (Fétes); Jeux. Orchestre du
Théatre Nationale de Opéra de Paris;
Manuel Rosenthal, conductor. West-
minister XWN-18771. /mages for or-
chestra (Gigues, Ibéria, Rondes de
Printemps). Boston Symphony Or-
chestra; Charles Munch, conductor.

RCA Victor LM-2282.

DVORAK: Symphonic Variations, Op.
78 (with Tchaikowsky: Swite No. 3
in G, Op. 55: Theme and Variations).
Philharmonia Orchestra; Sir Malcolm
Sargent, conductor. EMI-Capitol
G-7131. Concerto for ’Cello and Or-
chestra in B minor, Op. 104. Pablo
Casals; Czech Philharmonic Orches-
tra; George Szell, conductor. Angel

COLH-30.

HANDEL: Concertos for Organ and
Orchestra, Op. 4 (complete): E.
Power Biggs, organ; London Phil-
harmonic Orchestra; Sir Adrian Boult,
conductor. Columbia K-2-L 258 (2
discs).

HOVHANESS: Concerto for Piano and
Orchestra, No. 1 (“Lowsadzak’);
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra,
No. 2: Maro Ajemian, piano; Anahid
Ajemian, violin, MGM String Orches-
tra; Carlos Surinach, conductor.

MGM E-3674, |
INDIAN MUSIC: Improvised on In-

dian ragas by Ravi Shankar, Chatur
Lal, N. C. Mullick. World Pacific
Records WP-1248.

MAHLER: Symphony No. 1, in D
(“Titan”): London Philharmonic
Orchestra; Sir Adrian Boult, con-
ductor. Everest ,LPBR-6005.

PROKOFIEFF: The Buffoon(“Chout’),
Op. 21 (Suite): London Symphony
Orchestra; Walter Susskind, conduc-
tor. Everest LPBR-6001.

RACHMANINOFF: Concerto for Pi-
ano and_Orchestra, No. 2,in C Minor;
Preludes, Op. 32: No. 5, in G; Mo-
ments Musicaux, Op. 16: No. 4, in
E minor. Benno Moiseiwitsch, piano;

_ Philharmonia Orchestra; Hugo Reg-
nold, conductor. EMI-Capitol G-
7143. “The Art of Sergei Rachmanin-
off’ Vol. II. (re-recorded from the

composer-pianist’s performances be-

December 12, 1959
p +? 6 $2 3 i , ’

_ pt 4! 4
CS

: A
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20. AMERICAN RADICALS edited by Harvey
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notable radicals including Veblen, Haywood,
Debs, Broun, Altgeld, Dreiser.

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21. CHINA SHAKES THE WORLD AGAIN.
Paperback containing 5 articles by experts on
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22. THE GREAT ROAD by Agnes Smedley.
The Life and Times of Chu Teh, a stirring
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27. CONVICTION edited by Norman Mac-
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28. THE WALL BETWEEN by Anne Braden.
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How Still the Hawk

How still the hawk

Hangs innocent above

Its native wood:

Distance, that purifies the act
Of all intent, has graced
Intent with beauty.

Beauty must lie

As innocence must harm
Whose end (sited,

Held) is naked

Like the map it cowers on.
And the doom drops:
Plummet of peace

To him who does not share
The nearness and the need,
The shrivelled circle

Of magnetic fear.

Cuaries ToMLINsON

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Crossword Puzzle No. 845 |

By FRANK W. LEWIS

a ‘EB ef
Ee

ACROSS:

1 Did he make a little railroad try
mistakenly to be inhuman? (5, 6)
9 He could have been an Earl, but

settled for being 11. (4)

10 and 25 down A rig to help make
“The Tales of Hoffman,” for exam-
ple. (5,5)

11 See 380 across.

12 Question the in-laws about a possi-
ble coach to the youngsters? (7)
13 Where to find “If” in the delivery

service? (7)

15 Singularly 24. (8)

16 Move out of the station? Stations,
by the sound of it! (6)

18 Resorts to writing (in a _ rather
shaky style, however). (6)

21 The quality of beef, rather than
pork? (8)

24 Subtle emanations around, or per-
haps lights on arising. (7)

26 Seaport which manufactures cord-
age, shoes, baskets, etc. (7)

28 Proverbially rich wheel among
wheels, but only passing in pow-
er. (4)

29 14 reaches the heights, perhaps go-
ing to extremes. (5)

30 and 11 Does it involve royal design
if one does, though sounding bored?

31 He should have ties with 1, in early
years. (11)

DOWN: y
2 What might be bumper when the

. December 12, 1959

oF is turned over in the. citadel?

38 and 14 An unlikely place to look

for bryophytes. (7,5)

The gear of 31. (4)

5 In case it hasn’t come up before
the 22%. (7)

6 Put to one side, like an English

garden? (5)

Get out of bed, and perhaps show

up here. (6)

8 Makes a put-out? (6)

14 See 3 down.

17 Fruit that comes from more than
one tree or plant. (9)

19°A\ 14 is#14,> (6)

20 Surprise, as lemurs and leopards
do. (7)

22 Like 6-% or 34 short of court. (7)

23 An ascendant role, like a leader. (6)

25 See 10 across.

27 Potato weeder? (4)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 844

ACROSS: 1 Anthropomorphic; 9 Over-
print; 10 Virtu; 11 and 8 Notion coun-
ter; 12 Shell out; 14 Place mat; 16
Trier; 17 Spoof; 18 Lacrosse; 20 Spill-
way; 21 Gagegle; 24 Raise; 25 Absti-
nent; 26 Minister of State. DOWN: 1
Abound; 2 Treat; 3 Reproachfulness;
4 Pair; 5 Matchstick; 6 Revolutionar-
ies; 7 Harmonies; 13 Amalgamate; 15
Laodician; 17 Sistrum; 19 Pestle; 22
Greta; 23 Oslo.

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a ey ee

THE

NATION

DECEMBER 19, 1959 08, 25e

ROCKEFELLER’S
STRATEGY : | William G. Andrews,

CHRISTMAS :
AD ABSURDUM | Joktina Beate: Ia

Karl M. Ruppenthal

LETTERS

Naval View
of Gettysburg

Dear Sirs: Much has been written about
the Battle of Gettysburg [The Sense of
a Decision,” by W. S. Merwin, Noy.
21 issue] but one vital phase of the
situation has been consistently ignored
by practically all historians.

The Confederacy planned the mili-
tary advance to Gettysburg in antici-
pation of intervention by the combined
naval forces of Great Britain and Na-
poleon III. At the time of the battle,
powerful naval forces of both countries
were anchored near the Port of New
York. The British Cabinet was to meet
and decide in favor of active interven-
tion, and Napoleon III was committed
to join.

Charles. Francis Adams, American
Minister to London, was convinced that
the Union would be disrupted in the
event that Great Britain and Napoleon
III intervened in favor of the Confed-
eracy.

Then a miracle happened. A strong
Russian naval fleet appeared in New
York Harbor and simultaneously an-
other Russian fleet reached San Fran-
cisco. The Russian commanders de-
clared that Russia would back Lincoln.
Plans for intervention were abandoned,
and Lee was defeated at Gettysburg.

Russia at this period was in desper-
ate financial straits, and the cost of
sending these two naval fleets to aid
the United States called for heroic
measures. To help Russia meet this
cost, the United States agreed to buy
Alaska. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a
poem commemorating this act of friend-
ship. The United States then sent a
naval force known as the Fox Mission
to St. Petersburg, to express the grati-
tude of a nation.

Joseru O’Brien
New York City

No Revere He

Dear Sirs: | was amazed by the article,
“Sorcery and Flying Saucers,” in the
November 7 edition. The amazement
was occasioned by the absolute lack of
_ veracity in comments by David Cort
relative to me, Long John Nebel.

Let me state for the record that I
have no “suspicions” that flying saucers
exist; I deny their existence. I have
been defamed, I feel, by Mr. Cort’s ab-
solutely unfounded statements.

As for being the “Paul Revere” for the
Space People, this is a wild, unfounded

ae ea re . 7 Vad

slur that I would not expect to find in
a magazine with such a fine reputation.

I sincerely hope that this letter will
be published in your next edition, and
that it will be accompanied by an
apology from Mr. Cort.

Lone Joun NEBEL
New York City

Dear Sirs: Whatever his private thoughts
may be, Mr. Nebel is probably the best-
known publicist for flying saucers in
the East. For a man who makes his
living out of this hoo-rah, and doubtless
will so continue, the tone of his letter
is curiously virginal. That is to take it
at face value, as meaning exactly what
it says. And since when has “Paul Re-
vere” been an insult?

Davip Cort
New York City

Subtle Killers

Dear Sirs: Underlining the word “real”
in Robert L. Rudd’s article, “Pesticides,
the Real Peril,’ in the November 28
issue of The Nation, is certainly proper.
Congratulations on this extremely im-
portant and competent discussion of
vital concern to all Americans, whether
they realize it or not. There is no doubt
that the American public is being en-
trusted with, and exposed to, more and
more lethal poisons which, breathed or
ingested, promise to be increasingly in-
sidious and subtle killers.

Ricuarp W. Westwoop

President, American Nature Association
Washington, D.C.

Clear as NBC

Dear Sirs: As to Television and Virtue:
Man’s love for truth is uncertain. This
is as clear as NBC.

E11 SIEGEL
New York City

Student Peace Union

Dear Sirs: 1 read with great interest the
article in your November 28 issue by
Allan Brick on “Campus Rebels Find a
Cause.” Of particular interest to me
was the coverage given to the Student
Peace Union, since I have recently been
elected chairman of that organization.
I was one of the students who were al-
most arrested by the police at North-
western University for speaking on a
soapbox on the issue of peace and the
continuation of the arms race. |
Despite difficulties, we have succeed-
ed in starting a group at Northwestern
and have expanded our activities to

more than twenty-five campuses in the

e¥

a
view ni = ~~ =

— * ’ . > 1*~2
Midwest. In traveling about the Mid- —
west, we find an intense interest in the
problem of peace in contrast to the
apathy of two years ago. Last year
there was an Anti-Military ball at the
University of Wisconsin. This year there
will also be one at the University of
Illinois.

I would like to invite anyone, par-
(Continued on page 461.)

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
457 @

ARTICLES
460 @ Fly and Be Late

by KARL M. RUPPENTHAL
462 @ Notes on a Seasonal Neurosis:

Christmas Ad Absurdum

by JEROME BEATTY, Jr.
464 @ Rockefeller’s Strategy

by WILLIAM G. ANDREWS

466 @ Remilitarization of Japan
by JOHN G. ROBERTS

BOOKS AND THE ARTS
470 @ How Lives Are Written
: by RICHARD D. ALTICK
Armada and Virginia

by LOUIS B. WRIGHT
Joyce Scraps

by VIVIAN MERCIER
Letter from Mexico

by STANLEY MBEISLER
Films

by ROBERT HATCH
Theatre

by HAROLD CLURMAN
Art

by FAIRFIELD PORTER

471 @
472 @
473 @
474 @
475 @
476 @

Do You Remember? (poem)
by DAVID CORNEL DHJONG

Crossword Puzzle (opp. 476)
by FRANK W. LEWIS

HLL

= George G. Kirstein, Publisher

= Carey McWilliams, Editor

= Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Rditor
= Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre

Maurice Grosser, Art

M. L. Rosenthal, Poetry

Lester Trimble, Music

Alexander Werth, European
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
The Nation, Dec, 19, 1959. Vol, 189, No, 21

The Nation published weekly (except for omus-
sion of four summer issues) by The Navon
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A, by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
New York 14, N. Y. Second class postage paid
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Subscription Price Domestic—One year $8, Two
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Affairs, Information Service, matio 1

476 @

“ ay

= NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1959

——aEa

Oe ee a oe

VOLUME 189, No. 21

THE

NATION

EDITORIALS

The Theme is Peace

Why does the Democratic Party — the party of
Bryan, Wilson and Roosevelt — fear the issue of peace
in next year’s election? That it is now the paramount
fear of the party’s leaders cannot be doubted. “A great
sea change,” reports Joseph Alsop, “has transformed the
situation in the Democratic Party in the last four
months.” The change stems, of course, from the rising
tide of Republican voter-support on the issue of peace,
which to Mr. Alsop is “as phony as a three-dollar bill.”
But it is not merely in partisan terms that the Demo-
crats fear the issue; it is also worrisome because it
sharply divides the party. The foreign-policy sections
of the twenty-two-point program unveiled at the re-
cent meeting in New York of the Democratic Advisory
Council represents, in essence, a compromise between
the Acheson-Truman-Symington and the Stevenson-
Humphrey-Bowles points of view. To Messrs. Acheson,
Truman and Symington, as to Alsop, the issue of peace
is as phony as a three-dollar bill; quotation marks must
be used whenever peace is mentioned. But in the heat
and noise of a Presidential campaign it is quite impos-
sible to be for peace but against “peace.” Voters will
not see, and they surely will not hear, the quotation
marks. If peace is the key issue, as the polls indicate,
then the Democratic position is untenable. Either the
Democrats must directly challenge the Republican posi-
tion, revealing themselves as committed to a continua-
tion, indeed an intensification, of cold-war policies; or
they must demonstrate that the GOP only appears to
be for peace, in which case they must present a peace
program. The proposal for a National Peace Agency,
included in the twenty-two-point council statement,
Is not a program; it is a gimmick designed merely to
ward off the charge that the Democrats are the “war
party.” Se oe |

Apart from internal divisions and differences, the
prime weakness of the Democratic Party at the moment
is to be found in the fact that its leaders do not seem
to understand what it is that an opposition party must
do to win. On the eve of the recent general election in
Great Britain, Enoch Powell, a Conservative M.P.,

pointed to the basic weakness in the Labor Party’s posi-
tion. An opposition, he said, “must have a categorical
imperative: ‘do this, and this alone, if you would be
saved.’ There must be a great, simple, central theme,
branching out into all the fields and subjects of de-
bate, but in itself easily grasped, which runs through
the words and actions of a successful opposition.” Such
a theme the Labor Party did not have; such a theme
the Democratic Party has yet to formulate. But it is at
hand, obvious to all, and the Democrats could, if they
would, exploit it to a far better advantage than the
Republicans. The theme, of course, is peace.

The News Story that Vanished

On December 4, United Press International and other
news services disclosed that twenty-seven high military
officers had enjoyed the hospitality of the Martin Com-
pany of Baltimore, manufacturer of the Titan missile
and holder of $800 million in defense contracts. Nine
generals and nine admirals, including Gen. Nathan F.
Twining, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were
involved. It was not a matter of Martin picking up a
luncheon tab, or sending the bestarred officers (there
were also a few colonels and naval captains) tickets to
an engineering convention. This was big time, befitting
a big corporation. For three fun-in-the-sun outings at
the swank Cotton Club on Eleutheria Island in the
Bahamas, the Martin Company spent $18,000, which it
deducted as a “necessary” business expense from its
1957, 1958 and 1959 income taxes. The dour Internal
Revenue Service disallowed the 1957 and 1958 deduc-
tions; the 1959 return has not yet been audited.

All this was uncovered by Representative F. Edward
Hebert’s House Armed Services Subcommittee and
given prominent space by the metropolitan newspapers
on December 5. George M. Bunker, Martin’s board
chairman, was indignant. He couldn’t believe “anybody
is going to think that men of [the] character and re-
sponsibilities” of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and other high brass “could be improperly in-
fluenced by playing golf with me on Eleutheria.” All
he was trying to do was promote the kind of “intimate

relationship” needed among government and industrial
leaders working in a joint effort to keep America strong
and Martin profitable. General Twining was particular-
ly zealous: he spent eleven days in all at the Martin
Valhalla and brought members of his family, whom he
flew there in his Air Force C-118, the military version
of the DC-6B. His strength was as the strength of ten,
because his heart was pure.

Mr. Hebert didn’t think the American public was
that pure-minded. Ninety per cent of them, he estimat-
ed, would immediately conclude the generals and ad-
mirals were being influenced. If so, the public forgot
about it speedily. Having published once, the news-
papers felt they had done their duty, and the matter was
buried in decent oblivion. Payola, the frailties of the
disk-jockey fraternity, goes on and on. The opinion-
molders put first things first, and there is the proof of it.

The Parties Responsible

Secretary of Labor James Mitchell’s proposal, which
apparently had the full support of President Eisen-
hower, that the steel dispute should be submitted to
a third party for settlement was promptly accepted by
the union and as promptly rejected by the steel com-
panies. It is now clear that steel management will reject
any proposals not based on their own “last offer,”
which is to say that the prospects for a settlement dur-
ing the remaining period of the injunction are virtually
nil. Therefore, should the Steelworkers reject this “last
offer” in the election to be held next month, responsi-
bility for the resumption of the strike will rest squarely
on management.

In the meantime, further appeals se settlement,
either by the Administration or the public, should be
addressed directly to the steel companies.

Where Is Everybody?

Part IX of The Nation’s special issue, “The Shame of
New York” (October 31), dealing with rackets and pay-
offs, begins with the statement that the largest single
industry in New York City is run by the underworld.
Not by way of extenuation, but simply as a fact, it may
be said that the New York Daily News, in a series of
articles on gambling which preceded “The Shame of
_ New York,” made the same allegation. Studies by law-
enforcement agencies show that from $1 billion to $4
billion is bet annually in New York City with bookies
_ and policy-number operators.

_ We have now made some further research, however,
and have come up with a 1951 federal law which re-

Be Nr Roeome SO .
tax and prescribes severe penalties for violations. Now
the Internal Revenue Service, at the instigation of in- —
quiring newsmen, reports that in all the five boroughs
of New York only two (2) persons are listed as pur-
chasers of the $50 stamp, and none of the $250 stamp.
The two federally licensed gamblers both ply their trade
in the Bronx, a borough which has many other distinc-
tions, such as being nearest to Albany and containing
within its boundaries the second highest elevation in
the city — 284 feet, 6 inches. The two celebrities are,
according to the Internal Revenue Service, Mr. Gerard
Brescia, alias Charlie Jerry, of 670 Garden Street, and
Mr. Ernest Walpert, of 2455 Cruger Avenue.

It is wonderful to know that there is not a single
professional gambler in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens
and Staten Island, and that reports of horse-parlors,
numbers-playing and police graft all over town are
the products of diseased imagination and editorial gul-
libility. And, of course, our congratulations to the two
gentlemen from the Bronx, who between them must be
responsible for all of the $1 billion to $4 billion that are
bet in New York City every year.

“The Shame of New York” also reported that in New
York there are more rats than people — an “estimated
nine million of them,” wrote Fred Cook and Gene Glea-
son, the authors. The New York World-Telegram cap-
tions a recent story (December 9), “City Declares War
on 8 Million Rats.” In a word, either a million rats have
vanished since our special issue appeared, or the World-
Telegram’s census is wrong. For our part, we stand by
the Cook-Gleason census, which we remain convinced
was accurate to plus or minus 1 per cent (90,000 rats).
At all events we are happy to note that the Health De-
partment, with a new burst of energy, has now thrown
1,000 men into “the biggest rat hunt in recent decades,”
and in “this gigantic effort to conquer the dreaded
rodents which infest our spreading slums,” hundreds of
Harlem landlords have been hailed into court, thousands
of other building owners have been nabbed, every single
house and apartment in which rats have swished their
tails has been pinpointed, and the machinery is in
motion to exterminate every single rat.

With the gamblers gone, and the rats going, New
Yorkers will be unable to recognize their city, and the
muckrakers will find their occupation gone.

Bonn’s New Lebensraum

Not so long ago any American who was decorated by
the Germans would have been tried as a traitor; the —
British hanged Lord Haw-Haw for scarcely more.
Things are different now. On December 7, in Bonn, _
George Meany, president of the American Federation of
Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, made —
public a long statement on the German question after i
being invaaiae pe Chancellor Konrad Adenauer wit

4 iy on et 7 Th ? Nat TION

ooo ’ i
’
“iw é f in ether t. |

na J

| the Grand Cross, Second Class, of the Order of Merit.

| Accompanying Mr. Meany was Jay Lovestone, who
heads the AFL-CIO European and Eastern Depart-
ment. Mr. Lovestone was also honored with the Order
of Merit, but lacking the sash and star that went with
the Meany version. For Mr. Lovestone, it must have
been an exciting moment. He is the ex-general secretary
of the Communist Party who was expelled, at Stalin’s
instigation, in 1929.

More important Americans than the Messrs. Meany
and Lovestone have gone and will go to Bonn, for West
Germany is becoming a power to be reckoned with in
the world. She is spending $1 billion a year for arms and
military equipment. Her Defense Minister, Franz Joseph
Strauss, no longer gratefully receives American hand-
outs; these days he gives the orders, and he will have
still more to say as the years roll by. He will deal in
the world armaments markets “like a horse trader,” he
announces. At the same time, arms-procurement ap-

_ propriations will be used to shore up the West German
_ economy, where needed. “Our economy does not depend
on armament contracts,” Herr Strauss observes, some-
what ungratefully, “but we have on the other hand the
possibility of offsetting difficulties in many areas.”
i Herr Strauss’s coming coup, however, is in missiles.
| He is pressing for the organization of a rocket and mis-
sile agency for NATO, with “rationalization,” dear to
the German heart, and a pooling of brains, money and
\ resources “to promote the utmost efficiency in taking
1 NATO into space.” To insure that Germany will get
_ its share of this business, and the international prestige
which goes with it, Herr Strauss is talking of getting
“the great rocket genius of the age” to head the pro-
gram. Indeed, Dr. Wernher von Braun recently con-
ferred at length with Dr. Strauss in Bonn, and if Dr.
von Braun is not satisfied with his job at Redstone
Arsenal, now taken over by the National Aeronautic
and Space Agency, he knows where he can go. Un-
doubtedly he can take with him a great many German
rocket scientists (many of whom are now American
}| citizens) and, once they have the nuclear warheads,
|| too, the Germans will be far, far ahead of where they
}| were in 1914, 1918, 1939 and 1945. It just shows that
_ you can’t keep a good nation down.

Ee are

_ Smoke and Smog

The government’s solicitude for the health of the
nation is alert but selective. The Secretary of Health,
Welfare and Education swooped fast to save our sea-
sonal feasters from the cancer hazards of polluted cran-
berries, but the exhaust systems of internal combustion
engines in countless millions continue to pour their
hydrocarbons out into the air.

Word came last week from Detroit that engineers
have perfected a device which will eliminate at least

December 19, 1959

ifs ;
a 44

the fumes emitted by the crankeases of the nation’s
cars — a significant percentage of the smog gasses is
found to come from this source. The device will be fitted
in 1961 to cars sold in California, where smog is a pub-
lic scandal. But the industry has not yet decided
whether or not to offer this life-saving attachment as
“extra equipment” — like whitewall tires — and no one
is rushing to make it available nationally. The cranberry
pesticide was a small-business threat to health; but the
fumes from our cars, like the smoke from our cigarettes,
are by-products of business so large that they can
scarcely be distinguished from acts of God.

Why, If It Isn’t Doctor Schacht!

According to Holmes Alexander, writing in the Los
Angeles Times of November 17, things are in a bad way
in Japan, not necessarily from a Japanese standpoint,
but as patriotic Americans see it. It seems that the only
way we can defend Hawaii and Alaska is by a forward
area in the shape of an are running from the Kuriles
and including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and
the small anti-Red nations of Southeast Asia, such as
Laos and South Vietnam. But this costs money, and “our
finances are hurting.” The solution is the same in Asia
as in Europe — the remilitarization of our former
enemies. This is pleasant in another way: instead of a
lot of nonsense about democracy, it provides “the only
quick antidote to Communist aggression — a strong,
right-wing, militaristic government.” (And that’s what
we have: see “Remilitarization of Japan,” page 466.)

In Japan, to be sure, there is a difficulty. Without
nuclear weapons, a militaristic government is only a
paper tiger, and the Japanese, having been on the re-
ceiving end, have a morbid attitude toward these mod-
ern appurtenances of the craft. But U.S. diplomacy
and the zaibatsu are curing all that. The “personality
of the Japanese nation” will crave “the signet of upper-
crust nationalism” — atomic and, ultimately, hydrogen
bombs. And who is on the scene already advising the
Kishi government on the financial requisites? No other
than Herr Doktor Hjalmar Schacht, who ran Hitler’s
economy for him and escaped hanging at Nuremberg.
It seems that Dr. Schacht is also advising President
Garcia of the Philippines. The other day he raised a
storm in Manila by deploring the “lack of boldness and
vision” of Philippine economic planners. He recalled
that from 1933 to 1937, Hjalmar Schacht, the great
financial wizard, printed twelve billion Reichsmarks
and, with the aid of an armament boom, put the Ger-
man economy back on its feet. Schacht is an all-out in-
flationist still. Some of the Philippine economists de-
murred, Perhaps they remembered that Hitler’s suc-
cess was only temporary. But it is good to know that
Hjalmar is back at the old stand, though in a new
place. —

459

OSE IRD EA i

F LY AND BE LATE ee by Karl M. ible | " "

FLIGHT 96 lands at Chicago’s Mid-
way Airport, forty-seven passengers
fidgeting in their seats. The time
table provides thirty minutes for
making a connecting plane, but No.
96 is already twenty-five minutes
late. The plane pulls off the active
runway and waits instead of rolling
on to the ramp. The pilot, picking up
his microphone, explains to his pas-
sengers that the ramp is occupied by
another plane. The minutes crawl
by, and finally No. 96 taxis to its
unloading spot and the passengers
debark — fifteen minutes after the
scheduled connecting flight had de-
parted.

Planning an air trip soon? It is
likely that something like this will
happen to you. Figures published
recently show that on one line, you
have no more than a 50-50 chance
of being on time; on other lines, per-
formance is somewhat better, but
you could still get even money from
a Las Vegas gambler that you'll be
at least a minute late. And, accord-
ing to statistics, there’s a 10 per
cent chance that you'll be at least
a half-hour late.

Flights are late for many reasons.
The problem of expediting traffic
when visibility is poor has not been
completely solved. Many airports
are poorly planned, despite the mil-
lions spent on them. Occasionally
flights develop mechanical troubles.
The Civil Aeronautics Board con-
siders delays of this character to be
beyond airline control. But while
some delays are all but unavoidable,
others can almost be termed inten-
tional. The fact is that some airlines
advertise schedules which they know
cannot be met. The passenger is late
the minute he sets foot on the plane.

WHEN the wings of the airlines be-
_ gan to spread some twenty years ago,
the DC-3 was the standard plane.
_ When two lines competed over a
- route, the scheduled time en route

KARL M. RUPPENTHAL, an air-
line pilot since 1942, is a lecturer in
_ Transportation and Management at

: the Graduate School of Business at
Stanford.

was usually the same. The schedules
were fairly realistic, based on the
performance that could reasonably
be expected from the plane. Of
course, many flights were late. But
the industry was new, and most pas-
sengers realized that bad weather,
or an engine that sounded rough on
run-up, might mean a delay. The
businessman who could not afford
the risk of lateness took the 20th
Century or the Commodore Vander-
bilt.

Four-engine planes made possible
the first non-stop flights from Chica-
go to the West Coast. Now, to the
visionaries of the industry, one over-
land frontier remained: scheduled
non-stop flights from New York to
Los Angeles. Competing for this
market — one of the most lucrative
in the nation — were three vigorous
trunk-line competitors plus a host of
“non-skeds.” Each knew that the
first to provide non-stop service
might gain a competitive advantage
worth millions.

While the Super Constellations
and the DC-7s were normally ca-
pable of making this flight non-stop,
they could not do so under eight
hours. And eight hours was the max-
imum time a single flight crew could
legally be scheduled for continuous
flight.

Precisely what happened next is
not public knowledge. Possibly a
clever lawyer for one of the airlines
reasoned that while the Civil Air
Regulations stipulated that no flight
crew could be scheduled for more
than eight hours’ continuous flight,
there was nothing in them which re-
quired that the schedule have any
relation to reality. At any rate, one
line inaugurated non-stop coast-to-
coast flights, scheduling them for a
neat 7 hours, 59 minutes. Occasional-
ly, with the help of conspiring winds,
a flight arrived on schedule. But
usually the planes performed as the
engineers said they would, and most
flights were late. Many west-bound
flights took more than ten hours.

While the advertised schedules
were impossible to keep, they proved
a commercial bonanza. The airline’s
switchboard was flooded with reser-

vations, and its quarterly financial
statement perked up. But the ad-
vantage was short-lived. The two
major competing lines, having no in-
tention of being left at the post, soon
began their own non-stop flights on
the same magic 7:59 schedules.

Of course, the industry never ad-
mitted publicly that these schedules
had no reasonable possibility of being
met. To do so would have been
tantamount to admitting willful vio-
lation of the Civil Air Regulations.
But the Civil Aeronautics Board’s
Office of Compliance, watching the
persistent disparity between publicly
scheduled time and actual time,
began to build up a case, and finally
the major offending line was ordered
to show cause why it should not
cease violating the regulations. The
airline, while not admitting any vio-
lation, responded by asking that the
regulations be waived.

This precipitated a months’ long
battle over the eight-hour proviso.
The Air Line Pilots Association
feared that a waiver in this case
would provide a precedent enabling
the airlines to ignore the Civil Air
Regulations entirely. Eventually, a
compromise was reached, the board
waiving the regulations on non-stop ~
coast-to-coast flights only, provided
certain other conditions were met.

SETTLEMENT of the eight-hour
dispute brought an end to several
trends in aviation practices which
might have compromised _ safety.
Coast-to-coast schedules were in-
creased by about two hours to re-
flect the real capabilities of the
planes. But unfortunately other air-
lines, operating on other routes, drew
the wrong lessons from the dispute;
they remembered not the dispute,
but the clang of cash registers which
had accompanied the promulgation
of the original fast (and phony)
schedules. So one line advertised a
new, “fastest” schedule between New

York and a certain Southern city,
But its competitor, which had also |

learned a lesson from the coast-to-_
coast episode — i.e., never be a ‘
with your advertised speed down —

eer Pe an even faster ride,

o
, Nati ON
4 '* =
us

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if

y r He
Cant ba i

Big
f > i.

The first line retaliated, and the
paper war was on. Before long, not
a single scheduled flight on this route
ever arrived on time except with the
help of freak tail winds of more than
100 miles per hour.

Unrealistic flight schedules do
more than cheat the passenger; they
may also endanger him. Pilots may
4 be encouraged to cut corners to keep

__up with the schedule. When schedule
patterns for planes are based on
published, unrealistic flying times,
the time allotted for maintenance
; may be consumed in the air. In this
way, preventative maintenance may
| be deferred until it can wait no
longer, and then a flight is canceled.
} Once airlines enter a race to ad-
|} _-vertise faster schedules than their
competitors, it is not easy to quit

the game. If Line A advertises a

flight in 3 hours, Line B may offer

to perform it in 2 hours, 50 minutes.

Not to be outdone, Line A may ad-

vertise a schedule of 160 minutes.

The battle is on. Short-run_ losers

are the passengers, the flight crews

and the airline clerks who do their

best to placate irate passengers who

have missed connections. But in the

long run, the greatest losers are the
airlines who indulge in the practice
— the public loses faith in their in-
tegrity. Losers, too, may be the well-
run lines which shun such practices,
for the public may wonder why the
industry does not police its own
delinquents.

WHEN the practice became so prev-
alent on certain lines that working
conditions and safety were threat-

ened, the Air Line Pilots Association

asked the CAB to promulgate new

_ regulations designed to guarantee
that advertised schedules would be
realistic. After some delay, the

Ky board acted: thereafter, it ruled, 75
per cent of all scheduled flights must
be no more than fifteen minutes
late — unless it could be shown that

_ the delay was beyond control of the

airline. This was a constructive step.

Lines which had never indulged

in unrealistic scheduling (there were

~ some) welcomed the measure. Other
lines overhauled their published

_ schedules to comply. But a few per-

sisted in the practice, and the CAB

conti nued- to be poess with «

}
10

- sider, pointing out that airlines nor-
; in

Panes!

plaints from passengers. As a result,
the attorney for the board’s Office
of Compliance analyzed performance
on selected flights of a half-dozen
airlines. Most of the carriers showed
themselves to be cooperative, offer-
ing to make any schedule changes
which seemed reasonable. One line,
however, whose published schedules
required 400 mph performance from
250 mph equipment — an obvious
impossibility — refused to cooperate,
and the compliance attorney pro-
ceeded against it under Section 411
of the Civil Aeronautics Act which
prohibits an airline from “engaging
in unfair and deceptive practices or
unfair methods of competition in air
transportation or the sale thereof.”

THE ACTION — in the form of a
petition for enforcement before the
Civil Aeronautics Board—was taken
on January 19, 1959. The compliance
attorney’s petition showed that for
July, 1956, only 6.8 per cent of the
respondent airline’s flights from a cer-
tain city inbound to New York ar-
rived on time, and that not a single
flight in the other direction arrived
on time. For the month of April,
1957, the petition showed, only 37.5
per cent of inbound flights arrived
on time, and again not a single
outbound flight kept schedule. The
attorney pointed out that he had
selected months when flying weather
was generally good.

Hearings and the usual legal de-
lays held up the decision for six
months. When it came — last June
24 — the board found that “the pub-
lication or holding out to the public
of flight schedules that do not rea-
sonably reflect actual performance
thereunder, constitutes an unfair and
deceptive practice and an_ unfair
method of competition in air trans-
portation or the sale thereof within
the meaning of Section 411.” But
despite the finding, the board refused
to take any action against the air-
line on the ground that at the time
the petition had been presented, the
deceptive schedules of July, 1956,
and April, 1957, were no longer being
flown. The time tables had been
changed.

The compliance attorney, dis-
mayed, asked the board - ‘to recon-

mally operated different schedules
in summer and in winter. He warned |

the board:

The board’s unwillingness to direct
even such a mild sanction as a cease
and desist order to violators of the
Civil Aeronautics Act must neces-
sarily impede its future enforcement
functions.

But the board refused to recon-
sider. It did, however, issue a ruling
which could have beneficial effects.
It provides that airlines must hence-
forth file all statistics concerning
departure and arrival times with the if
board, and that the statistics be sy
available to the public. The effective-
ness of the new measure will depend
largely on the attitude of the in-
dustry itself. It may well be that
influential members of the Air Trans-
port Association will now recognize
competitive scheduling for the evil
that it is, and demand an end to it. |
They may come to recognize that
the intentional falsification of sched-
ules by a few airlines is enough to
penalize the whole industry in the
eyes of the public; that the public
might begin to look upon air car-
riers with about as much faith as it
regards itinerant peddlers, horse
traders and patent-medicine men. .

It would be short-sighted indeed
for the industry to lose this oppor-
tunity to clean its own house. Ad-
vertising a schedule which cannot
be met is like putting fourteen ounces
into a can of beans and labeling the
can “1 pound.” Profits may flourish
for a time, but what will happen to
the merchant when his customers be- _
gin to weigh the can?

Next time you step into a plane, —
ask your pilot whether your flight —
is scheduled to be late.

(Continued from inside cover.)

ticularly students, who has an interest
in the issue of peace and disarmament
and is interested in knowing more abo out
the Student Peace Union, to write to
at 5504 South Woodlawn, Chicago 3
Illinois. The $.P.U. is willing and sible
to help local groups get started an dca n
supply speakers, tapes, literature, ete
in the Midwest. ‘

NOTES ON A SEASONAL NEUROSIS

A WONDERFUL thing happened
last Christmas. The seasonal story
in The New York Times started off,
“The once a year when Christmas
comes is here at last.” Because of
the newspaper strike, the bastard
issue came off the presses a week
late and a person had the tremendous
satisfaction of reading it and realiz-
ing that the entire celebration was,
not here at last, but gone at last!

Because the Times is the most au-
thoritative source for an accurate

WS
MEpp % Q
Z MER Z Hoeven Ra)

0
J

picture of the world at Christmas-
tide, I went back another year to
the most recent non-truncated De-
cember 26 issue and found a long,
front-page story beginning with this
paragraph:

The joy and happiness of Christ-
mas yesterday eased the world’s pre-
occupation with the complexities of
the times. People at home and abroad
relaxed.

With all due respect to a great
newspaper, let me say that this story
and all the past and future ones like
it, written long before the end of the
day in question and off the top of
the reporter’s head, epitomize the
vast difference between the idealized
and true Christmases. The gap is
surely growing wider, as the years
go by.

Actually, the “complexities of the
times” are much to be preferred to
the complexities of Christmas. If

JEROME BEATTY, Jr., is the au-
thor of the current bestseller, Show
‘Me the Way to Go Home: The Com-
ae Sea KGroweit)

CHRISTMAS AD ABSURDUM..

there is any relaxing for “people”
that holiday, it is insignificant com-
pared to that of the day after, when
they are eased by the joy and happi-
ness of not having to go through any-
thing like it again for almost a year.
There is such a thing as “Christ-
mas neurosis”; psychiatric note has
been taken of it. Anticipation of the
day to come, and the hereditary
necessity for a warm family reunion
point toward an ideal Christmas that
can’t be attained. The pressure is too
great for relatives to be thrown to-
gether for a day and to get along
perfectly. Last-minute shopping, the
puzzle over gifts, the feeling of guilt
when comparisons are made, the in-
escapable conclusion that Christmas
costs too much—these are some of
the reasons why the rush to the
punch bowl seems to begin earlier
and earlier each year. (Of course, it
is directly proportional to the similar
rush by the children to the presents,
and in some families where that takes
place at the crack of dawn, the punch
bowl is often unwrapped by about

9 A.M.)

THE debacle in the living room is
the debacle of the Christian world in
microcosm. Christmas is a_ good
thing, and everyone wants to get on
the bandwagon. Television and radio
offer so many church services that
there is hardly any reason for leav-
ing home to view the genuine article.
In between, there is a Christmas
Sing With Bing or Christmas Cartoon
Festival. For carols, there are Jingle
Bells and White Christmas—even on
commercials. From Saks Fifth Avenue
loudspeakers blaring across Manhat-
tan, to the tape-recorded carols under
the White House tree, we are never
out of earshot of songs which are
now typical, rather than religious,
and in the public domain.

Even the Defense Department’s

ublic-relations fellows don’t want to
he left out in the cold. One year they
issued a lengthy press report about
a strange flying object which had
been observed in the early how rs of
the morning, picked up by he

~ * 4

by Jerome Beatty, Jr.

line, other radar installations, Navy
picket ships and Army units in
Alaska. The dispatch ended with the
punch line: “Santa Claus is arriving
on schedule.” How much did this bit
of nonsense cost the taxpayers? How
much it added to the gradual debase-
ment of the entire Christmas legend
is something you will have to judge
for yourself.
Writers and editors go hog wild
when the Yule deadline approaches.
Always looking for an angle, they
really have to squirm to find one
that hasn’t been done before.* Late-
ly the tendency has been to approach
the subject along the lines of how
to suffer through Christmas. One
metropolitan paper declared on its
woman’s page: “Crises Occur on the
Hour.” “Will Uncle Jim be sober —
when he comes to call?” the story
goes on. “Not that he ever has been
before, but the children are older ©
this year and they’re bound to no-
tice.” A year ago a special issue. of
a house and home magazine ran an
article with the friendly title: “How |
to Keep the Holidays from Becom-
ing a Headache.” I got a headache
reading it. Even the religious publi-.
cations are questioning matters (with —
less hyprocrisy, I am sure). “Is — i
Christmas shopping a moral obliga-
tion?” asks a Catholic paper. “Shall
we abandon Christmas?” is the de- —
batable subject brought up by a |
Protestant editor. oh
The news and business magazines |
are worried about the Yuletide, too. i
For them, of course, the really jolly
carols are ‘played on the cash register. |
As one business weekly reported last
year, “It looks like a Merry Christ-
mas... . Late shoppers turn the tide.
, “Sales get into the Christmas
spirit.”
Most of the publications try to
keep us in a cheerful mood, of course.
One told us how to “take a religious
holiday.” It was instructive, but 1
required trips to Rome and Jer .
salem. Others produce lists of ama’
ing gilt suggestions such as white: re=

¥] ~*T squirmed only 8 little | pit for this
eee” A) os

A ee

“EF ST

wall tires, travel-folders-in-a-bunch,
genealogy charts and properly-aged
three-inch steaks. The Hostess Al-
manac thinks up something for you
to do each day of December. Like
on the 9th, you let “children stick
cranberries and popcorn into the
crevices of pine cones.” Having made
a stab at this, I can tell you that to
accomplish it one needs a cross be-
tween the Botanical Gardens and
the atomic laboratories at Los
Alamos.

December issues of publications
are, of course, replete with advice on
toys. One article warns: “Parents
will frequently feel lost in the gilt,
noise and flashiness of it all.” What
an understatement! The article de-
velops some interesting theses, such
as “Do choose toys that give chil-
dren a chance to express themselves,”
and warnings not to be scared off
“from toys that provide a bit of
danger; [the] hazard may be just
enough to encourage a meaningful
lesson in safety.” The fact that this
advice was approved by the Ameri-
can Medical Association may have
more significance than is at first ap-
parent.

SOME of us are so stupid that even
if we know how to buy toys, we don’t
know how to place them under the
tree! One newspaper columnist deals
with this intricate matter in some de-
tail. There are two ways of piling
presents, “the individual pile system
and the nest system.” The first “can
be disastrous”; in the second, you
have “one pile per child per nest.” I
Was encouraged to read elsewhere re-
cently that the Pat Boone family
uses the disastrous individual stack
system. All the Boones take turns
opening presents before break-
fast, while the others watch. “This
makes for a long, but happily shared,
gift-giving time,” the writer said.
For once, I agree; anything to stretch
the ceremony out as far as possible
before that dread question comes
from the lips of one of the children:
bs that all?”

Last year a nerve-racked father
introduced into the New York State
Legislature a bill requiring manufac-
turers to assemble completely all toys
before shipment to retailers. The bill,
unhappily, was torpedoed, so not

December 19, 1959

only the legislator who introduced
it, but fathers throughout the land
will as usual spend many man-hours
this Christmas Eve trying to put to-
gether some steam shovel or kiddie
car or bicycle according to directions
written for an Einstein.

THE JOLLY old elf himself is prob-
ably the most abused of all Christ-
mas institutions. A good instance is
the school in upstate New York to
which department stores and other
organizations send men for training
in the art of being Santa Claus. The
week-long course includes lectures
and demonstrations on the history
and evolution of Santa, child psy-
chology, toys for different ages, etc.
A successful student earns a silver
pin and a degree. According to the
headmaster, the student learns that
“the basic requirement to be a suc-
cessful Santa Claus is genuineness.
Play the hearty, friendly role of
Santa to the hilt, whenever you are
in costume.” The irony of this ad-
vice is not lost on me, for I am tra-
ditionally suspicious of Santa Clauses
when they are out of uniform, hav-
ing found them without exception
unjovial, particularly in July.

If I had to center my criticism on
one figure, I suppose I’d choose the
modern St. Nick. Needless to say, I
am wasting my barbs, for the sym-
bolic figure has outlived — yea!
thrived on —a nauseating essay en-
titled “Yes, Virginia, There Is a
Santa Claus,” which has been reprint-
ed in a New York newspaper every
Yule since 1897, when it first ap-
peared in answer to a little girl’s
question. The little girl is now seven-
ty years old and apparently no more
fed up with the piece than the rest
of us.

Not too long ago the vicar of St.
Albans said, “Let Santa Claus get
back to the North Pole and stay
there. We do not need him. He is re-
dundant. Christ alone makes Christ-
mas.”

Those are pretty strong words, for
Santa Claus and Christmas are
among those _ sacred institutions
which, like motherhood and the na-
tional anthem, are supposed to be
above criticism. A current outstand-
ing exception is the case of Stan Fre-
berg, who made a record last year

called Green Christmas. Apparently
it 1s going to be a hit each season,
just like the more innocuous one of
Irving Berlin’s. This is surprising, for
Freberg satirically blasts the Christ-
mas of our day. The clang of the
cash register and such lines as “whose
birthday are we celebrating any-
way?” point up the over-commercial-
ism of the holiday. The record has
won approbation of churchmen, ad
agencies and advertisers.

The paradox is that Freberg, the
son of a minister, has coined a lot
of cash as a result of the success of
the platter, and is himself open to
the charge of making money on
Christmas. But the royalties go to
charity.

Perhaps the boldest justification

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

for the retention of Santa was given
by Mrs. Walter Ferguson in her syn-
dicated column a while back, in reply
to some shafts directed at the lovable
fellow:

He has become our supersalesman.

. . The baby Jesus inspires love
which makes us want to give, but
old Santa remains the figure who
coaxes us into the store.

PRACTICALLY all the adjustments
of Yule time have some economic
value. Christmas cards are no ex-
ception. I'll never forget the shock
of reading that Senator Estes Ke-
fauver had sent out 40,000 of them
one year. Presumably they were not
addressed by hand, and presumably
he didn’t lick the stamps.

Lots of clever businesses are realiz-
ing that the Christmas card list is
a swell direct-mail gimmick. Here’s
the message on one that was mailed

463

out in great quantities by the em-
ployees of one firm:

C U *s purposes, as stated
in its charter, are to provide for con-
sumers information and counsel, on
consumer goods and services . . . to
give information and assistance on
all matters relating to expenditure
of family income .. . to initiate and
to cooperate with individual and
group efforts seeking to create and
maintain decent living standards .. .
AND. TO WISH YOU A MERRY
CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW
YEAR.

A card sent by one business firm
a couple of years back declared, “A
gift has been sent in your name to

ee ee ae
* lie

Varouk.” T was touched by this sen-
timent, as I was by a card sent out
by a public-relations firm which an-
nounced that the firm had delivered
a present in my name to some insti-
tutionalized boys and girls. After a
brief line wishing me a Merry Christ-
mas and all that, the rest of the
card was devoted to the name of the
firm, in large type, and the (printed)
full names of the twenty-one execu-
tives and associates in the company.
Nobody, of course, had had to touch
a pen to any part of the card. Later
I received a form letter from the
sick kids, thanking me in the name
of the public-relations firm.
Probably the most unusual Christ-

J v -

mas message I ever received was a "4
printed letter from a sincere well-
wisher. It contained many thoughts,
but the best was this one: “Have
you ever tried God’s Power when
faced with impossible problems?
The results will truly amaze you.”
This led me into a sacrilegious day-
dream in which various TV_pitch-
men were selling me a bottle of
G-O-D—that’s how it was spelled in
my dream—for all that ails me, and
saying, “Try G-O-D. The results will
truly amaze you. If not—then your
money back.”

That’s precisely the way I feel
about Operation Bethlehem: I want
my money back.

ROCKEFELLER’S STRATEGY ee by William G. Andrews

Hanover, N. H.
IN 1952 front-running Bob Taft was
hauled up short by a drubbing in
the first-in-the-nation Presidential
preference primary in New Hamp-
shire. Dwight D. Eisenhower was an
easy victor despite the fact that he
was still coyly awaiting his “call to
duty” from NATO headquarters in
Europe. As Time wrote prophetically,
“New Hampshire has so changed po-
litical calculations that Eisenhower
now seems to be leading the Repub-
lican race for the first time since
November.”

In that same New Hampshire pri-
mary, President Harry Truman was
routed by Estes Kefauver and short-
ly announced that he would not seek
re-election. Today, many political
pundits are speculating on the pos-
sibility that New Hampshire’s early
primary may again play giant-killer
and give Nelson Rockefeller’s cam-
paign the psychological boost it
needs. The significance of this specu-
Jation is increased by a recent report
in The New York Times from Rocke-
feller’s “closest advisers” that “he will
enter the New. Hampshire primary”
if he decides to run.

WILLIAM G. ANDREWS, former
state news editor of the Lebanon,

_N.H., Daily Valley News, teaches
government at Dartmouth College.

It would be folly to believe that
the comparisons between 1952 Taft
and 1960 Nixon in New Hampshire
are close. In 1952, all the top state
leaders were lined up behind Ike.
Today, most of them are backing
Nixon. In 1952, public-opinion polls
showed Eisenhower to have an edge
over Taft before the primary, where-
as a survey last summer disclosed
that New Hampshire Republicans
preferred Nixon over Rockefeller by
6-to-1. Taft’s isolationism probably
hurt him in this state, but, whatever
Nixon is, he isn’t an isolationist.

Nor is Nixon as ineffective in
campaigning as was Taft. New
Hampshire’s voters in 1952 failed to
“dig” Taft’s cold, clammy manner
and his snide plaints about Ike’s
aloofness. He fought his way through
crowds instead of patronizing auto-
graph-seekers and he cut short or
brushed off questioners. The cam-
paign wearied him and his attempts
at informality fell dismally flat. In
the city of Lebanon, for instance, he
generated snickers instead of warmth
when he said, “I’m so happy to be
in Laconia, where I have many
friends.” An aide muttered desper-
ately, “Lebanon! Lebanon!” and Taft
compounded the sin: “But I don’t
have much time because I am due
to speak this evening in Lebanon.”
Nixon’s ponderous sincerity may

! °

‘primary contests. The GOP state

leave his listeners feeling oily, but
he does not make such boners.

DESPITE the fact that the party
leaders and voter opinion in the state
at present are unfavorable to the
Rockefeller candidacy, he may be
compelled to make the race there if
he decides seriously to seek the Presi-
dency. Furthermore, there are good
reasons to believe that he can use
the New Hampshire primary as a
springboard into the White House.
One thing is clear above all others
in the 1960 Republican race: if
Rockefeller is to beat Nixon, he
must do so on the primary circuit.
He cannot sit back and wait for two —
other rivals to deadlock the conven-
tion and then slip in by the side
door—as did Willkie in 1940. He
doesn’t have two rivals—only Nixon.
Nor can he win enough delegates in
state convention fights unless he has
demonstrated his voter appeal in

machines that control the state con-
ventions are—with few exceptions—
solidly in the Nixon camp.

Rockefeller’s only chance to pre-
vent Nixon from waltzing into the
White House, nominated by accla-
mation, is to follow the example of —
Eisenhower’s backers in 1952 and —
prove that he is a stronger candies
at the hustings than today’s front

ba ; "he \

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i (

VTLON

+ 4 i r y «

fs At,

runner. Furthermore, one or two in-
belive tests in small states won't
do the trick. He must pick up enough
delegates to prevent a Nixon win on
the first ballot. He has New York’s
large delegation in his pocket, but
what he needs more than anything
else is California’s ballots. If he can
beat Nixon in the latter’s own back
yard, he will have the Vice President
in serious trouble. The balance of
delegate strength will have been al-
tered and Nixon dealt a severe psy-
chological blow. Some of Rockefel-
ler’s advisers reportedly believe that
intra-party jealousies and the flexi-
bility of California’s partisan politics
might well enable their candidate to
pull that neat trick. The “new Re-
publicanism” sentiment that is strong
in iconoclastic California, combined
with powerful pro-Knight and _ pro-
Warren elements in the Republican
Party who never liked Nixon, could
well combine to fashion a Rockefel-
ler win.

But no one wins like a winner. It
would be very difficult to generate
the necessary enthusiasm in a state
the size of California for a candidate
as little known as Rockefeller unless
he had demonstrated winning power
in a previous primary contest. New
Hampshire and Wisconsin have the
earliest primaries. Wisconsin has a
strong progressive tradition from
which Rockefeller could undoubtedly
draw strong support.

~ ON THE other: hand, New Hamp-
shire offers some real advantages. It
is only one-seventh as populous and
one-sixth as large in area as Wis-
consin. Thus, a short, vigorous, in-
tensive campaign would produce
_much more substantial dividends for
a candidate whose greatest asset is
his political sex appeal. His greatest
_ liability is that he is relatively little
known and the voters think he has
‘ less governmental experience than
_ Nixon. This fact was made abun-
_ dantly clear in last summer’s poll in
this state. Nearly five of every six
Nixon supporters here who explain-
_ ed why they preferred him to Rocke-
_ feller cited his “experience,” or said
_ they had “heard more about him.”
;) Actually, Rockefeller’s governmental
~ experience has been longer and much
e diversified and challeng ing th;
xon’s. But the voters pie Oo now

2A,

it and only a rigorous, drum-beating
campaign will change their minds.
Therefore, New York’s Governor
must first make his background of
public service known to the voters
and, secondly, he must make himself
known to them. This means, above
all, a personal-appearance tour, hit-
ting every town and city of any sig-
nificance. This can be done much
more easily and in less time in New
Hampshire than in Wisconsin. The
voters in New Hampshire are very

Governor Rockefeller

conscious of their role as political
weather vane after the impact of the
1952 primary and they are more
likely to turn out in numbers to “see
what this guy is like” than in a state
where the primary has not been of
such significance recently. This fact,
combined with the custom of hold-
ing the primary in conjunction with
the town meetings, will make it easier
to turn out a big vote in New Hamp-
shire. Voters will have local issues
to draw them out as well as the na-
tional contest. A big vote will tend
to reduce the advantage of the “ma-
chine candidate,” whose supporters
would come to the polls in any case.

Nor should it be forgotten that
New York and New Hampshire
are neighboring, Eastern, industrial
states having much more in com-
mon than have New York and Wis-
consin. For this reason, also, Rocke-
feller is probably better known in
New Hampshire. He has many per-
sonal contacts in the Granite State
through his Dartmouth College and

Exeter Academ: associations. His
sons attended Exeter. He graduated
from artmouth in 1 ), was a trus-

.
pe id

afer! ay ae

a
va

tee from 1942 to 1952, and sent one
son there.

A final—but very significant—
factor suggesting that Rockefeller’s
best chances lie in New Hampshire
is that a strong grass-roots organiza- a
tion has been functioning and build- a
ing here since last May. At that time, ia
certain state politicians and lawyers
began meeting to discuss ways they
might aid a Rockefeller candidacy.
The group emerged into the public 7
eye with the announcement in Sep- <i
tember of a roster of forty members
of a state advisory committee. Since
then the list has been expanded to 7
about eighty, a headquarters has
been established in Concord, and the (4
names of persons sympathetic to
Rockefeller have been solicited in 4%
every corner of the state. 4

It is true that most of the first-
rank politicians are in the Nixon
camp, but the honorary chairman of
the Draft Rockefeller group, and one
of its most active members, is Con-
gressman Chester FE. Merrow. Also
in the group are two of New Hamp-
shire’s twenty-four state senators and
a dozen or so of her 400 state repre-
sentatives. The other Congressman,
Perkins Bass, is uncommitted, al-
though he has said that he “leans
toward” Rockefeller. Mr. Bass’s
brother is a member of the nine-man
steering committee. The state chair-
man is William G. Saltonstall, head-
master of Exeter, who was a delegate
for Eisenhower at the 1952 conven-
tion and for Stassen in 1948.

County and town committees have
also been organized in many parts
of the state. The most active of these
is the committee in Hanover, home
of Dartmouth College, which recent-
ly held a very successful rally.

WHILE THE rabidly-reactionary
Manchester Union-Leader is vocifer-
ously supporting Nixon, most of the
other eight New Hampshire dailies
seem to be lining up for Rockefeller
At least four have already done so
and a couple of others are lean
that way. The influence o
Union-Leader is hard to meas
the only newspaper with stat
circulation, its impact is undou
ly great. But sometimes it pre
unanticipated reactions, Willic
who prides himself on being or

vy
the
ao "

r a lila ge Yori

the last “personal journalists” in the
country, is not above _ slanting
both news and editorial columns for
the sake of candidates with whose
political philosophy he agrees. He
writes frequent, intemperate front-
page editorials with an acid pen. At
the time of the death of Sen. Joe
McCarthy, he black-bordered a big,
front-page editorial, labeled it “Mur-
dered!”, and blamed “that stinking
hypocrite in the White House” for
the passing of his hero. Loeb also
used this type of scurrility against
Eisenhower in the 1952 primary and,
as was suggested in The Nation at
the time, “the violence of his at-
tacks” may have “helped to defeat
Taft, just as similar atacks on Sen-
ator Tobey defeated ... Powell...
two years” earlier.

Already the Union-Leader has
trained its angry fire on Rockefeller.
Loeb argued recently that Nixon is
preferable to Rockefeller because the
Vice President is experienced, has
greater party loyalty, and because

. . . Nothing could be worse for this
nation than to combine the greatest
fortune in the United States with the
biggest government. The combination
of big money and big government
would REALLY reduce the average
citizen to a hopeless position. The
billions of the Rockefellers, combined
with the billions of the federal gov-
ernment, would mean a combination
of power extremely dangerous to

iii wae ' 4

democratic and free institutions of

this country.

Speculation on the ability of Rock-
efeller to capture crowds in New
Hampshire is not wholly hypothet-
ical. He attended a class reunion
and football game at Dartmouth in
September. After the game, he spoke
briefly and informally to a crowd of
several thousand in front of Dart-
mouth Hall. Someone in the crowd

called out: “What about 1960?”

Friends, [was the cheerful reply]
that’s a bit like the six New Yorkers
who were out in a rowboat. The boat
upset and they were thrown into the
water. Another boat happened by
and fished them out of the drink, but
it was small and already crowded.
When they thought everyone had
been accounted for, another head was
seen bobbing in the water nearby.
One of the boat’s occupants, con-
cerned lest it sink from overloading,
called out, “Hello, over there! Are
you all right? Can you float alone?”
“Sure, I can float a loan,” was the
answer. “So, at a time like this, you
want to talk business?”

The pun was sheer cornball and
the crowd’s reaction was less a laugh
than a good-natured guffaw. The
Governor had made his point and
the question had been evaded, but
he had won friends doing it. That
same evening, he discussed his work
in New York State with a group of
his supporters, leaving them con-

ae , |
an ed Fae ig was noenaeen

playboy in politics. Throug bat hint
visit here, he conveyed the impres-
sion, ether accurate or not, that A
he is a man at peace with haneall
and with the world, yet having an
acute sense of noblesse oblige in the —
manner of the Roosevelts or the
British aristocracy.

If he comes into this state for a
week or ten days, conducts a well-
prepared and vigorous campaign in
every corner, and is as successful in
transmitting a picture of good-na-
tured but determined leadership as
he did in New York in 1958 and at
Dartmouth this fall, he has a good
chance to overcome Nixon’s long
lead. Yet — because that lead is so
long — he need not win control of
New Hampshire’s handful of con-
vention votes to score a moral vic-
tory. In fact, because the best-known
New Hampshire political names —
Senators Bridges and Cotton and ~
Governor Powell — will probably _
head the list of prospective Nixon
delegates, the Rockefeller supporters
may not run a slate of delegates, re-
lying only on the showing of their |
candidate in the preference vote to _
achieve their purposes. Even a nar-
row defeat in the popularity contest
would, in effect, they believe, be a
psychological victory for Rockefeller
and could be just the gentle nudge
needed to set his bandwagon rolling.

|
|
a

REMILITARIZATION of JAPAN... by John 6. Roberts

Tokyo
FIVE AMERICAN aircraft carriers,
some of which saw action against
Hirohito, are being towed to Japan
for scrapping. Newspaper comments
on the deal are as sentimental as
those generated by Admiral Nimitz’s
gesture in returning his Hideaki
swords to the land of the Samurai.
- But for those of us old enough to
_ remember the rape of Nanking and
the “Co-prosperity Sphere,” the

JOHN G. ROBERTS, Tokyo corre-
_spondent for several business publi-
cations, is at work on a book about
contemporary Japan.

eee meee ee ed u

tidings have less happy connotations.
Not quite forgotten are those hot-
blooded rallies against the sale of
steel to imperialist Japan, noisy de-
nunciations of the zaibatsw—Japan’s
“economic royalists’—and the mute
protests of feminine calves muffled in
lisle hose to boycott Japanese silk.
Such a fire-horse reflex may seem
dated in this new era studded with
the Colombo Plan, World Bank,
ICA, IMF, SEATO and other jewels
of Free World cooperation. It could
even be called alarmist in the midst
of good-will tours, Summit plans and
disarmament proposals. But while
pollyannas of the press were still

Be
misty-eyed at the prospect of war- |
ships being melted down into bi-—
cycles and sewing machines, there |
came another announcement that a |
shipment of Sidewinder missiles had
been secretly airlifted to the U. S.
air base at Tachikawa and tranferred
to the Japanese “Self-Defense” —
forces. Sidewinders are a part of the |
armament of the Lockheed jet fight- a
ers soon to be manufactured in Ja-
pan by Mitsubishi.

Other items in the Tokyo news-
papers fail to ease one’s qualms. To:
quote a few recent headlines:
JAPANESE ARMED FORCES
STRONGER THAN Mts 31; DE-

AA r Af -

: i £ ’ ” ata Hg 7 Na PLO
\ Ll C

‘ nae. d A

SET

PS a Sar

> Te

FENSE BILLS RAMMED
THROUGH DIET BY TORIES;
Y1,500 BILLION DEFENSE
BUILD-UP PLAN DRAFTED;
JAPAN ARMS MAKERS EXPECT
ORDER BOOM; JAPAN’ TO
BUILD MISSILE WARSHIP; A-
ARMS SEEN FOR JAPAN IN
DECADE.

It is hardly news any more that
Japan is rearming. But perhaps it is
less fully recognized that the coun-
try which renounced war is being
militarized at the expense of Amer-
ican taxpayers, and by an oligopoly-
dominated government with re-
newed expansionist ambitions.

This unpleasant conclusion is sub-
stantiated by a number of current
developments:

I. In clear violation of the Japa-
nese Constitution, the Kishi Admin-
istration is rushing a revision of the
Japan-U.S. Security Treaty which
will create, in effect, a military al-
liance. The revised pact will heighten
the tensions, already dangerous, be-
tween Japan and the Eastern bloc;
it will increase the danger of Japan’s
involvement in possible wars be-
tween the United States and third
countries; and the assertion is made,
convincingly, that the new treaty
will require Japan to equip its forces
with nuclear weapons.

2. The biggest prewar xzaibatsu,
the Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumito-

- mo industrial empires, have been

fully resurrected and enjoy political
power perhaps greater than at the
time of Pearl Harbor. The Big Three,
united with new zaibatsu and pre-
sumably supported by their U. S.
business partners — Westinghouse
(Mitsubishi), G. E. (Mitsui), West-
ern Electric (Sumitomo), Standard
Oil (Mitsui, Mitsubishi and others)
and Alcoa (Furukawa) — are press-
ing for accelerated rearmament by
every means, including circumven-
tion of the democratic process.

3. The Kishi Administration has
announced an ambitious “Six-Year
Plan” of military build-up, integrat-
ed closely with a program of muni-
tions production and export formu-
lated by the zaibatsu, upon whose
support the existence of the ruling
party depends.

. The rearmament program is

_ made possible largely through mil-
_ December 19, 1959

itary and economic aid from the
United States, granted for the ap-
parent purpose of establishing Japan
as an economic colony, a permanent
advance base against Asia, a cut-
rate arsenal and a source of ground
troops for any future war in the
East.

ARTICLE 9 of Japan’s 1947 Consti-
tution seems unmistakable in its in-
tent when it declares:

Aspiring sincerely to an interna-
tional peace based on justice and
order, the Japanese people forever
renounce war as a sovereign right of
the nation and the threat or use of
force as means of settling interna-
tional disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of
the preceding paragraph, land, sea
and air forces, as well as other war
potential, will never be maintained.
The right of belligerency of the state
will not be recognized.

Mr. Kishi himself, in an interview
with Cecil Brown a year ago, said
that there could be no U.S.-Japanese
mutual-defense treaty similar to
those America has with other coun-
tries because the Constitution would
not permit it. “The time has come
to abrogate Article 9,” he said. But
the amendment idea was not popular,
so the agile Mr. Kishi changed his
ground. Last month he told critics
in the Diet that Article 9 not only
permitted rearmament and the U.S.
alliance, but the use of nuclear weap-
ons as well.

The Tokyo District Court, how-
ever, regarded Article 9 as less elas-
tic. In a thunderbolt decision re-
versing the convictions of seven
Japanese charged with trespassing
on the U.S. base at Sunakawa in
1957, Judge Aiko Date found that
the stationing of U.S. forces in Ja-
pan was unconstitutional. The deci-
sion, rendered in March, 1959, im-
plied the invalidity of the Security
Treaty and the Administrative
Agreement under which U.S. bases
enjoy extraterritorial status. This
critical case is still pending before
the Supreme Court; yet Kishi, sworn
to uphold the Constitution, is now
determined to ignore it, as well as
the power of the judiciary. On Octo-
ber 10, he insisted that, regardless
of the courts, he would sign the
treaty revision, probably in January.

The present draft of the U.S.-
Japanese pact, called a “Mutual Co-
operation and Security Treaty,” per-
petuates the stationing of U.S. forces
in Japan for ten years. It obligates
Japan to retaliate against any attack
on U.S. bases (over which Japan has
no jurisdiction) regardless of the
provocation, and permits the deploy-
ment of Japanese forces abroad. It
has no provision against the intro-
duction of nuclear weapons by the
United States, so that Japan may
become a nuclear arsenal subject to
H-bomb attack in the event of war.
The pact incorporates the Vanden-
berg Resolution, requiring any coun-
try entering into a mutual-aid rela-
tionship with the United States to
have sufficient military strength to
engage in modern warfare. This may
be construed to mean that Japan,
too, must become a nuclear power.
While the draft makes frequent obei-
sance to the Japanese Constitution, it
does not explain just how Japan
is to meet these provisions while for-
ever renouncing war and all war-
potential.

IN THE FACE of these Constitu-
tional obstacles and widespread pop-
ular opposition, Mr. Kishi’s haste to
conclude the treaty may be perplex-
ing. But it becomes rather clearer
when we consider the zaibatsu, with
whom his association has been long
and friendly. Dissolved by MacAr-
thur’s SCAP soon after the surren-
der, these many-tentacled combines,
aided by Washington’s reversal of
the dissolution policy, lost no time
in planning a revival. The Big Three
(Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo)
reassembled their member companies
and added many more, to become
once again the economic rulers of
Japan. Although family ownership
has been replaced by more widely
distributed stockholdings, control re-
mains largely in the hands of mana-
gers who forged Japan’s war machine
in the thirties and encouraged its use
for imperialist aggression.

The zaibatsu’s productive capacity,
said to be triple that of the wartime
peak, is concentrated in heavy in-
dustries, but export markets are in-
adequate and unreliable. The United
States recession of 1957-58 gave
Japan a severe jolt. Trade with

467

China, Japan’s natural market and
source of raw materials, had prom-
ised to be a sound economic base,
but relations were cut off by Peking
in 1958 because of Japan’s adherence
to the Dulles China policy. In a
classic response to these challenges,
the zaibatsu looked to armaments as
a safeguard against economic tail-
spins.

The anxiety of the zaibatsu to
expand their military potential is
manifest in the recent decision of
the Economic Reconstruction Coun-
cil (chief source of funds for the
governing Liberal-Democratic Party)
to allocate almost $1 million for pro-
treaty publicity. The council, led by
unreconstructed zaibatsu, is an ad-
junct of the Federation of Economic
Organizations (Keidanren) — the

GHQ of Japanese big business.
THE MEANS by which pressure for

rearmament is exerted cannot be
understood without a close look at
Keidanren, the top layer of a hierar-
chy of interlocking economic organi-
zations in which the normally com-
petitive zaibatsu unite in pursuit of
mutual aims. Heading the federation
is Taizo Ishizaka, chairman of To-
shiba, a huge combine whose largest
stockholder is General Electric, and
which is regarded as the hub of the
Mitsui industrial empire. A vice-
chairman is Shigeo Nagano, presi-
dent of Fuji Steel, one of the largest
in its field; he is said to be pri-
marily responsible for securing the
Prime Ministry for Mr. Kishi. An-
other vice-chairman is Arakazu Oji-
ma, president of Yawata Steel, one
of Japan’s top profit makers.

Last month it was announced that
a $44 million World Bank loan was
to be shared between Fuji and Ya-
wata, by authority of Hayato Ikeda,
Minister of International Trade and
Industry. Ikeda, leader of the right-
wing Yoshida faction of the Liberal-
Democratic Party, is strongly pro-
American. Both steel companies have
a huge stake in rearmament, of
course; and both are among the
most generous contributors to the
Reconstruction Council to which
Kishi and Ikeda are beholden.

It should be added that Fuji Steel

lans a $40 million steel mill on
Taiwan, which would place Nagano

squarely behind the Dulles-Herter

AE) ee eee eS

Far East policy and the military
burdens which it entails. Indeed, he
is active in the Japan-Nationalist
China Cooperation Council, whose
role is similar to that of America’s
shadowy “China Lobby.”

THIS partial circuit diagram is
shown only to suggest the close
collaboration between big business
and Japan’s “democratic” regime.
Similarly relevant are the composi-
tion and activities of Keidanren’s
committees, which areled bythe presi-
dents or chairmen of Japan’s fore-
most enterprises. It is in these com-
mittees that policy on every aspect
of Japanese politics and economics
is hammered out. The emergent
programs are presented to the gov-
ernment as recommendations, but
all too frequently they seem to be
accepted as orders.

One of the most important organs
of Keidanren is the Defense Industry
Committee, headed by Kiyoshi Go-
ko. As wartime head of Mitsubishi
Heavy Industries, he developed the
Zero fighting plane as well as the
world’s largest warships. His former
company, Mitsubishi Heavy Indus-
tries (reorganized), has been award-
ed the major share of a contract to
manufacture 200 Lockheed F104 CJ
(“J” for Japan) jet fighters for the
Japanese Air Force. Behind the au-
thorization to manufacture — these
planes (at over $1 million apiece)
is the fact that both Mitsubishi and
other aircraft companies have been
suffering heavy losses due to the
sluggishness of the defense build-up.

tee ae we

0 ae |
i

Something had to give; and, as usual,
it was Uncle Sugar. The United ;
States will pay 30 to 50 per cent of |
the cost of the planes.

But returning to Keidanren: Each
of the nine subcommittees on de-
fense industry is headed by a top
executive from a major arms manu-
facturer. One exception is the sub-
committee on foreign arms markets,
whose chairman is Kogoro Uemura,
who was responsible for mobilizing
the zaibatsu economic organizations
during World War II, and had close
relations with Kishi, who was Min-
ister of Trade and Industry in the
Tojo Cabinet.

Uemura is important as the au-
thor of a plan for exporting weapons
to Southeast Asia, cannily anticipat-
ing Eisenhower’s April 4 Gettysburg
address. At that time, the President
stressed a program in which the in-
dustrial capacity of Japan was to be
the most important element in de-
fending Asia from Communist ag-
gression. Now, in substance, Japan is
taking over some of the responsibili-
ties of ICA in Southeast Asia—but
still at the expense of the U.S. tax-

payer.

wi \

THIS BOON to industrialists is in
addition to the Japanese reparations
program, most of the proceeds of
which go directly into the pockets
of the zaibatsu in payment for goods
shipped to recipient nations. Indeed,
the whole reparations program turns —
out to be a billion-dollar shot in the
arm for the zatbatsu, who were large-
ly responsible for starting the war in
the first place. And the money? It
comes from taxpayer-san to the tune
of $30 for every man, woman and
child in Japan.
The Uemura-Eisenhower plan for
Southeast Asia has other brilliant
advantages: it allows expansion of
Japanese arms production far beyond
present needs of the “Self-Defense”
Forces in preparation for the future;
it equips conservative or authori-
tarian governments to resist ageres-—
sion, internal as well as external,
in those areas in which Japan’s for-
eign investment is most concen-
trated; and not to be overlooked is
the edge it gives Japan over Euro-
pean competitors, who are also see 4 ms
ing munitions markets.
wal vin s RT.

‘ uy & —CwdT Nha Na

ip i”
he

Japan’s long-range defense pro-
gram, incorporated into the Defense
Agency’s proposed Six Year Plan,
calls for a tripled arms budget by
1965. By that year, significantly,
aircraft expenditures decrease sharp-
ly, while the guided-missile produc-
tion curve takes a steep upturn in
1962.

Such activities, not unexpectedly,
provoke harsh accusations from the
Communist bloc. While Washington
hails Japan as our Far East bulwark,
Moscow and Peking call it bluntly
“an arsenal of the U.S.,” “an active

supporter of the warmongers” and
“a base for atomic war.”
But although Mr. Kishi (who

spent three years in Sugamo Prison
as a “Class A” war-crimes suspect )
has been called a warmonger in the
Diet, it need not be concluded that
either he or his zaibatsw backers
really want a war. As responsible
politicians and businessmen, their
job is to stabilize an economy which
is expanding more rapidly than any
in the capitalist world. They seem to
hope that they can reap the benefits
of girding for war without shedding
blood. This thinking is well express-

-ed by industrialist Yuichi Yuasa,

who told the Japan Times:

The public is prone to associate
the defense industry with the pre-
war military industry and rearma-
ment. However, the postwar defense
industry is dedicated in part to the
maintenance of peace and order with-
in the country. As such lit}
should be welcomed by the public.

. Many phases of the defense in-
dustry require a high degree of tech-
nology and can be expected to pull
up the technological level of Jap-
anese industries in general.

But suppose that in pursuit of
these lofty aims, Japan should be-
come involved in war? Such a ques-
tion was asked of Tsunao Okumura,
president of Japan’s largest securi-
ties company, who gave this poetic
but not very reassuring reply:

If war comes, you and I and all
the peoples of the world may per-
haps be voyaging in a spiritual form
to another universe, so let us not
worry that far.

Such a fatalistic attitude is not
entirely unjustified while Japan’s
destiny remains in the fumbling
hands of American statesmen. The

Qecember 19, 1959

State Department has recently re-
iterated that there will be no change
in our policy toward China, which
was so frankly expressed in 1954 by
Walter Robertson, then Assistant
Secretary of State for Far Eastern

Affairs:

The heart of the present policy
toward China and Formosa . . . is
that there is to be kept alive a con-
stant threat of military action vis-
a-vis Red China in the hope that
there would be an internal break-
down. . For an indefinite period
we would go on _ subsidizing the
peripheral peoples to the end that
at some point they might be pre-
pared to move in militarily, with
our support, on the Communist areas
of China. . . .” [Toronto Telegram,
Feb. 12, 1954.]

As a “peripheral people” the Jap-
anese must have a beefed-up self-
defense force to be able to “move in
militarily, with our support.” The
treaty revision and rearmament are
corollaries of this policy; and in fair-
ness to the zaibatsu, it must be ad-
mitted that the heavier responsibility
for current developments lies in
Washington.

Actually, Japan is spending only
1.75 per cent of gross national in-
come for military purposes (the
United States spends more than 10
per cent). Direct U.S. military aid to
Japan has averaged $150 million a
year over the past eight years. Mean-
while the U.S. forces in Japan spend
some $200 million a year on military
contracts for goods and _ services,
thereby expanding domestic capa-
city and know-how while preparing
a gigantic military establishment
which will eventually go to Japan.

BUT PRESSURE for rearmament
does not come entirely from the State
Department and the military. Amer-
ican business and finance, too, have
a big stake in Japan. U.S. invest-
ment in Japan, including loans and
credits, has increased from a prewar
$119 million to some $600 million.
This is exclusive of postwar relief
loans of $1,700 million, most of which
will never be repaid. Loans from the
World Bank alone total $302 million.
And in addition to investments, more
than 800 U.S. companies have profit-
able tie-ups with Japanese firms.
The protection of this investment

is a sufficient incentive for encourag-
ing Japan to rearm. But it must also
be considered that the heaviest in-
vestments are in the steel, petroleum
and electrical industries which bene-
fit so richly from rearmament. It is
no coincidence that these industries
are the three largest contributors
to Mr. Kishi’s Liberal-Democratic
Party, which is not only pushing for
rearmament and pact revision, but
for removing the legal obstacles to
increased U.S. investment in Japan.

The Kishi Government contends
that, despite the idealistic Mac-
Arthur Constitution, every country
has the inherent right of self-defense.
The argument has merit, especially
when other countries, including
former Axis powers, are being
equipped with nuclear weapons. But
if such a right exists, it resides in
the people, not in a taeuan of the
prevailing party. And the Japanese
people are overwhelmingly against
rearmament and war. A Yomiuri
newspaper poll showed that 50 per
cent of the people favored neutrality,
while only 26 per cent wanted an al-
liance with the United States; a
Mainichi poll indicated that 40.7 per
cent of those questioned were against
the substance of the proposed treaty
revision, while only 28 per cent were
in favor.

AT A TIME when world disarma-
ment seems more than a pipe dream,
when our China policy is tottering
and when other crevasses in the cold-
war glacier seem to herald spring,
Kishi’s frantic campaign for a pro-
vocative military alliance is anachro-
nistic. Furthermore, a government
which flouts its own Constitution and
the popular will is hardly a reliable
repository of modern military power.
The Kishi regime is further disquali-
fied by its subservience to the zai-
batsu, a group whose incapacity for
responsible stewardship was demon-
strated before and during World
War II.

The Japanese people remember
with gratitude the generosity of the
American victors, whose greatest gift
was the hope of democracy and last-
ing peace. But the friendship we have
won is being rapidly dissipated by
Washington’s sponsorship of a re-
vived militarism which threatens
both democracy and peace.

469

+I
i"
ie
it
ae

How Lives Are Written

TWO GENTLE MEN: The Lwes of
George Herbert and Robert Herrick.
By Marchette Chute. E. P. Dutton &
Co. 319 pp. $5.

ADVENTURES OF A BIOGRAPHER.
By Catherine Drinker Bowen. Little,
Brown & Co. 235 pp. $4.

Richard D. Altick

AFTER the success of her life-and-

times books about Chaucer and Shake-

-speare, Marchette Chute’s Two Gentle

Men represents a courageous change of

pace. These heroes do not bestride their

times; they are two seventeenth-cen-
tury Anglican country priests. And the

literary products involved are not a

“Canterbury Tales,” nor some forty im-

mortal plays, but only two small vol-

umes of lyrics.

The twin portraits of George Herbert
and Robert Herrick form a_ pleasant
diptych. The men were almost exact
contemporaries, living in an age filled
with turbulence which spread from
theology to politics and then, climac-
tically, to an agonizing civil war and
the beheading of a king. But “the

Church of England needed a wide roof

to accommodate two men as unlike as

the saintly rector of Bemerton and the
somewhat pagan vicar,” Robert Herrick.

Herbert, well connected and _ intellec-

tually gifted, tried hard for a_ political

career but didn’t make it. He ended in-
stead as the devout and benevolent rec-
tor of an obscure parish, fully deserving
the tribute he received from Izaak Wal-
ton’s eloquent but inaccurate pen. Her-
rick, on the other hand, was never too
pious; many would have said, not pious
enough. Entering the church only after
having gone through his inheritance, he
was distinguished instead for his joyous
bibulousness, indifference to parish du-
ties and attention to swishing petticoats.

His temperament fitted him to live in

the era of Horace and Catullus rather
than that of Laud and Cromwell, but
if his poems of youth and love in Hes-
ae are any indication, he managed
to keep a bit of paganism alive in Eng-
land even as the Puritans appeared on
the church porch.

-Herrick had little trouble reaching a

RICHARD D. ALTICK, author of The

5! ‘Scholar Adventurers, The English Com-
‘mon Reader, etc., is now completing a
By book on literary HE

~Herrick’s, even if it cannot co
full fiereeness of H

congenial understanding with the Chris-
tian religion. Holy orders offered a prac-
tical way to secure an undemanding
livelihood, and doctrinal issues didn’t
matter very much. But George Herbert
took religion with passionate serious-
ness, and his tormented search for di-
vine assurance and forgiveness gener-
ated poetry as moving, of its kind, as
any we have. Although England’s age-
old concern for faith has engaged many
fine minds and talents, not until Hop-
kins did it produce another such poet.

The interior drama of Herbert’s life,
as reflected in The Temple, is less suited
to Miss Chute’s talents than the gay
superficiality of Herrick’s. Her reso-
lutely undramatic prose is an admirable
vehicle for understatement, but in Her-
bert’s case it mutes unduly the sound
of his spiritual struggle which, after all,
was shrill. A biographer as determined
as Miss Chute is to avoid even the sus-
picion of histrionics is somewhat at a
disadvantage when dealing with a sub-
ject like Herbert.

IN A popular biographer restraint is
a virtue as considerable as it is rare. It
is difficult—how difficult, nobody can
know who has not tried it—to assimi-
late the contents of hundreds of specia-
lized and complicated books and _ arti-
cles and then to distill their essential
facts into an easily comprehended nar-
rative, without doing violence to the
truth. Miss Chute’s sense of respon-
sibility has won her the respect of pro-
fessional scholars, who are notoriously
chary of bestowing their blessing on
avowed popularizers.

Casually considered, to be sure, Miss
Chute’s prose seems to plod; it has the
air, as Chesterton once said of Matthew
Arnold’s essays, of a schoolmaster ex-
plaining things to a class of idiot chil-
dren. But a careful reading of Two Gen-
tle Men will show how deceptive this
first impression is. I suspect that Miss
Chute spends as much time over her
sentences as Herrick did in carving his
well-wrought poetic cherrystones. And
the sober grace of her style does not
limit it to a single key. Actually it is,
in its modest way, a flexible instrument
which, like the Church of England’s
roof, can accommodate the contrasting
spirits of two lives like Herbert's and

‘the

in me inne

he ¥,

MISS CHUTE does her reading almost
entirely in the New York Public Li- |
brary, to which she dedicated her book |
on Ben Jonson. Catherine Drinker |
Bowen, who works on a much more |
lavish scale, ranges the world, from :
Leningrad to California. In Adventures
of a Biographer she offers what might —
be called a Wednesday matinee view of —
scholarly research. I have no doubt that b
the book is true to Mrs. Bowen’s own |
temperament and experience; but it~
will be a bitter day for librarians, de-
scendants of famous men and _ publish- @
ers’ editors if her enthusiasm should —
tempt many other ladies, with visions” g
of the Book-of-the-Month Club in their |
heads, to embark on similar programs
of investigation. High spirits and un- —
limited curiosity are not the only requi-
sites of the successful biographer. a
Mrs. Bowen is, so to speak, the pro- a
fessional amateur. She retains, after five —
elaborately researched bestsellers, the
wide-eyed wonder of a girl reporter sent —
downtown to interview a television ce-_
lebrity for the high school paper. Packam
ing her notebooks and bundles of share
pencils from one place to another, she
existed, by her own account, in a perpet-
ual happy dither. Thanks to this fortu-
nate combination of romantic zest, bras
ness and inexhaustible diligence, she ha
met many interesting people, visited —
many fascinating homes and written
biographies that read like fiction whi so)
in places, they are.
But the impression one receives from
some of her cheerily ingenuous anec-
dotes is not quite what she intended,
She arrives, for instance, at the Hunting-
ton Library. She has notified the offi-
cials beforehand that she will have only
two or three days to spend there, and
that she expects to be shown this ra re
drawing and that first edition and, w lL,
anything else they have that would | be
of use to her. (“How do you do your
research?” the musicologist E. J. Dent
once asked her. “Me?” she answered.
“Oh, I just plunge around in libraries.”)
The librarians, with what nervousness
we can imagine, meet her at the door
and try to divert her to the rare orchids
in the garden and The Blue Boy a
Pinkie in the art gallery. But she
have none of it. “No, I said; I
to see the books.” And, of course, sl
does. She is not one to be. denied, There
is a sinister ring in her preface: “E
book that I have written hi
situations and

to block
i

ver

accident.This is the biographer’s hazard,
and when it happens the writer fights
back, no holds barred.”

A reasonable toughness of purpose is
desirable in anybody who works with
the materials of history, but so is tough-
ness of mind. At a meeting of the Amer-
ican Historical Association Mrs. Bowen
Sensed a certain lack of rapport between
herself and the academic historians.
Doubtless it was true that they envied
her popular success and disapproved of
her imaginative ways with the past.
But their failure to sympathize with her
sentimentalism was more than matched
by her inability to grasp what they
were talking about. In fact, I wonder if
she heard them correctly. The conven-
tioners, she complains, “were forever
taking shots at biography. “The dangers
of the biographical approach,’ they said.
I knew what they meant, of course.
Biography is written from a point of
view; the writer likes his hero or dis-
likes him. Moreover, biography is filled
with personal detail, those ‘particulars’
to which the historian does not ‘descend’
without apology. To the professional
historian, biography has for centuries

been tainted.” If Mrs. Bowen believes
that modern historians despise either
biography or “particulars,” she has
missed something important in_ her
reading.

Historians may justifiably raise their
eyebrows at Mrs. Bowen’s simple doc-
trine that “the writing of biography is
primarily a matter of reducing the large
scenes to a series of small pictures that
can be encompassed by the naked eye.”
She seeks to create a peepshow that
will be visually as accurate as a Wil-
liamsburg Restoration, with every sconce
and hitching post accounted for in the
records, even though the thoughts that
pass beneath the authenticated perukes
are simply written into the script by a
modern hand. But tireless antiquarian-
ism and psychological guesswork are
not the sum of the biographer’s art. It
is noticeable that Mrs. Bowen’s defini-
tion omits any mention of the intel-
lectual content of biography. In the
midst of her breathless reminiscences,
she should have reminded her readers
that besides piling up mileage and an
imposing bibliography, the biographer
must also pause for hard thought.

Armada and Virginia

THE ELIZABETHANS AND AMER-
ICA, By A. L. Rowse. Harper & Bros.
221 pp. $4.

Louis B. Wright
THE PROBLEMS that faced Eliz-

abethan Englishmen were not altogether
different from those that beset modern
Americans; and, distant as they are in
time from us, the parallels between their
civilization and ours are significant and
instructive. The Englishman of 1575
lived in political uncertainty, in the
shadow of international disaster. Across
the Narrow Seas stretched a land power
of immense strength, a land power that
had managed to cross the Atlantic and
establish an empire in the New World.
The soldiers of Spain were the best in
the world, and the ruler of Spain, Philip
TI, looked forward to the day when these
soldiers could conquer England and re-
duce that troublesome nation to the so-
cial, political and religious opinions held
in Spain. In the sixteenth century,

LOUIS B. WRIGHT, director of the
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washing-
ton, D.C., is the author of Middle Class
Culture in Elizabethan England, The
First Gentlemen of Virginia, The Cul-
tural Life of the American Colonies,
among many other books.

December 19, 1959

religion equated with politics, and the
religious opinions of England and Spain,
and hence their political systems, were
as diametrically opposed as the political
systems of the United States and Rus-
sia today.

In other respects Elizabethan Eng-
land and modern America had many
things in common, For the Elizabethans,
the world had suddenly expanded as
explorers brought back stories of the
extent of lands beyond the seas, just as
Americans have seen their own world
expanding beyond the stratosphere. This
expansion of the earth as they under-
stood it had profound repercussions upon
Elizabethan imaginations, just as the
events of the past decade have had
upon ours. A fundamental change also
occurred in arms and armament in the
sixteenth century, and if it was less
sweeping than the discovery of atomic
fission, at least for the Elizabethans it
was almost as revolutionary. The con-
trolled use of gunpowder had improved
to such an extent that ancient tech-
niques of warfare had to be abandoned.
Englishmen also learned how to con-
trol their ships, to tack against the wind
and to fight with ships instead of using
them merely as floating platforms for
soldiers. These develepments eventually
upset the balance of power in Europe

and gave England an opportunity to
meet Spain on an equal footing.
Elizabethan England, like modern
America, was the victim of creeping in-
flation, with all the economic disloca-
tions that came in its train. As the
price of commodities rose, landed folk
living on customary rents found them-
selves short of ready money; displaced
laborers had difficulty adjusting to new
conditions; itinerant workers at times
became a serious social problem; and
many people, both high and low, flocked
to London and to other cities and towns
as the first extensive urban development
of modern times got under way. A pros-
perous middle class gained both econom-
ic and political power and began to look
about for fresh means of investment and
further sources of wealth. The Eliza-
bethans were vigorous, imaginative and
enterprising. They would have under-
stood their descendants in America.

TO DESCRIBE the activities of these
people in paving the way for the settle-
ment of British America was the pur-
pose of Professor A. L. Rowse in The
Elizabethans and America, a series of
discourses delivered as the first Trevel-
yan Lectures at Cambridge University.
These lectures provide a spirited inter-
pretation of the Elizabethans as Profes-
sor Rowse, a Fellow of All Souls College,
understands them, and he has devoted
a considerable part of a busy life to
studying them. If the material that he
presents is not as new to Americans as
it is to Mr. Rowse and his fellow
academicians, we must remember that
our national origins have not had the
consuming interest for latter-day Eng-
lishmen that they have had for us. It
is refreshing to observe, however, that
Mr. Rowse thought the theme a fitting
one with which to edify those Canta-
brigians who came to hear lectures es-
tablished to honor a great historian,
The romantic interest that attaches
to the first efforts by the English to
establish colonies on these shores has
resulted in an enormous literature, both
scholarly and popular, concerned with
Raleigh’s colonial endeavor and with
the final successful establishment at
Jamestown. Mr. Rowse has made use of
some of this accumulation of knowledge
in writing lectures that once more tell
the story of Queen Elizabeth’s personal
interest in American exploration and
settlement, of Drake’s voyages of pillage
and discovery, of Richard Hakluyt’s
tireless propaganda, of Raleigh’s long
and disappointing struggle to seat eol-
onists on the coast of North Carolina,
of the settlement of Jamestown, and
finally of the establishment of the Pil-

471

JP RE i

grims at Plymouth and the Puritans on
Massachusetts Bay. As he reaches the
third decade of the sevententh century,
after Elizabeth’s death, he tries
to distinguish qualities peculiarly “Eliz-
abethan” in the later colonial activities,
but the reader may find this distinction
somewhat hard to discern. A final
chapter discusses the impact of America
on Elizabethan art, literature and sci-
ence.

Looking back from later centuries, it
may seem that the English very nearly
overslept the opportunity to seize a por-
tion of the New World. Early in the
sixteenth century Spain created a great
empire south of the Rio Grande, an
empire that, contrary to popular opin-
ion, she governed with remarkable ef-
ficiency and retained for three centuries.
During most of Elizabeth’s reign, it
looked as if nothing could break the
grip of Spain on the New World. Even
within the powerful circle of the Queen’s
own advisers, some of her councilors
doubted the wisdom of antagonizing the
Iberian colossus by attempting any
incursions into Spain’s preserve over-
seas. The conflict of opinion was drama-
tized in plans for Drake’s famous circum-
navigation of the globe, when the Queen
herself had to connive to keep Lord
Burghley from knowing what Drake

SION

SOVIET
HIGHLIGHTS

A Survey of Soviet Thought and
Developments

long

In the current issue (No. 5, 1959)

SPRING IN SIGHT, by Ilya Ehren-
burg. The famous writer states his
views on cultural exchange.

THE SPIRIT OF THE 'TTIMES AND
THE LIGHT FROM THE SCREEN,
by D. Pisarevsky. A review of the
movie festival in Moscow.

REMEMBER THE 16 YEAR OLDS!
by L. Borodina. A letter on sex in
films.

FAMILY HAPPINESS, by Z. I. Kozlov,
President of ‘Presidium, Supreme
Soviet of Byelorussian Republic. A
discussion of engagement and mar-
riage,

THE ARITHMETIC OF SOCIALISM
IN THE SAVINOV FAMILY, by A.
Guryanoyv. A typical family budget
in the USSR.

THE FUTURE OF OUR CITIES, by
V. Kucherenko, Chairman, State Build-
ing Committee of the USSR. On city
and regional planning.

THE BERING STRAIT DAM, by
Boris Lyubimov. <A proposal to
change the climate of the Northern
Hemisphere.

LNT

$6.00 per year (12 issues); 50ce per copy

=
2
2
2
(Single copy orders must be prepaid)

INTERNATIONAL ARTS AND
SCIENCES PRESS

33 West 42 St., New York 36, N.Y.
i HA

bile
Mi
ve

be a

ve) q ¥P raat 9

was up to. Even so, Bareilees managed —

to place a personal spy aboard Drake’s
flagship, and the whole expedition might
have gone awry had not Drake ordered
a drumhead court-martial and executed
the Lord Treasurer’s representative.
Burghley was not pro-Spanish; he simply
believed that the part of wisdom re-
quired England to follow a discreet and
safe policy of non-interference with
Spanish America even if England lost
the opportunity of seizing some of the
New World for herself. Fortunately for
English-speaking America, another pow-
erful faction took the opposite view. It
was led by Sir Francis Walsingham,
Raleigh, and other inspired souls, and
was constantly prodded by Richard
Hakluyt, a preacher-geographer, who
harped on the need to counter Spain
overseas. One document which Hakluyt
managed to get before the Queen’s eyes,
a document that must have pleased her,
explained a plan to “bring King Philip
from his high throne and make him
equal to the princes his neighbors.”

THE INTRICATE story of Elizabeth-
an politics and foreign policy has been
told by Professor Conyers Read, Sir
John Neale, Professor Rowse himself
and many others. It is a fascinating tale
of intrigue and deception, of playing for
time to get ready to meet Spain on
something like equal terms. In the end,
England faced Spain in open war and
defeated the great Armada, as Profes-
sor Garrett Mattingly has so brilliantly
related in his recent The Armada
(Houghton Mifflin). The way was then
clear for a successful effort at coloniza-
tion on the Atlantic seaboard. But by
this time Raleigh’s schemes had found-
ered, and Raleigh himself no longer oc-
cupied the favored place he had held
near the throne.

Although explorers continued to
probe the Atlantic seaboard, the first
permanent settlement had to wait near-
ly two decades after the Armada. Dur-
ing this period, interest in America was
by no means dead or even quiescent.
Writers and propagandists continued to
urge expansion overseas until even
timid King James I was convinced that
he had a right to a portion of the New
World. It is a little ironic that the first
permanent settlement in the New World
would bear the name of this most un-
heroic of sovereigns. But Raleigh had
managed to give to the region itself the
name Virginia after his beloved Queen.

Although Professor Rowse has added
little that is new, he tells his story with
the skill of an experienced journalist.
Readers will find much in his narrative
that is. stimulating and entertaining ee

way. Se ye ve

oes.
) ecm 7

, o ce ty
Tis

wenn

nt ae

THE CRITICAL WRITINGS ‘OFt y
JAMES JOYCE. Edited by Ells if
worth Mason and Richard Ellmann. 4
Viking Press. 288 pp. $5. +

FEW PEOPLE can have had less |
talent for the little things in life than |
James Joyce, or so one felt after read- —
ing Richard Ellmann’s excellent biog-
raphy. Now this scrapbook, rather |
pretentiously titled The Critical Writ- —
ings of James Joyce, gives one a similar
impression. Like all the big decisions in
his life, Joyce’s resolve to devote his
literary gift entirely to major work and~
to earn his living by anything rather |
than journalism was a truly wise one. |
The early book reviews — previously —
published in a limited edition by Stan- |
islaus Joyce and Ellsworth Mason —
and the newspaper articles for a Trieste.
paper, even when well done, give one
a sensation reminiscent of watching an
elephant pick up a penny. The full-
length critical studies — of Ibsen, the —
Irish poet Mangan, and Blake — tell
us more about Joyce than about their
ostensible subjects. The remainder of —
the book consists of some school and
college essays, some lectures on Ireland
to a popular Italian audience, a few —
letters, program notes, verse lampoons —
and parodies. What sort of impression —
would these clippings make on some-
one who knew nothing of Joyce?

But of course this book wasn’t pub-—
lished for those who know nothing of
him. Because Joyce wrote so little be-
sides his masterpieces, admirers of these
are bound to snatch eagerly at every-
thing else from his pen, including hi s
rather unsatisfactory letters and the
present tantalizing scraps. The Critical 1
Writings has great value for three dif-
ferent types of Joyce addict: those
seeking to elucidate his work, those
fascinated by his complex: personality,
and those whose delight it is to bela I
him and his work with any stick that
comes to hand.

For instance, I was excited to fi
the following sentence in his Itali
lecture on Mangan: “His nights vy
so many Stations of the Cross amo
the disreputable dives of ‘The Lib
ties,’ ” since it confirms a theory of mine
that in the “Circe” or brothel episode
of Ulysses there lie buried allusions t«

VIVIAN MERCIER i is finishing a bo.
on the Irish comic tradition and

Vivian Mercier

“some or all of the Stations of the Cross.

Again, Joyceans of whatever stripe must
be glad to have the full text of the
paper, “Drama and Life,’ which the
eighteen-year-old Joyce read to the
Literary and Historical Society of Uni-
versity College, Dublin; most of them
will be surprised to find that it culmi-
nates in a paean to realism: “The great
human comedy, in which each has share,
gives limitless scope to the true artist,
today as yesterday and as in years
gone.” There speaks the future author
of Ulysses, rather than Stephen Ded-
alus.

Aside from publishing for the first
time this and other youthful writings,
the present book illuminates Joyce the
man rather fleetingly. Of greatest bio-
graphical interest, perhaps, are the news-
paper articles recounting his visit to
Galway and the Aran Islands in 1912,
and his firsthand description of the
first night of Shaw’s Blanco Posnet at
the Abbey Theatre in 1909. Also, the
previously unavailable writing about
politics and literature reveals some un-
expected allegiances and _ beliefs.

The anti-Joyce Joycean will find plenty
_ to lick his lipsover. Joyce’s frequent igno-
rance about the Gaelic language and its
literature and about Irish history looks
peculiarly ridiculous coming from a man
engaged in explaining his native coun-
try to foreigners. The editors document
many such errors in their painstaking

footnotes. Joyce must have been one of
the last men alive to believe that the
Indo-European Gaelic language was re-
lated to the Semitic language of the
Phoenicians.

Personally I am curious to find out
just how much Joyce knew about the
Gaelic tradition, into which his ped-
antry, his huge vocabulary, his in-
voluted verbal and psychological tech-
niques, and his gift for satire and parody
fit so perfectly. Very little, I think,
aside from what he learned by review-
ing Lady Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers
and reading other works in English by
his Irish contemporaries. He shows in
one lecture an encyclopedic knowledge
— doubtless derived from encyclopedias
— of the early Irish saints, especially
those who, like himself, were mission-
aries to the Continent. And of course
he visited Aran and ‘saw the vestiges of
Gaelic civilization with his own eyes.
After 1912, the critical writings tell
nothing of this side of Joyce. He must
have taken pains to learn a good deal
more about the Gaelic tradition while
writing Finnegans Wake or even, earli-
er, the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses.

As you see, this book is a hunting-
ground for almost any kind of mono-
maniac. We — monomaniacs, that is —
should all be grateful to Messrs. Mason
and Ellmann for what they have rescued
from the wastebasket of the greatest
monomaniac of all.

LETTER from MEXICO

Stanley Meisler

MEXICO CITY’S Palace of Fine Arts
assigns one of its salons to modern art
and another to Mexican art, but both,
like all the others, exhibit the same
kind of paintings. In tiers of galleries,
this huge museum offers little but work
by twentieth-century Mexicans. A first
look is far from a dull experience. Eager
for more, I marched from room to room,
excited by a mural still in progress, by
the stark perspective of Siqueiros, by
the cluttered symbols of Rivera, by the
bright colors and stunted figures of
young artists, by the mystery of a
powerful art spawned in a political rev-
olution. Only later did doubt creep in.
Where do young Mexicans go, I won-
dered, to find out about Botticelli or El
Greco or Rembrandt or Degas or Pi-
casso or de Kooning?

Later, at the small Antonio Souza

STANLEY MEISLER is a Washington
newspaper man and occasional contribu-
tor to critical and political journals.

. December 19, 1959

Gallery, the American manager discussed
her related problem. The gallery dis-
played numerous canvases by Leo
Rosshandler, a Dutch painter living in
Mexico, who paints huge, frightening
birds in thick blacks, browns and
whites. Although visitors gazed long
and quietly at them, sales were meager.
“The Mexican public has not been edu-
cated beyond Mexican nationalistic art,”
the manager said. “They want the usual
paintings of the Indian woman with her
rebozo and little child.”

During my stay, a brisk controversy
in the newspapers, stirred by José Luis
Cuevas, has emphasized the significance
of the gallery’s problem. Sometimes
dubbed Mexico’s joven enojado (angry
young man), the 26-year-old Cuevas,
wild and imaginative and _ pessimistic,
ranks near the top of the new genera-
tion of Mexican painters. He received
some notice in the United States early
this year when the Evergreen Review
translated one of his diatribes. In it,

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473

Cuevas railed against artistic provincial-
ism, claiming that a cactus curtain ex-
ists between the art of Mexico and the
art of the rest of the world.

Now, in his newest onslaught, he has
attacked the constraint in Mexican art
by citing a personal and detailed exam-
ple. In an article for the cultural sup-
plement of Novedades, he published
some of his correspondence with Fer-

nando Gamboa and added some bitter
comment. Gamboa, an art educator and
critic, had selected the artists to paint
the murals for the new medical center
in Mexico City. Cuevas was chosen,
but when the center opens, none of his
work will adorn its walls. He and
Gamboa could not agree on the de-
signs.

CUEVAS said that Gamboa had di-
rected him to avoid depressing subjects.
The painter found this prohibition, cus-
tom-made, perhaps, for the usual Mexi-
can. muralist, impossible for him. “I
have never been able to see humanity,
the world that surrounds me, except as
a giant dungheap without any salva-
tion at all,’ he wrote Gamboa. “It is
not that your memorandum lays out
the subject, which no artist, as a matter
of discipline, would avoid,” Cuevas
said. “It is that the memorandum gives
the tone for the subject... and this is
noxious, highly injurious for the destiny
of Mexican art which, it seems, is mov-
ing with the same old dialectical instru-
ments, without hope of progress, in an
eternal repetition of formulas... .”

Gamboa’s chief argument was simple:
“Tf you think that in rooms where sick,
defenseless, distrustful and timorous
people wait for medical examinations,
you can paint only negative aspects of
human life, then perhaps you are right
in supposing...that your murals are
going to be rejected.” But it did not
seem so simple to Cuevas. Since his
attitude toward life and art was well-
known, he reasoned, the original invita-
tion could not have been serious. He
decided it had been a device to hide
Gamboa’s intention of assigning murals
only to followers of David Alfaro
Siqueiros, the Communist dean of
Mexican muralists.

Cuevas, however, did not speak with
the whole voice of Mexican youth. In
the same issue, another successful, 26-
year-old artist, Rafael Coronel, whose
brilliant and very funny drawings re-
mind you neither of Siqueiros nor
Cuevas, told an interviewer that Cuevas
is “like a fly fluttering around a bull...
Siqueiros has already arrived, and
Cuevas—who knows? . . . His courage is
that of a little boy who has just been
spanked.” To confuse matters further,

_ *

Siqueiros told the newspaper Ewcelsior
on the same weekend that the govern-
ment is constantly moving away from
his kind of art. If any favoritism ex-
ists, he complained, it benefits the
artists who oppose the social realism
made popular by the revolution.

I CAUGHT the concert at which Carlos
Chavez returned as guest conductor of
the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional after
an absence of several years. He had
founded the orchestra in 1928 and di-
rected it for twenty years, bringing
Mexico a balance of international and
native music. In this tradition, the
concert included Beethoven, Haydn,
Stravinsky and his own fourth sym-
phony, Sinfonia Romdntica. The sym-
phony, commissioned by the Louisville
Orchestra, was receiving its first per-
formance in Mexico. Unlike other mu-
sic by Chavez, it does not burst with
Indian dances and folk rhythms; the
echoes of Mexican melodies disappear
in its integrated brilliance. After the
performance, the packed house at the
Palace of Fine Arts stood and ap-
plauded for fifteen minutes. The au-
dience, however, may have directed its
tribute less at the new work than at
the status of Chavez as a national
institution. Born near Mexico City sixty
years ago, Chavez represents a com-
plete Mexican contribution to inter-
national art. Yet there is nothing par-
ochial about him. “He has succeeded
in creating a music,” the concert pro-
gram says, “that is eminently Mexican,
but eminently Carlos Chavez at the
same time.” The rest of Mexican art,
struggling and tense, is striving toward
this same maturity.

FILMS

Robert Hatch
THE LATEST of the “New-Wave”

French imports is The Cousins, a coun-
try mouse-city mouse story that dips
into the lives and affairs of today’s
Paris student bohemia. The picture is
written, produced and directed by
Claude Chabrol, but I had the feeling
that it was an exercise in self-expression
thrown together by the characters
themselves. It is just such a story as
these bright, aimless, superficially tough
and_ perilously debauched boys and
girls might consider profound and mov-
ing. That it is a hodge-podge of ro-
mantic clichés, that it frequently strains
plausibility, that it is dreadfully senti-
mental and that its tragedy is imposed

‘eg 0 Pa

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=

by the barest sort of accident a; is i 4
fact no valid tragedy at all—these
weaknesses would probably not strike
the participants in the picture, as they
did not strike its twenty-seven-year-old —
author. fe te

The Cousins, thus, produces the odd —
effect of offering a group of interesting
and credible characters in a generally
shabby and spurious narrative. I would
guess that M. Chabrol, though he has
limited gifts as a storyteller, is a close
and thoughtful observer of his near-
contemporaries. He is also technically
a good film maker in the now-familiar
socio-melodramatic style of French
problem films.

Taking his word for it, the student
world of Paris has lost its innocence and
shattered its health. It is not just that
the boys and girls strike knowing poses
while wallowing in idle ignorance; nor
even that they make love heedlessly and
drink to excess. It is that they seem to
derive no pleasure from their revels,
that they are evidently straining to
keep the party going, but show signs —
that they could turn ugly as weasels if
anyone seriously opposed them. Their —
sad clowning is not unlike that of our .
aboriginal beats, except that they seem
to have some hollow vision of an older
bohemia and, being French, are neither
inarticulate nor unkempt.

THERE is also the matter of money.
Student dissipation is usually kept in
check by the fact that the celebrants
quite soon run out of funds. But the-
central character of this film, the city
cousin, is supplied with apparently un-
limited credit by parents who are obvi-
ously indifferent and one guesses them- |
selves unaccustomed to wealth. He —
lives in a lavish, romantically decorated,
duplex; he controls a large group of
followers by virtue of his resources, his
good looks, his genuine intelligence and
his spurious sophistication. He also at-_
tracts older parasites whose characters
and motives he only thinks he sees
through. , q

In one striking scene, this elegant
young man, half drunk, switches off the —
lights in his crowded apartment and, —
wearing an S.S. officer’s cap and carry-—
ing a lighted candelabrum, stalks among —
the entwined couples, intoning in German
a mawkish plaint of loneliness, disillusion, |
nostalgia for the lost war and bleating:
cries for mama. It is a scornful parody; —
it is also too well-done to be entirely.
unfelt. M. Chabrol evidently finds among
his arrogant and ignorant fellows” a
sympathy with their brothers of a gen
eration earlier across the Rhine. If tha at
Werther-Goebbels obscenity has mad
any real inroud on French youth,

ee
re P

oa
yi
a

as bitter a piece of irony as this
host ironic postwar era has produced.
Jean-Claude Brialy is coldly brilliant
‘in this brittle, deliberately theatrical
and sexually ambiguous role. As his
sountry cousin, pathetically eager, hys-
erically idealistic, utterly vulnerable,
Gerard Blain is surprisingly convincing
on personal terms, considering that the
arrative forces him to swing energetical-
between horse sense and folly. For
ts characterizations and as a view of
one thread in the contemporary French
social pattern, The Cousins is an en-
grossing and dismaying film.

THEATRE

Harold Clurman

OUR social plays these days are melo-

dramas like The Gang’s All Here, folk
omedies like Only in America and musi-
als like Fiorello (Broadhurst).

Fiorello is ingratiating. Its all no-star
cast is extremely likeable. Tom Bosley’s
La Guardia has much more characteri-
zation than is usual in musicals. Patricia

ilson as his secretary and second wife
is most sympathetic, and sings agree-
ably. Howard da Silva as a district
boss is sentimentally gruff and Pat
Stanley is truly darling though I wish
‘she had been given more opportunity

o display her genuine talent as a dancer.
_ Jerry Bock’s music is not particularly
‘individual or easy to sing, but Sheldon
Harnick has written some amusing
lyrics—particularly “Politics and Poker”
‘and “Little Tin Box.” William and
Jean Eckart’s settings communicate the
feeling of amiable crudity which is the
distinctive mark of the show. Their
work has real style, in contrast to the
usual sets for musicals, which are effi-
cient and pretty and that is not enough.
he book is by Jerome Weidman and
George Abbott.
Whatever liberalism the show suggests
or suffuses comes from the identity of
its central figure, who emerges with
a certain raffish, tangy candor that
New York once possessed. One can
speak of “nostalgia” in regard to this
musical, for it evokes the rough con-
viviality of small neighborhoods which
at one time constituted the particular

charm of New York.

| ILLIAM INGE’S A Loss of Roses
_ (Eugene O’Neill Theatre) is out of
| focus. One is not altogether certain
_whose story the play is telling. The
author might justifiably respond that
his story is intended to reveal a general
tuation, a condition, even a mood.

December 19, 1959

)

But Chekhov or the Tennessee Williams
of The Glass Menagerie and Inge him-
self in Come Back, Little Sheba and
Bus Stop managed to create group
portraits in which the composition high-
lighted a single character who gave all
the others a more definite position with-
in the play’s total structure.

Yet if A Loss of Roses is a failure
it is not without merit. For all the
faults of the script and the production
I found myself touched by it. Inge has
a true sense of a certain (symbolic)
American environment. “I hate to see
lovely things go to waste,” one charac-
ter says in this play about the loss
of innocence. This sense of the inherent
likeability of the least conspicuous people
of our land, and of the factors that
muddy their sweetest traits, redeems
even the least of Inge’s plays. They are
about “the depression of the heart”—
the lack of steady values, social ex-
pression, spiritual freedom, the abiding
traits of our civilization.

Another weakness of the play is that
two of its main characters—mother and
son—are sketched in a sort of shorthand
the intelligibility of which depends on
the audience’s smattering of Freud. The
most interesting character, the girl who
serves as the purifying agent in the
impasse between mother and son while
herself becoming a victim and a soiled
discard of the community, should have
been made the unequivocal center of
the play.

The cast of A Loss of Roses—Betty
Field, Carol Haney, Warren Beatty,
Robert Webber, Michael Pollard—is
good, but for some reason (direction? )
the characters do not come off the
written page.

FIVE FINGER EXERCISE (Music
Box), a great London success by a
young English playwright Peter Shaffer,
is sensitively directed by John Gielgud
and admirably acted—particularly by
Roland Culver as an obtuse but never
hateful English manufacturer of cheap
furniture and by Michael Bryant who
plays a “good” German youth to per-
fection.

I wrote about this play for The Nation
when I was in London last spring and
while I noted its representative char-
acter I may have been too severe about
certain of its stagey aspects. There still
seems to me to be something forced
and false in every one of the crucial
plot turns—contrived either to make
effective curtains or to drive home the
play’s “points.” But one should not
overlook—above all this season—the
positive aspects of Five Finger Exercise
as it relates to the English scene.
In a more genteel fashion than Osborne,

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Shaffer gives us a_ specific notion of
what is making the young men in Eng-
land angry. The middle-class male is
Philistine, his more informed wife is
as phoney as she is frustrated, and
their children are either suffocated by
the Philistinism or are petted to death
by the phoniness. The family is thus
sealed off from contact with any liber-
ating reality: the children either float
in a smiling void in which their in-
herited graces make pretty patterns or
cry out in futile anguish against the
homes in which they are decorously im-
prisoned and consumed.

The play’s writing is neat—perhaps
too neat—and the sentiment honorable.
The author will grow in stature when
he has freed himself from the symmetry
of conventional English theatrical forms
and feelings. In both respects he is
in advance of what has been common
in the immediate past on the English
stage, but he is not yet far enough
in advance.

SILENT NIGHT, LONELY NIGHT
by Robert Anderson (Morosco) is a
sympathetic attempt to write a play
without incident about the chance meet-
ing of two unhappy strangers—man and
woman—whose brief exchange of tender-
ness makes it easier for them to go on
carrying the burdens of their respective
lives.

This is one of the most difficult kinds
of plays to write—something like an
epithalamiu if the author has
failed to make his play cogent it is
because he has not quite the “touch”
for it, and more especially because his
two people seem cut off from an aware-
ness of anything beyond their too

a7 ae =
~— %
~% vr e

i. fo P= ae

‘a ; ‘

“average” selves. The result—despite a
suave production and the presence of
the always fine Henry Fonda and Bar-
bara Bel Geddes—i |
to be written in invisible ink.

ART

Fairfield Porter
FOR December the Zabriskie Gallery

has assembled a show of California and
New York painters whose work, though
representational, comes out of an ex-
perience with abstraction. New York
art is compared to American art pro-
vincial to New York. In the West the
audience for painting is smaller than
here. Because it is hard to get anyone
to listen, the artist shouts. As could
be seen at the new images of man show
in the Museum of Modern Art, it is
the subject matter that shouts, whether
“abstract” or “representational.” The
Californians are Paul Wanner, William
Brown and John Paul Jones. The first
two paint thick and large, Jones’s paint-
ings look like negatives; perhaps he got
the idea from the etcher’s plate. In all
the paintings there is a cavalier use of
the human subject — certainly these
painters do have a “new image of man.”
The image is not flattering to the artist’s
perceptiveness: it is the non-image of
man that one gets from news photo-
graphs—a temporary grimace, a mean-
ingless action. Wanner handles the
medium skillfully. His paintings are a
Juminous iceberg-lettuce green. But still
life or person larger than life, and
broader, for all of the skill, why is it

Do You Remember?
Do you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?
She stood on her head, she dangled
from branches, she pointed her tongue
like a pennant at pleasure; but she does
not weep in lonely rooms, because

hers is no remembering with losses.

Do you recall Alice with her tilted voice
compounding all the urges of Spring?
She walks with unnostalgic paces

along the lanes where whistling is clear
and songs are pert, and she sings

no sad cadences, nor for you, Ben Bolt.

Do you still have yearnings for lost

Aan Ae there mote i faa displayed

pleasures in glens, and eyes that challenged?
You ask Alice, Ben Bolt, why her answer
keeps scolding, keeps flashing like a jay
barely above you, while your hands are still
pocketed in the remorse she ignored.

Davin Cornet. DrJone ay

3 *i,, ;

by the news camera? As in the bigness 4
of West-coast fruit, size dilutes flavor.
It is the landscape that moves: essen-
tial landscape: namely, distant hori-
zons. The New York painters are Robert
De Niro, Lester Johnson and Leland |
Bell. The difference is that they are —
absorbed more in painting than in the —
audience. De Niro’s colors in major key
are lassoed all in one throw by the
quick rope of his black line. Bell ana-
lyzes the figure in a cooler and broader
Giacometti-fashion. He sees the skull
beneath the flesh. Johnson’s paintings,
thick, almost black, have a first-hand
immediacy, not journalistic like the
Californians’.
The contrast between New York and
California continues in the exhibition of
small Vermont landscapes by Lucien.
Day at the Morris Gallery. If Wan-
ner’s landscapes have the bland sweet-
ness of the Delicious apple, Day’s have
the intenser flavor of wild strawberries.
If the people who appear in Wanner’s
paintings have the impersonality of re-
tired consumers, Day’s — landscapes,
which contain no people at all, are
populated with individuals. The squint —
on the face of one of Wanner’s figures
is less specific (less personal) than the—
paint stroke into which Day may have
turned a branch, a tree, a rock or a hill.
The artist respects his individuals as —
separate from himself and separate from
one another, each of a different nature. —
This is part of the same thing that
Bonnard does in his landscapes. The
artist does not swallow the external
world in his creativeness, but watches —
the separate lives of hill, cloud, and deaf.
The landscape becomes a democracy of —
creatures assembled on the canvas, like |
citizens at a town meeting. a
Nicholas Krushenik’s paintings at the |
Brata Gallery show what happens in
New York when an artist tries to assert
himself against the competition and with
the stimulus of this environment. ,
paintings are divided into from two to —
four vertical sections, like duplications —
with variations. What is going on? In
most cases energy is contained between, i
thick flat straight bars, like expose
in successive cylinders of an interna
combustion engine; or like the essentia
energies of related human souls, sepa-
rated by the walls that make communi=
cation necessary and difficult, One paint=
ing resembles the destruction caused
(or about to be caused) by the electrical
flow between cells of a battery. But
Krushenik does not say that man 1s
like a machine, and his theme is not
death, He says that there are enormou
energies and that they are ‘con tained
his theme is force. a ei

s
y pe Ao

ai a “ ey

wre

Crossword Puzzle No. 846

By FRANK W. LEWIS

: of
oo
A
|
an
eee
es

ACROSS:

1 What might go with a totter around
the car with all four feet? (10)

6 Certainly doesn’t make the striker
sore—or does it? (4)

He’s up or down, looking for Eury-
dice. (7)

A union man returns, when you see
the leaders of the patrol are de-
feated. (7)

and 18 Father, in supporting the en-
terprise, is very careful. (11)
13 Blow up, perhaps. (10)
15 feahursts of the impoverished spir-
it? (7).
16 Visit, in an established manner,
one from the sea. (7)
17 Only honest ledgers contain what
could be settled ‘easily. (7)
(7)

10
11

20 Implies the pitch has a flutter.

22 The man I see on the corner when
I march past? (10)

25 Quiet little thing, but in the money!

25 Greed in government implied if one
did. (7)

26 I have a winning position around
ia toes follow every move closely.
7

27 The national defense of the mint?

28 The net rating’s contracting for
this, perhaps. (10)

DOWN:

1 Many companies might be floated
by them. (5,10)

eee | Pee |
reaaete if

zz
a

eet PPP

‘Midwife;

2 Good for the British! (But not as

a matter of course!) (7)
3 The construction of 27 takes a long
time. (4)
Not flag, officers, however. (7)
Tries for aquatic creatures around
it. (7)
Such a spirit is sweet and pleasant.
(7)
It might at least delay the entrance
of the lead. (6-5, 4)
9 Garden state variety of sloths and
anteaters, perhaps. (9)
Rough behavior of the T. C. line-
men. (9)
See 12 across.
Plans made 12 days before Christ-
mas, if the month is short. (7)
Sat up on the bank, with compara-
tive relish. (7)
Manage to run to work? (7)

Certainly not a quiet hotel in which
to find Twain’s character. (4)

NO. 845

co a a

18
19

20
21

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE

ACROSS: 1 Harry Truman; 9 Lear; |
10 and 25 Light opera; 12 Pumpkin; 13

15 Skylight; 16 Depose; 18
Spasms; 21 Neatness; 24 Auroras; 26
Esparto; 28 Idle; 29 Topaz; 30 and 11
Planking; 31 Haberdasher. DOWN: 2
Acropolis; 3 and 14 Rolling stone; 4
Togs; 5 Untried; 6 Askew; 7 7 Debunk;
8 Snuffs; wy, Pineapple: 19 Pounds; 20
Startle; 22 Assizes; 23 Satrap; 27 Spud.

RESORTS
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PUBLICATIONS
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ETHICAL DRUGS

and

MEDICAL ETHICS

David L. Cowen

DIPLOMAS FOR SALE

Myron Lieberman

Prisoners: a Self-Portrait

by David Cort

LETTERS

TV Post Mortem
Dear Sirs: In the wake of the TV quiz-
show investigation, one notes:

{ The TV_ probe was _ practically
forced upon the Harris committee by
the unauthorized disclosures of its for-
mer general counsel, Dr. Bernard
Schwartz (The Professor and the Com-
missions, Alfred A. Knopf) during the
Sherman Adams-Bernard Goldfine case.
Schwartz was fired by the committee.

{| The results of a year-old New York
grand jury probe of the quiz shows have
never been made public.

{| FCC chairman John Doerfer, the
man whose sworn duty is to police the
networks, had to admit at a hearing a
while back, that his business travel ex-
penses have been paid by the TV in-
dustry.

{| Some former officials of one net-
work are being charged with accepting
a $750,000 bribe to slant their news
reporting in favor of Trujillo.

{| A singing TV commercial is re-
putedly worth $250,000 a year to the
Coca-Cola people; an assistant pro-
fessor is worth only $5,500 to Columbia
University; and even on the TV screen,
he was worth only $50,000 to NBC.

{| And in general, the disclosures of
‘payola” in the recording industry, and
the expected spread of the Congressional
probe into cosmetics, indicates quite
clearly that “rigging” and “payola” are
widely accepted ways of doing business.

Nicuotas N. CHERNIAVSKY
Rockford, Ill.

[For the TV industry’s reaction to

the investigation and publicity, see page

491—Ed.|

The Copper Strike

Dear Sirs: More than 35,000 members
of the International Union of Mine,
Mill and Smelter Workers have been
striking the copper mines since August
10. A strike of such duration spells un-
imaginable hardships for workers in any
industry. For copper workers, it is well-
nigh unbearable. In copper-mine towns,
there is nothing else to. do but to work
in the mines; there is no other industry,
almost no businesses, where the wife,
a son, a daughter, can eke out a few
dollars a week to keep the family going
while the striking miner walks the picket
line.

So, in the nearly 140 days that the
strike has been on, the union has ex-
hausted its treasury and the workers
have exhausted the benefits available
to them—federal, state and county. And
to make matters worse, the union has

‘agency set up for the purpose. The

thy

had to spend huge sums to defend
eleven of its leaders against charges by
the Department of Justice that they
had “conspired” to use “illegally” the
facilities of the NLRB.

The workers of the nonferrous min-
eral industry have been represented by
the International Union of Mine, Mill
and Smelter Workers for sixty-six years.
Few unions can match it for militancy
and square-dealing, and for its contri-
butions to the American labor move-
ment through many historic labor
battles. Few unions can match it, either,
for its consistently enlightened social
policies, including the principle of racial
equality.

Now the union is threatened with
destruction, and its workers, and their
families, with absolute hunger. I believe
Nation readers will want to help. Send
a contribution to the Mine-Mill Defense
Fund, 941 East 17th Ave:, Denver 18,
Colorado.

Davin JENKINS
Denver, Colo.

‘Truths of the Blood’

Dear Sirs: David Cort’s article, “Sorcery
and Flying Saucers,” in your November
7 issue, was a knockout. I suggest you
follow up with a review of The, Mean-
ing of Death, just published by McGraw-
Hill. Carl Jung contributes the first
article, in which he writes of “truths
of the blood” (compare with the “think-
ing-with-the-blood” line used by the
Nazis, for whom Jung edited a psychi-
atric publication for nearly seven years).
Despite the fact that Jung has defended
Nazi concentration camps, his opinions
on death, telepathy, time and space are
incorporated in this book. Who will
explain why?

Georce R. Wooprurr
New York City

Refugees’ Plight

Dear Sirs: One catches a frustrating
note in the recent American Friends
Service Committee press release about
the tragic situation of 250,000 Algerian
refugees—half of them children—now
living in makeshift hovels in Tunisia
and Morocco. “They have not fled from
communism,” says the release, “and their
situation has not been dramatic enough
to capture the world’s attention, . . .”

Unlike other refugee groups, the Al-
gerians are cared for by no special

already over-burdened U.N. High Com-
missioner for Refugees lends his “good
offices” to the problem. The League of
Red Cross Societies tries to provide a

minimum daily ration of 1,600 ca lorie Sy

cr me oe

but even for this minuscule amount,
supplies are not always available. The
refugees, whose numbers are growing by _
7,500 monthly, also need blankets, warm
clothing, drugs, soap and school ma- |
terials. These the Quakers are trying to —
supply. Contributions of blankets, —
clothing and funds will be welcomed by
the American Friends Service Committee}
at their headquarters, 20 S. 12th Street, —

Philadelphia. |

4
a}

M. S. Satcrest
Philadephia, Pa.

In This Issue

EDITORIALS
477 @

ARTICLES

479 @ Ethical Drugs and Medical
Ethics
by DAVID L. COWEN
483 @ Diplomas for Sale
by MYRON LIEBERMAN
485 @ Trujillo: More Croesus Than
Caesar
by J. I. JIMENES-GRULLON

486 @ The Prisoners: a Self-Portrait
by DAVID CORT

BOOKS AND THE ARTS

489 @ The Old Chief of Quincy
by BENJAMIN DeMOT'T

490 @ Africa’s Destroyed Civilization
by KENNETH REXROTH ae
490 @ The Storm Swallow (poem)
by ROBERT BLY
491 @ Pioneers Beware
by HECTOR CHBVIGNY
491 @ Television’s Rigged Honesty
by ANNE W. LANGMAN
492 @ Letter from Paris
by ORESTE F, PUCCIANI
494 @ Art
by MAURICE GROSSHPR x
495 @ Theatre
by HAROLD CLURMAN
496 @ Music

by LESTER TRIMBLE a

Crosword Puzzle (opp. 496) .
by FRANK W. LYWIS

iON

‘Publisher ;

Carey McWilliams, "EPditor "i

Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Kditor

Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts

Harold Clurman, Theatre

Maurice Grosser, Art

M. L. Rosenthal, ‘Poetry

Lester Trimble, "Music

Alexander Werth, European
Correspondent

Mary Simon, Advertising Manager fi
The Nation, Dec. 26, 1959, Vol. 189, No. bea.”

The Nation published weekly (except for omus-
sion of four summer issues) by The Nation —
Company and copyright 1959, in the U.S.A.
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Aven
New York 14, N. Y¥. Second class postage pi
at New York, N. Y.

Subscription Price Domestio—One year rwo
Oo

years $14, Three Years $20. Adon posti 8
per year, Foreign and Canadian

hange of : Three ves notice
ener

of address
informati n

George G. Kirstein,

old adare. ‘na yell

“Tin

TN et lt a EOE I ias tee

fe gol almost $148 million could have gone to breaking
VOL arriers of new knowledge. Dr. Novick suggests that
igure “commonly bandied about” for 1959 R&D,
billion, may not be a significant measure of national
rt in the acquisition of new knowledge. The figure
self is statistically suspect, and inferences drawn from
are doubly suspect because of ambiguity of terms. In

yan effort to get some clarity into the situation, Novick
'/ offers four steps or classifications in R&D. Step I is

basic or experimental research with the objective of
increased understanding of the universe and better or-

ganization of knowledge. Step II comprises applied re-

search with a view to developing promising, but still
unknown, deyices or methods for utilizing the general
knowledge accruing from Step I. Step III is concerned
with product development, testing, evaluation and
pilot-production when “do-ability” has been established.
Step IV is production application research, applied test-
ing and evaluation in which “new uses and applications
or modifications of uses are sought for existing methods,
products, or components.” (Italics added.)

Step III obviously presents something of a jump from
Step II, while Step IV may conceivably be concerned

with activities which are not research as the public un-
derstands it. How much of our $10 billion, then, is going
into each of these categories, sequentially removed from
the divine afflatus of an Einstein, Newton or Darwin?
No one knows, but Novick is willing to take a stab at it.
Since he is the only one who has raised the question in
this form, his answer deserves respectful consideration:
Guessed distribution

$ 100,000,000

Step Promise
I Brave New World

II Possible use of new discovery .......... 300,000,000
III Application of new knowledge ........ 2 600,000,000
IV Improved use of existing knowledge 7,000,000,000

“Assuming,” writes Dr. Novick, “that something like
$400 million is what we now are putting into the search
for new knowledge with dramatic and exciting implica-
tions, and adjusting this for price change and Big Wheel
and Big Deal administrative practices, a basic question
is raised as to how much more we really are doing now
than we were ten or twenty years ago.” We certainly are
doing more selling. Well and good, but before we boast
of the lavish expenditures of our great corporations for
R&D, we had better find out whether most of it isn’t
just that — selling.

Ethical Drugs and Medieal Ethies ee by David L. Cowen

THE MANUFACTURERS of ethi-
cal pharmaceuticals (that is, drugs
not advertised to the layman and
for sale only upon the prescription
or original recommendation of the
physician ) have been under fire for
some time now. Consumers’ groups,
sections of the lay press and indi-
vidual physicians and pharmacists
have been asking questions and
making accusations. The government
has joined the war—in 1958 with a
Federal Trade Commission report
on antibiotics manufacture that
opened pricing and marketing activi-
ties to the public gaze, and more re-
cently in a criminal anti-trust suit
against the manufacturers of Salk
vaccine. The latter, the first real bat-
tle, was won by the industry, the
court finding that the government,
being required to prove guilt “on a
reasonable hypothesis beyond a rea-
sonable doubt” and to “simultane-

avID EGOWEN, who teaahes

history at Rutgers Unwersity, has
yore been interested in the special

ously eliminate every other reason-
able hypothesis of innocence,” had
presented evidence that established
only the latter.

The current Kefauver hearings
are the next battle. Presumably in-
terested in the broad problem of ad-
ministered prices, the hearings have
alleged and will continue to allege
high prices and exorbitant profits,
restricted supply and dumping at
low prices in foreign markets, and
will suggest a strain upon, if not vio-
lation op the anti-trust laws. It is
now too early to predict what the
results of the investigation will be:
legislation (on patent and anti-trust
laws), anti-trust actions, or further
investigations may follow. What-
ever happens, the pitiless publicity
of the Kefauver hearings must re-
dound to the advantage of the con-
sumer.

The consumer, who is concerned of
course with the high price of ethical
drugs, is at first ready to blame
the pharmacist, but the latter
rejects the basic responsibility. With
considerable justice, he points to the

high prices he needs to pay; to the
large inventories and senseless dupli-
cations he must keep; and to the
rapid obsolescence of drugs not al-
ways returnable. He contends that
on well over half the prescriptions
he sells he is just meeting his costs
of materials, labor and overhead; ex-
perts in pharmacy administration
keep telling him that to these he
should add a charge for professional
services.

Without question, the actual dol-
lar margin on the higher-price pre-
scriptions is large; undoubtedly
there are instances of gouging and
shady practices. But the basic
sources of consumer costs are the
controlled prices and marketing prae-
tices of the manufacturers.

WHETHER or not one accepts this
rationalization completely, it is prob-
ably true that to attempt to correct
the situation at the consumer level
is to deal only with the symptoms.
Clinics, co-operatives,
pharmacies and similar group enter-
prises reach a limited clientele and

labor-union |

are hamstrung by the same high ma-
terial costs and the same professional
standards which make the doctor’s
prescription an unalterable docu-
ment. In addition, group activities
of this kind usually run into oppo-
sition from organized medicine and
pharmacy, and from the manufac-
turers. In Santa Rosa, California, for
example, a syndicate raised $110,000
to gain voting control of a clinic and
then proceeded to turn the property
into other uses. And testimony be-
fore the Kefauver committee indi-
cates that a pharmacy established
by the American Association of Re-
tired Persons and the National Re-
tired Teachers Association in Cali-
fornia has had to close down, and
that its Washington, D.C., outlet
has been unable to get supplies from
three important manufacturers.

Recent attempts have been made
at covering prescription costs by
prepaid insurance. But this insur-
ance is not too easily arranged:
medication is not self-limiting, like
hospitalization; and, most important,
as long as basic costs remain high,
the cost of the insurance must re-
main prohibitive. The problem is
now under study by pharmaceutical
groups, but neither insurance nor
co-operatives can accomplish much
while the manufacturers’ prices re-
main high.

The attack must first be directed
at the cost of drugs to the phar-
macist. The basic factor responsible
for the high price charged by the
manufacturer is obviously the sys-
tem of patents and brand names.
This gives to the owner of the patent
or the brand name a monopoly, or
partial monopoly, which removes his
product from free competition. In
this respect the drug industry is no
different from others; but the drug

industry is unique in that there have
developed institutionalized patterns
that give it a more than normal con-
trol of price.

First, there is the professional and
legal structure which prevents the
pharmacist from making any altera-
tion or “substitution” in a doctor’s
prescription without the latter’s spe-
cific prior consent. This accounts for
the tremendous promotional cam-
paigns that the drug manufacturer
directs toward the physician.

Second, the selling is directed at
the physician, not at the ultimate
consumer. The physician’s primary
concern, of course, must be with the
“operational characteristics” of the
drug being detailed (a survey indi-
cates that only 2.4 per cent of phy-
sicians switch to an alternate product
because of price); what happier
price structure than that wherein the
product is ordered by one who does
not have to pay the price, and the
price is paid by one who has no ac-
ceptable alternative to the purchase?

Third—to make triply sure—there
are the fair-trade statutes by which
the manufacturer can set the mini-
mum beneath which a pharmacist
may not legally sell the product.
These appear to be the sturdiest
props of all, for the pharmacist sup-
ports them, believing that they are
essential to his economic well-being.

The present Senate investigation
may lead to a re-evaluation of our
patent system—perhaps with the
same meager results as in the past.
But the price of prescription drugs
could be lowered without compli-
cated legislation if the medical pro-
fession were to wield its power and
assume its obligations.

IN THE first place, the physician
should get his therapeutic informa-
tion from medical journals, profes-
sional seminars, publications of the
Council on Drugs of the A.M.A. and
such publications as The Medical
Letter, a new, non-profit publication
on drugs and therapeutics. The phy-
sician, too, should learn to rely on
the expert knowledge of the phar-
macist, whose long training—soon
to be lengthened to five years, and
then six—makes him a qualified con-
sultant. It should be a matter of
embarrassment to members of the
medical profession—and to coms at

tal

lash Aa, 4 4 La ? ee 4 P Acai ‘ ‘|

is—that they get their knowledge of
drugs from such hardly disinterest-
ed sources as the detail man (the
manufacturer’s salesman) and pro-
motional literature. f
This proposal that the medical —
profession divorce itself from a mé-—
salliance is hardly revolutionary. The —
Medical Letter is intended specifi-
cally to meet the needs of the busy
doctor who wants unbiased, reliable —
and timely information and critical —
evaluation of new drugs. Its editorial
and advisory boards consist of seven _
physicians who are members of medi- _
cal-school faculties plus the chief
pharmacist of a large hospital.

WERE THE profession to manifest _
its independence from the manu- —
facturer — there are physicians who
advocate the discarding of all medi-
cal advertisements unopened — one—
of the props to administered prices
will be removed. Moreover, the cost
of advertising per se will be sub-
stantially lowered. The proportion
of these costs to the final price is a
matter of some dispute, but it is a
most substantial factor. The first-
year promotional budget for Achro- _
mycin totaled $2,447,000: every —
physician in the nation received
two mailings each week for fifty-two |
weeks and more than $1,000,000 was
spent on detailing. The A.M.A. —
Journal has claimed editorially that —
advertising costs represent but 2c of
a 50c retail price. This 4 per cent -
may be as insignificant as the editor _
implies — the FTC in 1957 used the —
figure of 20.6 per cent as the average —
proportion of promotional costs to.
net sales — but it is something of a—
shock to find the justification for
this in the usual explanation of the —
economic value of advertising, that —
is, that advertising leads to greater —
efficiency through increased produc-
tion and thus to eventual lowering
of price. Surely the profession must —
be generally aware that the produc-—
tion of medicaments and their cote
sumption must derive from medical |
need and not from high-powered _ ;
hucksterism. j
Indeed, this brings up the wh
question ‘of the place of advertis
in public health, Demand can
created, and in some instances witl
sound _ economic reason, for sucl
Prodi ts a ew. ng gum, ~ oe
f ve yok ee

' i

and such. Demand created in the
same way for medicines can be so-
cially detrimental. The drug manu-
facturer insists that his advertising
is largely educational, but certainly
he is in no position to claim that it
is both educational and disinterested.
The fact of the matter is that drug
advertising is more often combative
than educational.

THE SECOND method by which
the medical profession can exert its
power for the good is in its minimi-
zation of the use of brand names.
So long as the physician continues to
prescribe brand names, the pharma-
cist must stock all, or most, of the
brands of each drug. There are no
less than twenty-nine different
brands, in various dosage forms, of
the trisulfapyrimidines; and_ the
pharmacist may not, legally or ethi-
cally, dispense one brand where the
physician has asked for another.
There has therefore long been a
movement for having the doctor pre-
scribe drugs by their generic names,
that is, by the name common to all
brands and recognized by the Food
and Drug Administration, the
United States Pharmacopoeia, the
National Formulary, etc., rather
than by brand. In this way he can
clear the pharmacist’s shelves of
duplication, he can permit the use
of the cheaper, unbranded products,
and he can force the high-price pro-
ducer to compete more genuinely. In
any event, the patient’s costs could
be cut by astounding proportions.
If, for example, the physician pre-
scribes Meticorten, the pharmacist
must charge on the basis of a cost
to him from five to seven times
greater than the cost of the same
drug supplied under the generic
name prednisone. Small wonder that
a spokesman for the industry has
called writing for generic names “an
apparent symptom of a trend toward
socialized practice in medicine and
pharmacy.”

Consumers’ groups, pharmacists,
medical faculties, all have been ad-
vocating the use of generic names,
yet the physician continues to ask
for the brand name. He does so for
a variety of reasons: he feels that he
knows the reliability of the manu-
facturer and can be sure of the
quantity and quality of the medicine;

December 26, 1959

he feels the maker is entitled to his
patronage in return for the high
cost of research, educative efforts
and samples; and he finds it easier
to remember the brand name, which
the advertisements have been ham-
mering at him, than to figure out the
generic name.

Some of this reasoning has already
been dealt with: branding is not
in itself a guarantee of purity of
product or honesty of advertising;
if tremendous advertising costs are
unwarranted, there should be no
sense of obligation. The problem of
research costs will be dealt with
later.

Nevertheless, it will not be easy
for the physician to break old habits
and write the generic term. He needs
urging from his patients, and he
needs an easy way out. This is pro-
vided by the suggestion that he
designate the branded drug if he pre-
fers, but that he indicate also that
any reliable equivalent will do. It
has been suggested that he might
mark his prescription A.R.B. (any
reliable brand), and I would pro-
pose the use of another, more tradi-
tional term and one less attached to
“brand,” namely, quid pro quo. The
addition of this, or the symbol
“q.p.q.” to the prescription, would
indicate to the pharmacist that he
had the approval of the physician to
dispense any drug which is generi-
cally the chemical and therapeutic
equivalent.

This the pharmaceutical industry
has labeled “substitution.” To the
industry, the word has become a
dirty one, of course, and there has
been created a National Pharma-
ceutical Council that “occupies it-
self principally with one problem —
what is frequently called ‘substitu-
tion’ but can be expressed positively
as brand identification.” The coun-
cil has produced twenty-four reasons
why brand names are important.
The reasons given, e.g., potency,
compatibility, purity, solubility, etc.,
are all qualities that good medicines
should have, and it must be assumed
that regardless of the brand name,
the same drug manufactured to the
same standards of purity will always
provide the same qualities in equal
measure.

It is difficult to believe that the
qualities of tetracycline, for example,

differ if dispensed under the names
of Achromycin, Tetracyn, Polycy-
cline, Steclin or Panmycin — espe-
ally since all are manufactured un-
der the same patents (Bristol, whose
tetracycline is called Polycycline,
was selling its product in bulk to
Squibb and Upjohn for repackaging
as Steclin and Panmycin respective-
ly). The National Pharmaceutical
Council is concerned with the pos-
sibility that equivalents may be sup-
plied by imitators and counterfeiters.
This is entirely another matter, and
there are legal means of redress
against such practices.

THE PHYSICIAN, however, may
still feel that he needs some pro-
tection from the unscrupulous phar-
macist who, once given a_ green
light, will fill all prescriptions with
inferior drugs, or will continue to
exact prices based on the original
brand price. Here some protection is
needed. The equivalent that may be
used need not be the personal choice
of the pharmacist, but could readily
be restricted to those professionally
acceptable. The American Pharma-
ceutical Association has already
made a start toward such a list with
a pamphlet called “Proprietary
Names (Trade Names) of Official
Drugs.” There are at least four
agencies that could assume the re-
sponsibility for the development of
quid pro quo lists, three of which
could give them official status: the
Pharmacopoeial Convention, the
Committee on National Formulary
of the American Pharmaceutical
Association, the Food and Drug Ad-
ministration, and the Council on

Drugs of the A.M.A. In addition,
481

increased governmental supervision,
through the FDA, would be needed
to guarantee the integrity of the
“USP” legend. Finally, although it is
true that competition among phar-
macists would tend to keep prices
down once the artificial props were
removed, it is also true that con-
sumer groups will have to be vigilant
to be sure that the prescription price
schedules, which are becoming rather
popular among local pharmaceutical
associations, set reasonable maxima.
The industry, of course, will cla-
mor that it cannot exist profitably
unless the integrity of its brands is
maintained. This sounds like the
argument against progressive taxa-
tion, and one is inclined to say that
though the profits might be trimmed
somewhat, the industry would never-
theless manage to grow and prosper.
There will still be patents, brands
and advantages to be gained by
being first with good products.

THE industry does not want any
tampering with the status quo.
Nothing should destroy the “delicate
partnership . . . between the quest
for scientific knowledge on the one
hand and the drive for financial
success on the other.” This brings
up the matter of research, which
each industry-witness before the
Kefauver committee has fallen back
upon. The high prices, all have in-
sisted, reflect high research costs.
Research is vital, not simply to the
industry, but to medical progress.
Beat down the price and research
will need to be restricted and public
health will suffer. There are some
significant considerations here that
need to be understood.

Industrial drug research is only a
fraction of the medical research car-
ried on in the country. In 1957, ac-
cording to an industry spokesman, 62
per cent of the $400 million spent on

medical research came from the gov-
ernment, 32 per cent from industry
ie and the remainder from philanthrop-
‘ic agencies, universities and such.

The major breakthroughs in medi-
cal research have not been the re-
ilts of industrial research. Insulin,
: icillin, streptomycin and the Salk
cine, for example, were all es-
entially the work of independent
earchers. This is not to say that
stry has not made pubstanaial

sk aor aaa

contributions. Merck & Co. °
among its accomplishments the first
synthesis of cortisone, the discovery
and synthesis of hydrocortisone and
newer cortico-steroids, the discovery
and synthesis of Vitamin B12, the
synthesis of the most widely used
sulfa drugs, and the development of
the technique for processing dried
blood plasma. Moreover, Selman
Waksman has said that without his
agreements with, and aid from,
Merck, “the antibiotics that we
isolated would have remained bibli-
ographic curiosities.”

But essentially the research ac-
tivities of the drug industry must be
directed toward profits. For this rea-
son much of the industry’s research
is really the development of new
products, some of it as part of a
program of planned obsolescence of
drugs already on the market, much
of it economically wasteful (it is
estimated that about 85 per cent of
new pharmaceutical products actual-
ly put on the market do not pay
their way), some of it medically
unnecessary, undesirable and even
dangerous. To cite but one example,
an impartial study states that “the
new diuretic, flumethiazide . . . dif-
fers chemically from chlorothiazide

. in having a trifluoromethyl group
in place of the chlorine. This sub-
stitution does not change its phar-
macologic properties. . There is
no present basis for believing that
flumethiazide has any advantage
over chlorothiazide with respect to

. side effects.”” One medical critic
has bluntly stated that the prolifer-
ation of varieties of antibiotics “re-
flects the competitive nature of the
drug business” and not therapeutic
need. The FTC has reported that
“the antibiotics research program in-
stituted by the companies after
World War II did not have as their
aim the discovery of drugs for which
patents could be licensed . . . widely.

. Each company was seeking ex-
clusive products which could sup-
port profitable prices.”

PRIVATE enterprise is not always
prepared or able to protect the
commonweal. A case in point is pen-
icillin, where the result of early ex-
pen in industry literally had

to be pried out (“They have not
made their operimeital re ts nc

lists their development of manufa

Pee ets
at

vod

processes generally available,” la-
mented Dr. Vannevar Bush in 1943),
and where success reflected govern-—
mental assumption of the direction |
and financing of a planned program, |
The major fermentation process and
nutrient medium used ‘in penicillin

manufacture were developed by De-
partment of Agriculture workers,
and the basic research was sponsored —
nation-wide by the Office of Sci-
entific Research and Development. —
It was the latter agency, together
with the War Production Board,
that financed the building of six |
penicillin plants (later purchased by —

the companies for 44 per cent of — :
their cost). A similar story can be |
told with regard to the Salk wac- —
cine. The original contracts between |
the manufacturers and the National |
Foundation for Infantile Paralysis
provided that the foundation “in-
struct the manufacturers in the pro- —
duction of . . . vaccine” and under- |
took “to reimburse them for their —
total costs of production.” New con-
tracts in 1954 started the companies
producing stockpiles of the vaccine
and obligated the foundation to
“purchase the vaccine whether or
not the [pending] test program
proved successful.” Moreover, “the
foundation and not the... manu-
facturers assumed whatever risks —
were inherent in the program of test-
ing.” e

ALL OF this is to demonstrate that
the public health is not completely
dependent upon research in the
pharmaceutical industry, and to
place the risk-taking heroics of pri-
vate enterprise in a truer light. Nor
must it be supposed that govern-
ment regulation of patents and
brands, or the physician’s writing for
quid pro quos, will leave no room or
the companies to gain advantage
from research, nor that some private
research is not desirable.
One thing should be evident to the
medical and pharmaceutical profes-
sions, which are so very touchy abo it
anything that even hints at. socié |.
ized medicine. The longer it take
them to find ways of keeping the
price of medication within the mea
of the pols ae greater the da
that | I be forced along
very pai y fear so m ch.

f r th

SS Sar ae eS

a a ee

December 26, 1959

DIPLOMAS FOR sy ALE ee by Myron Lieberman

ONE OF THE most interesting
educational publications of 1959 is
a ninety-nine-page pamphlet by
Robert H. Reid entitled American
Degree Mills. The study, sponsored
by the American Council on Educa-
tion, is interesting both for what it
says and what it does not say.

What it says is that for more than
120 years, a number of foreign na-
tionals have been getting phony de-
grees by correspondence “study”
from phony institutions of higher
education in the United States. The
dimensions of the diploma-mill prob-
lem today are not susceptible to pre-
cise delimitation. According to Reid,
a trade association which represents
a large number of diploma mills as-
serts that their enrollment in one re-
cent year was 750,000 students and
that they did a business of around
$750,000,000 a year. These figures
included both foreign and domestic
enrollments. There appear to be over
200 diploma mills located in at least
thirty-seven states. Their “diplomas”
are sold in forty-two countries and
in all continents. The situation has
repeatedly embarrassed the federal
government, which under existing
laws appears helpless to do anything
to remedy it. The reasons provide
some interesting insights into Amer-
ican education.

As in the case of many rackets,
the chief victims are unwilling or un-
able to publicize their grievances.
This is especially the case with for-
eign students, who ordinarily lack
the resources to initiate an action
in this country against the institu-
tions involved. Furthermore, the
victims often have a stake in letting
sleeping dogs lie. For example, in
situations where possession of a de-
gree is an asset or a prerequisite to a
good job, the “degree” holder is not
likely to take any action which publi-
cizes its fraudulent character. This
fact is one of the biggest barriers to
MYRON LIEBERMAN, The Na-
tion’s educational consultant, is with
the Educational Research Council of
Greater Cleveland. His most recent
book is The Future of Public Edu-
cation (Chicago U. Press).

‘?)

successful prosecution of diploma
mills. And, of course, even bona fide
students defrauded by diploma mills
do not always make an issue of the
fact.

Despite the repeated embarrass-
ment it has suffered all over the
world through these diploma mills,
the State Department does not even
have a list of them available for
overseas use. Furthermore, no agency
of the federal government has here-
tofore been authorized to draw up
such a list. The U.S. Office of Edu-
cation is not now and never has been
an accrediting agency. Tentative
first steps to make it one during the
Taft and Wilson administrations
evoked a storm of criticism and have
never been repeated. The Office of
Education does publish annually a
list of accredited institutions, but
the list is composed of institutions
accredited by other agencies and
those whose credits are accepted by
at least three accredited institutions.
This listing, while it excludes the cor-
respondence schools, does include a
considerable number of extremely
weak institutions which award de-
grees,

Last October Secretary Arthur S.
Flemming of the Department of
Health, Education and Welfare, told
a press conference that the Office of
Education is planning to prepare and
publicize a list of diploma mills.
However, no date was set, and at
the same conference, the Secretary
said that the Commissioner of Edu-
cation would investigate and clarify
federal authority to deal with these
institutions.

AT PRESENT, neither the Office of
Education nor any other federal or
state agency has either the authority
or the means to put fraudulent edu-
cational institutions out of business.
Some attention has been given to the
possibility of prosecuting diploma-
mill operators for use of the mails to
defraud. However, many diploma
mills operate under state charters
granted in an almost complete ab-
sence of state regulation, and the
Post Office cannot easily initiate pros-
ecutions for acts which are legal ac-

cording to state charters. If the fraud
consists of awarding a degree for no
work, the student is usually as guilty
as the institution. Furthermore, the
only promise sometimes made by the
institution is that it will grant a de-
gree. If it does this, no matter how
little work is required of the student,
how can there be intent to defraud?

One long-established diploma mill
was put out of business by the Fed-
eral Trade Commission on_ the
grounds of unfair competition with
legitimate institutions. In upholding
the FTC in this case, a federal court
conceded that the harm done to
students outside the United States
was not a relevant factor; the only
issue was the harm done to “peti-
tioner’s competitors” in this country.
Despite the FTC’s success in this
particular case, however, the agency
is in no position to clean up diploma
mills; its resources are limited and
Its activities in fields outside of edu-
cation have a deservedly higher pri-
ority.

WHAT ABOUT regulation by the
states? Only fourteen states have
any legislation regulating correspond-
ence schools, and seven of these ap-
ply to non-degree-granting institu-
tions. In sum: the federal govern-
ment is helpless to eliminate diploma
mills because it does not control edu-
cation, while the state cannot regu-
late out-of-state schools or even those
within their boundaries which enroll
only out-of-state students (the lat-
ter situation constitutes “interstate
commerce” and is therefore not sub-
ject to state regulation).

The absence of federal and state
activity in curbing diploma mills
raises the possibility of non-govern-
mental action, especially by profes-

sional organizations. Surprisingly
enough, American Degree Mills

makes not a single reference to the
American Association of University
Professors. The sad truth is that Bet-
ter Business Bureaus have been more
useful than the AAUP in efforts to
eliminate fraudulent educational in-
stitutions.

The existence of the fraudulent
schools is really a symptom of a

483

much larger and more important
problem, to wit, the absence of ef-
fective regulation over private edu-
cation generally in the United States.
To this day, no charter or license is
required to establish a college in al-
most one-third of the states. A more
serious problem is the existence of
thousands of low-grade educational
institutions at all levels all over the
country. These institutions, while
not diploma mills, are bad enough
to debase all levels of American edu-
cation. This situation is due to fac-
tors which seldom receive the at-
tention they deserve.

> ae
MOST PRIVATE education in the
United States is under religious aus-
pices, which makes any and all at-
tempts at regulation political dyna-
mite.. Legally, states can impose rea-
sonable requirements on_ private
schools concerning buildings, equip-
ment, class size, teacher qualifications
and similar factors. In practice, the
states seldom hold private schools to
the same minimum standards requir-
ed of public schools. Thus in every
state of the union, all elementary
and secondary public-school teachers
must have teaching certificates, but
only twelve states require them of
private-school teachers at any level.
(One of the myths of American edu-
cation is built upon the brilliant
liberal-arts college graduates, thor-
oughly trained in their subjects but
unable to teach in public schools be-
cause they don’t have, and won’t
take, the education courses necessary
for a teaching certificate. These
omnipresent creatures, so dear to the
hearts of private-school spokesmen,
are supposed to be teaching in private
schools, where their intellectual bril-
liance is respected and rewarded.
The truth is that most of them are
not fit to teach.)

Catholic parochial schools con-
stitute over 80 per cent of the private
schools in the United States. Al-

though relatively free from public
eontrol, at least they are subject to
the control of the Church, which

| will sink to the’ Tevel of 2 diploma
‘mill. Of course, there are many weak
parochial (as well as public) schools,
a fact which is recognized in Catho-
_ lic educational circles.

1 Over eae f:

The crucial point is that private
non-parochial schools, which are
equally free of state regulations, are
practically free of any control at all.
The correspondence-school diploma
mills are only part of the unhappy
consequences of this laissez-faire at-

titude toward private education.

A SITUATION I encountered two
years ago illustrates one aspect of the
picture. While employed by a pri-
vate university in New York City, I
interviewed an applicant for admis-
sion who wanted to take a course in
the teaching of reading. The appli-
cant was already employed as a re-
medial reading instructor in a private
“clinic” in New York City. He had
absolutely no qualifications to teach
anyone how to read.

At the time, he was getting $2
an hour from his employer, who in
turn received $4 an hour from
each student. Customers were usual-
ly parents whose children were do-
ing poorly i in school and who thought
that private instruction would help
their children to read better. They
were attracted to the “clinic” by
newspaper advertisements. Business
was excellent — so good that the
young man had decided to go into
business for himself. He had come to
us for help in preparing for his forth-
coming entrepreneurial responsibili-
ties. Had we accepted him, it would
have been the first time in his life
that he had ever studied reading or
the teaching of it. And this happened
in the state which exercises the most
stringent controls over private edu-
cation in the country.

Probably the worst educational
rackets are to be found in some of
the private independent schools.
Many of these operate in states
which purport to regulate private as
well as public schools. Quite often,
the regulation is inadequate to pre-
vent the worst abuses, while it serves
as an excuse for the schools to claim
that they meet state standards —
which they do.

These institutions are not merely
fraudulent from an academic view-
point. The depths to which they can
sink are illustrated by one Connecti-
cut institution I know about. Al-
though it had no psychological or
psychiatric staff, this pchaol special-

i ‘id t
a» a re ’

Te, 4
yw ee f ee .. os

' ey iv ye p
ized in problem children from wealthy |
families. Many of its students had |
been expelled from other public or |
private institutions. Mentally re- !
tarded, emotionally disturbed, phys- }
ically handicapped and normal |
children were thrown together in the
same classrooms without the slight- —
est regard for the consequences. —
Teachers were forbidden to fail any
students; the headmaster even
changed ae submitted by teach-
ers in order not to arouse the suspi- ©
cions of parents. Because the teach- —
ing staff was so poorly paid, and ©
underwent virtually complete turn-
over every year, there were always —
serious deficiencies in it. Frequently |
the same teacher would be teaching
two subjects at the same time in the
same room. Students and parents
were charged exorbitant fees for —
personal and educational services.
Parents were asked to donate to an —
employees’ retirement fund which —
the employees had never heard about. _
Physical maltreatment and sexual ir-
regularities among students were
daily occurrences.

OF COURSE, a school like this could
not exist without wealthy parents —
indifferent to the welfare of their
children. On the other hand, it can —
hardly be said that the state of Con- —
necticut provides much protection |
for children unlucky enough to have |
such parents. Private schools in Con-
necticut need adhere only to the fol- —
lowing regulations:

I. Keep attendance records, in-
cluding an annual report to the State
Department of Education. /

2. Offer a course in the duties and
responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, —
and file a copy thereof with the State
Department of Education,

3. Use English as the medium of
instruction and deyote not more than —
one hour a day to any language |
other than English. o

4. Utilize buildings which conform
to state laws governing safety and _
sanitation, ‘

These regulations leave privat
schools in Connecticut free to op
ate without qualified teachers, m
cal services, laboratories, books, equit
ment and courses of study. That at un
do so should not ony any

has outgrown ih: ‘ation that
“educators” are above making a fast
~ buck when the opportunity presents
itself, And it must be emphasized
that Connecticut is not alone or
| _ even unusual in its “look the other
oT way’ ’ policy concerning private edu-
cation.

THE PRESENT situation for the
country as a whole suggests this par-
adoxical conclusion: Public educa-
tion is being seriously weakened by

the absence of high standards for
private education. The makeshift
private schools hastily set up in cer-
tain Southern communities to avoid
integration in public schools provide
the most dramatic support for this
conclusion. These schools lacked ade-
quate buildings, supplies, trained
teachers and other essentials, yet they
were permitted to operate. If there
had been reasonable minimum stand-
ards for private schools, enforced
by state law, it would have been
impossible to weaken or destroy pub-
lic education by setting up quickie
private schools.

It is true that, in some states, any
state laws standing in the way of
private schools would be abolished
at once if they were a serious ob-
-stacle to private schools set up to

avoid integration. But there are
other states in which this is not the
case. In fact, the Negro migration to
large Northern cities is undoubtedly
contributing to the increase of pri-
_ vate schools there also. The school
situation is sometimes the decisive
factor in the action taken by white
families living on the edge of Negro
_ ghettos. Some families move to the
suburbs; others stay and send their
; a: children to private schools. The latter
alternative should be eliminated in-
_ sofar as it rests upon the freedom of
_ private schools to ignore reasonable
“minimum standards of education.
In the past twenty years, private-
_ school enrollments have increased

; figures represent an increase from 9.4
per cent of the total elementary and
ie Secondary school enrollments in

ee a ee on 1 nae ee oO

indicate that private schools per se
are better than public ones — at
least on the basis of secular educa-
tional criteria.

If the American — public-school
system is not to suffer an irreversible
blow from the growth of parochial
schools, private schools set up to
avoid integration, private schools

catering to the children of the power
and prestige elites, and _ private
schools which are out-and-out rack-
ets, there is no time to be lost in in-
sisting that all schools, public or
private, meet reasonable standards
set up to protect the public interest
as well as the interests of the chil-
dren who attend them.

Trujillo: More Croesus Than Caesar

Merida, Venezuela
LATIN AMERICA has‘ suffered
from many dictatorships, but all
were almost exclusively political. The
case of Trujillo is different. He
usurped power and then, gradually,
took over the national economy. For
him the state is an instrument at the
service of his boundless ambition for
wealth. It could be said he is more
Croesus than Caesar and that, psy-
chologically, he is more gangster than
politician.

Much has been written about the
terrorism of his thirty-year-old re-
gime — the suppression of civil
rights and liberties, the mass murders
perpetrated upon helpless peasants,
the assassinations Trujillo has en-
gineered not only on his own soil,
but in the United States and Cuba.
Much less is known of the extent to
which the dictator has turned a
whole country into a private estate.

More than 70 per cent of the
Dominican Republic’s sugar planta-
tions, and 60 per cent of all other
agricultural land, belong to him or
to his family. Similar figures are ap-
plicable to the nation’s small in-
dustry. Exact statistics are impos-
sible to ascertain; indeed, it is even
impossible to separate what belongs
to the state from what belongs to
Trujillo — both form a single entity.
The judiciary and legislative arms
of the government are under his
thumb, and both operate to assure
the steady growth of the ruler’s for-

J. I. JIMENES-GRULLON, a Do-
minican now exiled in Venezuela, is
the author of The Dominican Re-
public and A Gestapo in America,
both published in Spanish.

by J. I. Jimenes-Grullon

tune, already estimated at more than
$500,000,000.

The country’s tax system is ideal-
ly geared to protect Trujillo’s mo-
nopolies. According to the Anuario
Estadistico (Yearly Statistics Bul-
letin) of the Dominican Republic, in
1954 revenues from direct taxes
amounted to $13,599,489.63, while
indirect taxes totaled more than six
times as much — $83,492,918.03. It
is not the property-owners who bear
the tax burden, but the great mass
of the people, whose poverty thus
becomes a double burden.

At least 75 per cent, perhaps more,
of the Dominican Republic’s gain-
fully employed population work for
Trujillo directly or indirectly — di-
rectly in one of his agricultural, in-
dustrial or commercial enterprises,
indirectly as members of the govern-
ment bureaucracy. One result of this

eo ae A) en ee =) Sgr ae x eee
; 52%

economic monopoly is to strangle
private enterprise; and this phenom-
enon, combined with the growth of
population, results in turn in an in-
crease of unemployment. Already 40
per cent of the country’s employables
are without jobs, a fact which in-
creases the dictator’s power over his
people. For, to get work, the peo-
ple must turn to him. Trujillo cone
trols not only the natural, but also
the labor resources of the country —
a situation unique in Europe and the
Americas.

ONE BEGINS to understand, now,
how Trujillo’s tyranny has managed
to survive. He has coupled the ruth-

SS ARO rae ie aaa

less use of violence with an equally —

ruthless manipulation of man’s in-
stinct for survival; his people, to eat,
must submit to him. And to these
two factors, a third must be added:
the dictator’s seeming immunity on
the international scene. Despite his
persistent violation of international
accords—notably the Human Rights
Convention — he has never been
criticized officially by any of the
great democracies. The United
States, ignoring the crimes which
Trujillo has committed on its soil,
continues to maintain cordial rela-
tions with him in the name of “non-
intervention.”

Despite these circumstances, Tru-

‘ jillo’s opposition is is a1 owin ion hi

ile-engineered invasion of the Dor a
can Republic last June, even though rd
abortive, forced the dictator into a

Suite purchase program that is —
threatening the economy of the re- |
gime. This, in turn, has increased the —
misery of the people; the per capita
income, recently estimated by the |
United Nations at $137, has suffered —
a further drop. Were the democra- |
cies, in protest against Trujillo’s re-
peated violations of international ac~ —
cords, to break diplomatic relations —
with him and to declare an economic |
boycott against his regime, it is |
doubtful that the dictator could out- —
last the morrow.

THE PRISONERS: a SELF-PORTRAIT . . vy devia 7

A CHILD, after he has done wrong,
been caught, and while he is being
punished by prolonged disapproval
(psychiatrically, a poor way to pun-
ish), has a long, sad, lonely and
highly moral vigil. Theoretically his
views on life in this period should
be of great value, but in fact he is
only re-collecting his ego, not prob-
ing into the moral law. His mood is
rather beautiful in a minor key, but
useful neither to him nor to society.
This childhood poetry is repeated
and multiplied in all the prisons of
all the nations, though with differ-
ences. In America, the state and fed-
eral correctional institutions immure
at any one time about 200,000 peo-
ple, mostly men. This is about .1 per
cent of the whole population—about
one in every 250 men. Each costs the

taxpayer about $1,800 a year, di-

rectly.

The prisons, it is said by every-
body including the prisoners, are fail-
ures. The worst failure of prisons is
that they do not yet contain the
great mass of serious and competent
_ criminals, so different from the pres-

ent inmates. It takes forty years to
catch up with a Frank Costello and

separate him briefly from his mani-

DAVID CORT’S next book, Is
‘There an American in the House?,
i be published soon by M acmillan.

curist and the Copacabana night
club. The members of his organiza-
tion rarely experience the long, sweet
sorrow of prison life. The actual
prisoner has not thought to the point
about life; Costello has; and the con-
victed criminal should not flatter
himself that he is in Costello’s class
merely because he is a criminal. The
prisons are for the failures; perhaps
that is why the prisons are failures.

Both are, however, very expensive
failures, and so we must be grateful
for a recent authentic revelation of
the nature of the actual man now in
prison in America. This took the
form of a privileged poll of 500 pris-
oners of the Atlanta, Ga., Peniten-
tiary by the prisoners themselves.
The results appear under the title
“Project Prisoner” in a special issue
of The Atlantian, the inmates’ own
magazine. Since Atlanta has 2,700
prisoners, the sample is not complete,
but its percentages of types of crimin-
als are roughly the same as for the
total prison population.

It soon becomes apparent in the
tabulations that the results are
meaningless when they are measured
as of the whole 500, as if all kinds
of criminals were alike. For surely a
man reveals his character even more
clearly by the crime he elects to com-
mit than by the wife he chooses out
of all the women in the world, He

could not, he would not, anyway he’
did not, commit otlier crimes; he —
chose one or more in a narrow range. 7
And the Atlanta survey begins to —

turn on the lights only when it is
breaks down its results into crime

groups. | 4
ot
BEFORE we go into these fascinat
ing but difficult particulars, the
crude over-all averages established |
for the 500 inmates were: age, 35.9;
current sentence, 8.5 years; schoolai
ing, to the seventh grade; years spent
in prison, 8.2; number of arrests, 11;
previous sentences served, 2; age at i
first arrest, 18; average LQ, 103,98
To pay them .the compliment of
judging them as potential equals: J
dismal crew, already architects — of
dismal lives. a
The totality grows more humanly
recognizable when it is divided into—
temperamental crimes given as 25 per.
cent car theft (apparently an aver-
age and undistinguished crime), 14
per cent narcotics, nearly 14 per cent
forgery, nearly 10 per cent armed
robbery, 6 per cent larceny and me ri
crimes and 4.6 per cent murder. Any
other groups mentioned here were
down around 2 per cent. ey
I take it that when one of re e
groups gives a group answer that 1
conspicuously off the norm — lor
the groups, "> have something w

ma) ‘ 7
'- os f

é ae i
* j
PA

cing. “Unlels it can be explained
away by racial or social factors or
the peculiar operations of the law,
it is a clue.

the murderers at 88 per cent, followed
by the liquor violators. The murder-
ers were also the oldest (in their
forties), had the least schooling and

' were among the best church-goers.
They were joined by the youngest
group, the kidnapers, in low I.Q.s,
little schooling and good church
records in prison.

The brightest were the larcenists
(112.5 1.Q.), the Mann Act violators,
the narcotics cases, the forgers and
the armed robbers. But all these
had a little less schooling than the
fairly stupid morals cases. The best
church-goers as a group were the
narcotics and morals cases.

On the test of marriage, another
dimension is given to the crime
groups. The largest percentage of
single men lay among the young
and unintelligent kidnapers and the

_ more intelligent sex criminals. The
highest score in maintaining mar-
riages went to the intelligent armed
robbers with 66 per cent, followed
by the narcotics cases. In numbers
divorced, the only startling figure is
for mail-fraud cases who are zero

single, zero married and 100 per
cent divorced.

EVEN IN a secret, inviolable poll
_ like this, one must be awed by the
question, “Do you plan to continue
in crime?” But the answers seem to
me even more awesome: Yes, 11.3
per cent; Don’t know (figure “prob-
ably”), 17 per cent; No (figure
“maybe”), 71.7 per cent. Figure some
jokers both ways: the re-adventurers
_ into crime must come to at least 30
per cent, probably nearer 50 per cent.
_ The Ricncst Yes figures were for
_ the kidnapers, morals cases and for-
gers; and a lot of kidnapers and
. burglars didn’t know. That small but
_ remarkable mail-fraud group was
alone in voting 100 per cent No. It
should now be added that this group
_ reached the senior year of high school.
_ The contrasting interest in more
ip crime by the kidnapers and murder-
i ‘-s becomes less ominous when one
ae that their average sentences
ru a 59 and 35 years; indeed, the

Pers :

a RS

On the I.Q.s, the stupidest were -

very frivolity of their interest may
have inspired it.

“Ts this your last time in prison?”
ought to bring answers correspond-
ing inversely to those above. And
so we get a happy chorus of 100
per cent Yes from the morals cases
who had already avowed a consider-
able intention of continuing in crime.
The burglars at 80 per cent Yes also
seem never to learn. However, the
mail-fraud cases also voted 100 per
cent Yes; and these I seem to be-
lieve, since this answer corresponds
with their 100 per cent No to the pre-
ceding question. The murderers and

bale

Mann Act violators thought it a
weary 37 per cent possible that they
would be back in prison, with Don’t
know, and this answer has some
logical relation to their criminal in-
tentions.

BY NOW we can guess how they
will all react to the prison situation.
As to whether prison supervision was
an asset, only the mail-fraud cases
and the armed robbers gave a major-
ity Yes. A ringing No was returned
by the Mann Act violators (75 per
cent) and the murderers (71 per
cent).

Rephrasing the question to “Are
officials here to help you?” did not
change the responses much. The
larcenists, narcotics cases, mail-
fraud cases and armed robbers are
not unwilling to say Yes. The kid-
napers, Mann Act violators and
murderers overwhelmingly reject any
such thought.

Well, let’s try again: “Do you

find it difficult to adjust to prison
life?” Here the kidnapers and the
sex criminals are in agreement on the
difficulty, but the murderers this
time are fairly calm about it, at
only 37 per cent. The burglars are
calmest of all at 10 per cent, and
the mail-fraud and liquor cases not mf
quite as calm at 25 per cent. te

When we nag again on what is the
prisoner’s present attitude, the
“hopefuls” are fewest among the
long-term murderers (12 per cent)
and kidnapers (16 per cent). The
latter, with the longer terms, are
younger and thus slightly more hope-
ful. The highest percentage of “hope-

fuls” is to be found of course with
those feckless idiots, the morals we
cases (66 per cent). At the next S
sober, reasonable level come the A
mail frauds, narcotics and armed

robbers, as we had nearly expected.
Of course, the words “hopeful,” “in- Pa
different,” “resigned,” etc., mean fey
very different things to different in- ed
dividuals in this situation.

A few incidental sidelights on the
group pattern can be added. In the
matter of escaping custody, the high -
score belonged to the burglars (80 :
per cent) followed by the larcenists
(57 per cent); the least enterprising i
in this respect were the mail-fraud
cases (zero) and the narcotics of-
fenders (2.7 per cent).

The older men naturally feel most
strongly that first offenders should
be segregated, and these are the
liquor violators, murderers, mail-
fraud and narcotics cases.

The general average of the in-
mates who had had trades ran around
only 60 per cent, but the morals
cases were at 83 per cent and the
mail-fraud cases at 75 per cent. It is
saddening to notice that the often
estimable armed robbers here drop
to only 43 per cent, and are also the
lowest in learning a trade in prison
(23 per cent). Perhaps these people
are playing a game with the author-
ities, invisible to me, or perhaps they
would be genuinely ashamed of any

are only 16 per cent in the matter of —
having had a trade before prison
But again it may be asked: whe
does a man consider that he has

“trade”? What are the criteria of a

“trade” and of “having” it? Can the

writer of these lines be said to “have”
“ ad 5
trade”!

ONE MUST have begun to descry
in the foregoing bare statistics the
cloudy emerging outlines of some
half-seen types of people, self-re-
vealed almost unconsciously. One
may be skeptical, but I believe much
of this revelation is valid, for a rea-
son inherent in data generally. These
data were not taken to prove our
point, but to prove something else,
almost the opposite; that is, that
there is a single, generalized prison-
er who is a pretty nice fellow. This
inquiry thus approaches the research,
as it were, by the back window.
The useful conclusion is that treat-
ment of prisoners might profitably
vary with the crime, throughout so-
ciety’s relations with them. Taken in
that way, none of them is hopeless.

Every undifferentiated statement
that can be made about criminals
has, from this point of view, the
ring of nonsense. For example,
James V. Bennett, chief of the Fed-
eral Bureau of Prisons and one of
this country’s leading penologists,
describes “the more than 100,000
defeated, embittered, twisted, queer,
handicapped and seriously neurotic
individuals who pass _ annually
through the gates of our prisons.”
This statement has some status as
poetry and accomplishes the chief
purpose of most writing on the sub-
ject: to prove that the man’s heart
is in the right place. But, as we have
seen, each of Mr. Bennett’s adjectives
may apply to a majority of one group
and not to another. Or all the ad-
jectives may be said to apply to
nearly everybody alive.

It is unnatural to house masses
of men within walls, as the 5,200
at San Quentin, the 4,600 at Ohio
State (the penitentiary), the 4,650
at Joliet. The result will certainly
ale appear noisome, but to beautify the
4 joint will prove little, and even to
admit the prisoners’ wives on oc-
casion, as some suggest and as the
Latin Americans, Russians and some
Asiatics do, would have very dif-

rent effects on different groups of
convicts. It would certainly not help
the 100 per cent-divorced mail-fraud

cases, or the unmarried morals cases,
and might incite them to riot,

The 500 prisoners at Atlanta are
equally unhelpful when they try to
reveal themselves as a totality. Thus
majorities in the Atlanta poll say
they had a happy home life, an aver-
age family background, were un-
justly sentenced, usually tell the
truth, write their families, don’t see
enough of their families, do not es-
pecially miss family life or sex, and
so on. Anybody from President Ei-
senhower to Frank Sinatra might
have returned these answers; they
may describe everybody or nobody.

The truth is that a given period
of a society creates its special crimes,
and summons out its special types of
criminals. We no longer have the
terrible crimes of lese majesty and
religious heresy, for which people
were torn apart and burned alive.
Evasion of income tax and alimony
payments have been rotated into
place. The harsh kidnaping laws were
passed against hardened, middle-
aged criminals and have produced
the young, stupid, unmarried, church-
going type. Car theft, a crime en-
couraged by all Detroit’s glamorous
and seductive advertising, is too
widely attractive to produce any
single type, so far as I can see. It is
also among the least severely pun-
ished crimes. But after an act has
been made a crime, it takes a given
sort of personality, experience and
mood to commit it. And this person
in a different kind or period of so-
ciety could easily have lived a blame-
less life. It does no good to say that
society is positively to blame for
the criminal and the crime; society
is what it must be.

SOCIETY’S problem is first to catch
the criminal, and then, what to do
with him. In some societies the an-
swer is to kill him at once, which
ends the individual problem cheaply.
The second answer is to support him
for life in confinement, but this is
dreadfully expensive, The third is
to give him a graduated punishment
by confinement and then, with a
pious prayer, turn him loose. The
fourth is to try to understand him
and somehow undo in a few years
the self-destructive patterns which
are, however, the eerie stitost

i
rae

is ) ”
ote a Pe
we.) / ; jae ian

“chesthad private universe, This last

4) “ay |

e ‘ m)

is current doctrine, but not practirea q

One might say that if all veteran’
convicts were redeemed and rehabil- i
itated, the contribution to society in |
a positive sense would be so negligi-
ble as to be unnoticeable. A William
Sydney Porter does sometimes land
in prison, but it is. a long time be-
tween O. Henrys. Still, I noticed
that some of the writing in the At-
lanta Penitentiary survey was quite
creditable, definitely above average
high school level.

But I think it is more important
to look at the free boys from fifteen
through seventeen now on the streets,
among whom the hardened criminals
will be chosen almost by accident or
lot. If we can get those boys past a
year or so without a first crime, and
then a commitment to crime and a
pride in crime, they will be real men
at twenty-one. The human material
here is so salvageable, so valuable,
so close to salvation, that the hearts
of the officials dealing with juvenile
delinquents must be __ perpetually
breaking.

THE FIRST crime is the important
one. Many respectable people have
illegal fantasies, but they are not —
necessarily dunnging to the character
so long as they remain that. The |
fatal step of carrying the reckless —
fantasy over into a real act must —
present the new criminal with a
wholly revised picture of himself, —
which he rather admires and can
never lose entirely. When he is —
caught, this picture is socially con- |
firmed. And society is in for fifty |
years of trouble, damage and ex- —
pense,

The focus of society’s attention
should be on. this first crime, long —
before the Atlanta prisoners are
polled. Here should be in charge the |
most capable people we can find. A —
modest suggestion is that part of the
answer at that moment is much less
public attention, or none at all —
that is, no newspaper attention, “4
Newspaper editorializing on juvenil
delinquency is to be complimented
on its success at frightening old
ladies, infuriating men and exhilar-
ating the young, but otherwise it is
the most useless conceivable exercise
of the journalist’s art.

ire 7 a

pe on ee

The Old Ch

THE ADAMS-JEFFERSON _ LET-
TERS. Edited by Lester J. Cappon.
University of North Carolina Press.
2 vols; 638 pp. $12.50.

Benjamin DeMott

WHO is John Adams? In his lifetime
he was a President-by-three-Votes, a
figure more or less reviled — Franklin
allowed him wisdom but said that he
was in some things “absolutely out of
his senses.” An English voice at the
peace table, speaking for Everyone
Nice, called him “the most ungracious
man I ever saw,” and the liyerish tide
of abuse that flowed over his last two
decades would have drowned a lesser
man. Since then his partisans have been
few. Our great new lucrative industry,
American History, has been neryous
about bringing him into the Hero Mar-
ket (“He lacked Washington’s ability
to override great difficulties with out-
ward equinimity [sic] and confidence,”
says one scholar writing in 1957; he
lacked Hamilton’s “glamor,” and “as
time has demonstrated, he lacked the
abiding popularity and success of Jef-
i ferson as a political figure”). The only
believable biography, Chinard’s, risks
little more in the line of open “praise”
‘ than an assertion that Adams is the
A “personnification of all that is stanch,
honest, stubborn and somewhat nar-
row in his native province.” Wild old
Ezra Pound gave Adams some Cantos
- — but largely because the man was
Sound About Banks. And the occasional
writer on a technical subject who has
found himself possessed of an insight
into the nature of Adams’ character —
Zoltan Haraszti is an example — runs
off his course onto grave phrases about
“deep neurotic strain,’ expresses won-
der at Adams’ commonplaces, and _ tsk-
_tsks at his wit. In so much obtuseness
__ there is surely a meaning, but it is
__ needless to hunt for it here. What mat-
_ ters is that as a consequence of the
_ showing-forth in this correspondence of
a single strand of Adams’ life — his
relations with Jefferson — the magnif-
_icent old chief of Quincy is at last
_ back in full sight.
_ The outer story of these relations,
the letters express it, is simple: a

a novel, The Body’s Cage, is on
the English faculty of Amherst College.

mber 26, 1959

NJAMIN DeMOTT, author of re

nt ee Paes

p BOOKS and the

ief of Quincy

friendship of ambitious men is broken
early by jealousy and suspicion, re-
stored late by little save the passage
of years. The inner drama of the cor-
respondence is nothing less than the
revelation of a great soul, a revelation
so gripping (in the second of these
volumes, when Adams was in_ his
eighties) that canny spectators are
bound to ask questions about it. Did
Adams husband himself for the role?
Did some prophetic instinct warn him
to save-strength for a future in which
he could utter himself fully — in cir-
cumstances that would tell to his ad-
vantage as no others in his life had done?
Not likely. Readers of the Diary know
that the Quincy schoolmaster and law-
yer spent himself freely, openly, every-
where and always — in random con-
versations in inns, in his classroom and
in court, in pursuit of learning and in
brutal self-analysis, in cool observation,
hot quarrel, public life and in his parlor
— and his correspondence with others
beside Jefferson is clean of passages of
withdrawal. In the hectic days of nego-
tiations with foreign ministers his re-
ports to Franklin are enlivened by
mocking notes on the modes of evasive-
ness favored by their various “high
Mightinesses”; neat slits are made in the
gullets of the fat cats of yesteryear
(“He is an admirable patriot where
thirty percent can be made by serving
his country”); and there are delicious
moments when an interview with one or
another pipe-smoking, blackmailing Tri-
politan ambassador issues in whole para-
graphs of cunning wit.

BUT however vital Adams’ past, how-
ever freely he spent before, the prodi-
gality of his eighth and ninth decades
was surpassing. Grand torrents of knowl-
edge, observation, speculation and fresh
careless violent speech poured down on
the Jefferson of those years—there were
periods when Monticello could return but
one letter for six. “I cannot stand upon
Epistolary Etiquette,” says the Quincy
man with impatient merriment, “and
though I have written two Letters yet
unnoticed I must write a third.” Where-
upon he enters on another page smoking
with metaphor (“Aristocracy, like Water-
fowl, dives for Ages, and then rises
with brighter Plumage”) and vivacity
(“Lord! Lord!” he cries at some quota-
tion of Jefferson, “what can I do with so

ARTS

much Greek?”), and displays once more
both the enormous appetite for knowl-
edge and the lovely power of sly wink-
ing at The Mind (“Two things only did
I learn” from Plato, and one was that
“Sneezing is a cure for the Hickups”)
which alone can redeem accounts of a
year’s diet of books. His genius for
mocking self-dramatization is of the
kind owned by men who have sounded
to the bottom of their being (“But...
I have been often obliged to stop, and
talk to myself like the Reverend, Ale-
gorical, Hierogriphical and Apocaliptical
Mr. John Bunyan, and say ‘Sobrius esto
John!’ Be not carried away by sudden
blasts of Wind, by unexpected flashes of
Lightening, nor terrified by the sharpest
Crashes of Thunder!’”), and behind
every word he spoke was a quickness
of feeling, an extreme capacity for love
that betrayed itself repeatedly—as when
he commented on a report that Jeffer-
son was willing to live his life again:

I have had a Father, and lost him.
I have had a Mother and lost her.
I have had a Wife and lost her. I
have had Children and lost them.
I have had honourable and worthy
Friends and lost them—and instead
of suffering these griefs again, I had
rather go forward and meet my des-
tiny.

Were there only this voice, this char-
acter, the project of bringing out the
correspondence at hand would have been
worthwhile, but of course there is more.
There is a nearly heroic image of a mind
burning itself through a forest of il-
lusions, clearing tracts in its wastes,
acknowledging mysteries hitherto un-
faced. There is a record—when these
letters are read with the Diary—of the
growth of a political intelligence ex-
traordinary in its determination to
squeeze Truths of State out of individu-
al experience, to generalize only where
the heart is sure. (A political Antaeus,
Adams took as the ground of all reflec-
tion the self; recognizing a deflecting
sin of bitterness at his center, he worked
a lifetime to read its meaning, and the
fruit of his success, as glimpsed in these
letters, is surely the only poignant phi-
losophy of rank, reputation and honor —
yet framed by an American public man.)
Moreover, there is even a representa-—
tion of the mystery of great teaching.
Given a correspondent abstract in feel-
ing though superbly gifted in intellect ©
and energy, Adams became a tutor in
humanity, and at the end of this cor-

489

respondence the example he unfailingly
offered of a whole man’s manner of
speech begins to shake Jefferson’s in-
ward being—the latter is pressed on to
utterances of fears and regrets that are,
at the very close, as moving as those of
his master.

But the triumph does belong, beyond
all question, to the figure history calls
the lesser of the two. Jealous, bitter,
brilliant, learned, active; a man with a
capacity for grief, a man of Johnsonian
impulse, eager to move on from grief to
a statement of its uses, and then on
still farther to mockery of its abuses; a
man passionately uncertain in his re-
ligion, wholly aware of his wishfulness,
contemptuous of it but too desperate in
the attachments of his life to abandon
it; a relisher of experience, a man to-
tally open, rich in invective but touched
with a noble gentleness of feeling, a
self-dramatizer, an endlessly fertile wit;

a man beyond positions, as it were, one
who could not believe that an Opinion
of his, however forcefully delivered,
could be taken to represent him, be-
cause always (as he knew) life is deeper
than any system he can devise for its
expression; a leader doomed to be mis-
understood, misrepresented, humiliated.
... How he would wink and cry Lord!
Lord! at such a soppy Ciceronian bar-
rage! He would understand and value,
though, praise of the kind implicit in
Lawrence’s famous words: the only
riches, the great souls—and in point of
truth no other praise is relevant. Let it
be given him boldly, and let it be said,
too, that in returning this soul to public
view, scholarship, which may or may
not know where to place it in the splen-
did historical edifice of unreality, has
nevertheless served the ideal of Ameri-
can Character in an exemplary and ex-
hilarating way.

Africa’s Destroyed Civilization

THE LOST CITIES OF AFRICA. By
Basil Davidson. Little, Brown & Co.
366 pp. $6.50.

Kenneth Rexroth

THIS is one of the season’s more un-
fortunately named books. The title has
that certain Rider Haggard, White God-
dess of the Theosophical Cannibals ring
to it that put me off and I opened it
with a definite shiver of repugnant-ex-
pectation. But in fact it is both a sound
historical and archaeological work and
very exciting reading. Don’t let the
title put you off.

When I was a boy I read W. E. B.
DuBois and marveled over the vanish-
ed glories of African civilization with
tears in my eyes. As an adolescent, pos-
sibly because I was an adolescent, I was
one of the very few radical intellectuals,
black or white, who sympathized with
Marcus Garvey. Time went by and |
accepted the verdict of my betters that
DuBois had drawn a very long bow in-
deed, that he had romanticized the
African past that had actually existed,
and had invented whenever he didn’t
have enough information to romanti-
cize. For a long time the memory of
Garvey’s debacle made the very word
“Africa” almost a joke amongst Ne-
groes, liberals, radicals and just plain
Negrophiles. Everybody concentrated
on the task at hand—the struggle for

KENNETH REXROTH, poet and crit-
tc, is the author of Bird in the Bush,
recently published by New Directions.

490

the rights of American Negroes. Then
came Herskovitz and others like him,
and all the immense literature of jazz
and the questions of its African origins,
and the widespread appreciation of
Negro art amongst educated Negroes;
the tide began to turn. But somehow
it never turned far enough so that a
lingering doubt didn’t remain. Was the
heritage of the African past as splendid
as DuBois so long ago had portrayed
it? Here now is the answer. The old
man is vindicated—in abundant meas-
ure: in the words of an erstwhile po-
litical leader he has been “surpassed and
overtaken.”

The Lost Cities of Africa is the only
book I know of which is a systematic,
scientific and thoroughly up-to-date
presentation of the history, prehistory,

“ir . “ We dey

archaeology and prehistoric anthropol-—

Africa, except for the Moorish-Arab
Northwest corner. All the major cen-
ters of civilization are treated in con-
siderable detail: Upper Egypt, Libya,
the Kushites, Meroé; the Sudan, the
great caravan empires and the cities of
the Niger; Benin, Yoruba, the King-
doms of the Gold and Ivory Coasts and
the Congo; Zanzibar, the East Coast
trading cities with their contacts with
India and China; Ethiopia and Axum,
the Christian empires of the highlands;
Mapungubwe, Zimbabwe, whose mys-
terious ruins were the source of Rider
Haggard’s romances. The picture which
emerges is of a complex of pre-literate
civilizations only just beneath those of
Mexico and Peru, and_ still growing
vigorously when they were stricken by
European and later Arab looting, con-
quest and slave hunting.

SINCE most of the material is ar-
chaeological and not literary, a history
of Africa must perforce be a_ social
and economic history rather than a
political one. What we find is the story
of a barbaric society with a high level
of technical accomplishment, imposing
art, widespread trade, and probably a
greater security of life and a more
widely diffused decent standard of liv-
ing than could have been found in much
of contemporary medieval Europe. Basil
Davidson seldom misses the chance to
point out the essential Negro-ness of
all this. But that does not make him a
partisan or special pleader. So many
lies have been told on the other side~
that it is necessary to state the facts,
clearly and forcibly. It isn’t just that
no Pharaoh of Egypt until the Greek
Ptolemies could have been served in a
Mississippi beanery—we are all aware of
the dodge behind that blanket term
“Hamitic”; it is that from the Sudan to

The Storm Swallow
(From the Norwegian of Henrik Ibsen)

‘The storm-swallow nests where the land fails.
I heard it myself from an ancient sailor.

She moistens her wings in the distant foam;
She dives through swells, and she never sinks,

She dives with the sea; she climbs with the sea;
She keeps silence in calm; she cries against storm.

It is a journey between flying and swimming,
As dreaming is between heaven and chaos,

Too heavy for air, too light for waves —
Ah, swallow, swallow — there we have an image!

Yes, and what’s worse — in teachers’ eyes

It’s all set down as sailors’ lies,

Roperr By

Transvaal, from Benin to Zanzibar,
Africa produced, more or less

rope, its own kind of civilization, bid
its own values, its own traditions and its
pwn monuments.
By the time this civilization had be-
‘come internationalized and rich in the
“great emporia of the East Coast, it
Pwas “inferior” to the Portuguese who
destroyed it in only one thing—gun-
powder. In other words, the story of
Africa is the old, old story of a civili-
zation ruined by a pure chance of tech-
nology. As they say, “it is idle to spec-
ulate” on what the history of the world
would have been if Cortez and Pissaro
and Albuquerque and all the rest had
‘not had that little edge. What would
the world have been like? It is arguable
that, by now at least, it would have been
a better place.

I know I am treading on dangerous
ground, being as excited and enthu-
siastic about this book as I am. I have
plenty of Negro friends who consider
Africa none of their business, but I do
wish I could get them all to read
Here are the sources of one of the great
culture streams, one of the major arter-
ies, that have gone to make up our
-own American civilization. I know it is
far away and dim. I am not one of
those cranks who find Yoruba drum
rhythms in Fats Waller. But it is a
noble tradition, and it is the tradition of
twelve per cent of our inhabitants.

*
ie
b ;

—y

y Pioneers Beware

A LASKA, U.S.A. By Herb and Miriam
iiilischer. Little, Brown and Co.
243 pp. $4.50.

Hector Chevigny

‘it seems a promised land. The size of
the immigration problem can be meas-
ed by the flood of inquiries now
ashing daily into its bureaus concerned
h job placement, agriculture, mining
the like. The letters come from
ry section of the country and many
eign lands. Not a few call long-dis-

even into their own fitness, but simply
oi driving the Alcan Highway north-
eae How sad can be the conse-

HECTOR CHEVIGNY is author of
aD books on Alaska’s Russian period,
rd of Alaska and Lost Empire. He
vas speaker at the observance this year
n An ahondpeees Alaska Day, the anni-

ta’s mnie of the t -

ace. And some do not wait to inquire,

er rS7 7 e

quences was seen in the case of the
thirty-nine Michigan families who, call-
ing themselves the Fifty-Niners, set out
in a body in search of an existence free
of assembly lines and wound up dis-
illusioned and nearly all broke.*

Alaskans who want their state to
have a good start and not acquire a
bad name are gravely concerned. Two,
Herb and Miriam Hilscher, are so con-
cerned they wrote Alaska, U.S.A. It is
mostly a compendium of information on
living and working in Alaska with frank
reference to the hazards, pitfalls and
drawbacks. The Hilschers know their
state and love it. Mr. Hilscher was on
the commission that drew up the new
constitution.

As if in answer to inquiries, the field
of mining is described and discussed, as
are agriculture, livestock raising, oil and
—Alaska’s biggest industry—defense.
We learn that there is no demand for
unskilled labor in any field—only the
experienced can expect to gain foot-
holds. No one should come without
capital, but such professionals as teach-
ers, doctors and nurses can write their
own terms. Homesteading comes in for
special scrutiny, being the subject most
invested with romantic notions. We are
told exactly how to go about home-
steading; told also to expect a decade

*See “Alaska’s ’59ers” by O’Carroll
Colvin, The Nation, September 26.

or two of hard work and to spend an
appalling lot of money. Homesteader
communities tend to be small and iso-
lated. Alaska has only 5,000 miles of
roads (compare Texas’ 196,000 miles).
One chapter given entirely to traveling
the Alcan Highway leaves the reader
with no inclination to try it in a
jalopy. The Hilschers nevertheless ex-
pect their state to support a million
people (four times the present popula-
tion) in twenty years.

As background for the present scene,
the authors furnish a good summary of ~
the region’s history and add a feature
that should fascinate political scientists
—some of the inside story of the fight
for statehood, which took forty-three
years. They do not call it a revolution
but that is what it was, by definition,
the way they tell it, and they name
names. The ordinary citizen sought
freedom from tyranny, the tyranny of
special corporate privilege which in-.
hibited development of the country. At
one time the corporations even suc-
ceeded in curtailing the right to home-
stead. If the Russian period be counted
in, Alaska lived under corporation rule
for 160 years, or from 1799. Even the
Eskimos went to the polls when the
chance finally came, and the vote for
statehood was five to one. Their new
state’s constitution, say the Hilschers,
is among the most liberal in the nation.

TELEVISION’S RIGGED HONESTY

Anne W. Langman

TELEVISION is now against sin—
where it shows. Beginning December 15,
CBS producers must live under a memo-
randum from the top brass which legis-
lates honesty. The Integrity Rules are
the most remarkable and obvious red her-
ring yet employed in television’s effort
to restore itself to the trusting family
bosom. If obeyed (and surely no pro-
ducer will ignore the sinister implication
of “. . . a new office to be created within
CBS to implement this memorandum”)
these little honesties, continually re-
peated on the air, may quiet uneasiness
over larger deceits.

“All programs, no matter what their
type, must have integrity and respect
for the viewer,” the rules say. “Games
and contests ... are to be conducted in
all respects in precisely the manner in
which’ they purport to be conducted”
(however, games involving high stakes
“will not be permitted,” for they have
ot proved their irresistible venal-

ity). Producers must take the viewer
into their confidence, tell him all about
rehearsals, preparation for the program,
how they chose contestants from the
studio audience. “That’s artificial ap-
plause . . . canned laughter,” your honest

announcer will whisper, under the rules.

“That was no interview ... that was
delimited and delineated i in advance and
we want you to know it.”

The rules continue: “The use of
phrase ‘live on tape’ must not be us

Having prohibited this puzzler, CBS in-

troduces another: “Where an inte
program is on film or tape and has be
edited and condensed, it shall be
identified on the air (opening and-¢
ing) and in written publicity as”
‘This program is spontaneous.
rehearsed but has been cond
edited by CBS News.’”

It is a curious paradox that che
and public affairs programs are t
the brunt of the CBS Rules, «

4 0

they are exactly the ones whose in-
tegrity has seldom been questioned. It
is as though a town were to open an

anti-vice campaign by raiding all the
parish houses—which is what you might
expect if the town fathers wanted to
create a maximum of bustle with a min-
imum of scandal.

But as a result, these generally ex-
cellent programs — the very ones that
CBS has been depending on to justify
its public franchise—may become so
cluttered with announcements of method
that they lose their original pace and
point. Film, tape and live parts of the
program must be identified; re-creation
of an event is to be avoided, but if used
must be disclosed. The place where the
film is rolling suddenly becomes a ma-
jor concern: “Reporting that the viewer
is being taken to a given locality is
forbidden unless in fact a switch is
made to that locality at the time of the
broadcast.”

ALL this solicitude for mechanical hon-
esty presumably puts into effect a dic-
tum from the boss, CBS President Frank
Stanton, who has stated many times in
the last few weeks, “We propose to re-
move all possibility for public deception
wherever it may occur.” These were the
same weeks when he was trying to fire
CBS-TV President Louis Cowan with-
out actually saying so. An angry ex-
change of letters revealed that Stanton
was not playing under his own honesty
rules and had urged Cowan to join him
in his exemption. “You have insisted
that any public statement [of resigna-
tion| place primary responsibility upon
my health,’ Cowan wrote him. “I have
insisted on greater accuracy; my health
is now excellent. In consequence, we
have been unable to write a joint state-
ment.”

Heads that must roll, rules that must
be obeyed, brave words that are spoken
—all these maneuvers that are calcu-
lated to create, once again, a trust-
worthy image for television—do not
touch the heart of the matter, but they
do manage to distract attention from
the big issue. “We are determined,” Stan-
ton says, “to make sure that our pro-
grams are exactly what they purport to
be.” So what? Is it enough that viewers
know whether they are looking at a
tape or film, spontaneous or rehearsed
Western? Shall we give ABC a gold star
for firing a disk jockey, rely on the
police state organized at NBC to make
distinguished television, believe Frank
Stanton when he says, “There is not a
single problem we face... that does not
give us a heaven-sent opportunity for
improving television and thus giving it

492

another mighty shove forward toward
its inherent ... greatness”?

To find out what the networks ulti-
mately intend, ask the man who owns
one. During these critical weeks, the
men at the top Chairman of the
Board William Paley at CBS and Gen-
eral Sarnoff at NBC — have remained
silent, thus endorsing the rigged honesty
of their lieutenants.

Television is badly frightened. In a
panic — bordering on hysteria —it is
patching as fast as it can where it shows

LETTER from PARIS

Oreste F. Pucciani

THE MOST significant single event of
the French theatre this fall has been
the return of Jean-Paul Sartre whose
controversial Les Séquestrés d’Altona is
enjoying great success at the Thédtre de
la Renaissance. There is an astonishing
myth in Paris to the effect that Sartre
is a finished man. It is even more aston-
ishing when one considers that Sartre
is only fifty-four years old and is the
figure of greatest stature in French let-
ters since Valéry, Gide or Proust. But
he is also the most disquieting. One can-
not help thinking that it is his ability
to be disquieting, more than anything
else, which makes his detractors eager
to write his epitaph.

It is abhorrent to read the vitupera-
tions of small critics who, after an igno-
rant jab at Sartre, run for the cover of
their obscurity. “Me, paying pig that
IT am, I want my money’s worth. This
is for the snobs. I don’t go to the theatre
to cudgel my brains,” writes Jean-Jac-
ques Gautier of Les Séquestrés in the
Figaro. Lofty condescension was the
tone of J.-R. Huguenin in Arts a week
before the play was performed: “Let us
bear no grudges. With Les Séquestrés
d’ Altona |Sartre| will try his luck again
in the theatre, will find his Sunset Bou-
levard. Will he manage to get his public
back? Or should he take the precaution
of enrolling at once in the Union of
forgotten celebrities? We shall know this
week.” Some ten weeks later we know
that Sartre managed very well and with
no less a figure than Francois Mauriac
to come to his defense.

Like all of Sartre’s plays, Les Séques-
trés deals with a social and historical

ORESTE F, PUCCIANI is the author
of The French Theatre Since 1930, He
teaches contemporary French literature
at the University of California, Los An-
geles, but is at present on leave in France,

the most. But little honesties around —
the house do not penetrate to the foun-—
dations where the larger deceit is hidden,
or impinge upon the basic morality of
television which, according to law, should
operate in the public interest — and
doesn’t. There seems to be no intention
to change fundamentals, to serve the
viewers’ intelligence instead of the own-
ers’ bank account. The current reforms, |
with insouciant disregard of basic in-
tegrity of purpose, use honesty as a
means, not an end.

problem of our own time. In this in-

stance the problem is national and indi-

vidual guilt in reconstructed Germany.

One may perhaps see the genesis of the

play in two recent statements made by

its author. After a recent trip to Ger-

many, Sartre said: “The most difficult

problem facing the German people to-

day is to recover from their feelings of

guilt.” Earlier, he had declared: “I do

not believe in the guilt of nations. I

believe in miasmas and confusion.” Les

Séquestrés is a study in miasma out of

which an ambiguous clarification arises.

The German setting is, of course, in-

tended to suggest the further question:

What happens to people when an entire

nation commits crime? A tenuous thread

of complicity binds all of us to the sins
and errors of our community. What

happens when that community murders

six million Jews? Behind the individual

stands all of history. Behind .Hitler

stands Luther and “Luther drove us mad
with pride,” says one of the characters —
in the play. The psychological truth
which emerges from Les Séquestrés is
the viciousness and futility of the emo-
tion of guilt which in essence reveals
itself to be frustrated pride. The com-
plicity of the German people with Hitler
is often defended on the basis of im-
potence. But Sartre raises the trouble-
some question: Is not impotence itself
a matter of human choice? If it should
be, then we have found at a single stroke
both the malady and the cure.

The binding, poetic theme of the play
is the “sequestration” of the title. I
take this to be Sartre’s way of saying
that vice itself is nothing more than a
human choice of failure. As in No Ewit, —
it is this choice which encloses the five”
characters of the play in a circle of -
madness from which there is no escape,
Fourteen years after the German defeat,
in the little town of Altona near Ham-

}

burg, history has caught up with the
Won Gerlach family. Since 1946 Frantz,
the eldest son, has locked himself in his
room and will admit only his sister Léni
Who loves him incestuously. The’ reason
for Frantz’s seclusion is guilt. As an
officer in the German Army he had
committed torture. In his solitude he
proclaims his innocence to a mythical
people of crabs and, of course, to Léni.
The latter encourages Frantz in his mad-
ness. Morally she has sequestered her-
self with him, that being the climate
her physical love for her brother re-
quires. Like Racine, Sartre has used, as
an intelligible symbol of vice, one of
our greatest social taboos. But the origin
of both Léni’s and Frantz’s madness
must be sought in the oppressive world
of their father, old von Gerlach, who
sold to Goebbels a piece of family prop-
erty on which a concentration camp was
constructed. Here young Frantz saw the
first Jewish prisoners. One, whom he
helped to escape, was handed over to
the Nazis by his father.

This powerful old industrialist, remi-
niscent of Krupp in Germany today, is
the epitome of a civilization and an era.
The unrelenting spirit of seriousness
which controls him is demonstrated at
the beginning of the play in the oath
he extracts from his younger son,-Wer-
ner. Condemned to die of cancer in six
months, he makes Werner swear that he
will succeed him as head of the family
business and that he will live his entire
life in the ugly house of his ancestors.
Werner swears because he is his father’s
son. By paternal decree Werner is weak
while Frantz is strong. Werner believes
it. That is his choice. Because of it, he
too is integrated into the spiritual in-
cest of his family.

WERNER’s wife, Johanna, however, is
an outsider and the only relatively free
agent in this drama of the doom of
conscience. She consequently decides to
fight for her own and her husband’s
freedom, Thus she comes to accept a
bargain which her father-in-law pro-
poses: she will go to see Frantz in his
room, using the secret signal which the
old man has discovered by listening
downstairs as Léni raps at her brother’s
door. If Johanna succeeds in making
Frantz leave his room, Werner will be
released from his oath. One wonders
why von Gerlach is so eager to see
Frantz again. We understand that he
loves him, but we do not immediately
understand the meaning of his love.
Presently it becomes clear. He needs
Frantz so that he will not die alone.
Johanna succeeds. The outcome of the
play now hinges on an astounding folie
a deux which develops between Frantz

| Dec mber 26, 1959

and Johanna. As Johanna moves into
the orbit of Frantz’s unauthentic mad-
ness, Frantz slowly moves into the world
of human relationships and warmth.
Gradually we learn that even Johanna
is tainted by a choice of failure. She
has married Werner more because she
has failed in her career as an actress
than because of love. When Frantz fi-
nally consents to leave his room, we are
tempted to think that love has tri-
umphed. It has not. For Sartre, love is
not a meaning, but a possibility of
meaning. “Sequestration” does not come
so easily to an end. When Frantz meets
his father again, they both discover that
a series of free choices has created doom.
The folie a deux is pursued in another
key. It will not be over until Frantz
and his father take Léni’s Porsche and
re-enact a nearly fatal accident which
occurred many years before. This time
they do not intend to escape. Frantz’s
father goes to get the car while Frantz
says goodbye to Johanna and Léni. He
leaves them a gift: a tape-recorder which
contains one of the many speeches pro-
claiming his innocence to the “crabs” of
his seclusion and to a world from which
he had withdrawn. The lights of the
Porsche flash on the terrace. His father
is ready. Léni knows, though Johanna
does not, that her father and brother
intend to commit suicide together. After
all, Léni understands incest. “It is my
way of respecting the family,” she says.
Both her father and brother are dead
before Johanna comprehends. Slowly
Léni mounts the stairs to her brother’s
room. Her last words are: “A séquestrée
is needed up there.”

We began by asking what happens to
a people when an entire nation commits
crime. For Sartre the answer lies, as it
always does, in the thesis of human
freedom. Freedom is a condition, not
an entity. It is this condition which at
the close of the play points the way
out of the vicious circle of guilt. Johan-
na and Werner can choose to be free if
they so decide or they can, if they so
decide, become two more séquestrés of
Altona. So can the entire German na-
tion. This is the bleak optimism of
Sartre’s philosophy.

As the curtain falls, Johanna switches
on the tape-recorder. We hear the crazed,
fanatical voice of Frantz telling the
“crabs” that he was innocent. But what
are we to say of the innocence of a man
who has in fact committed torture?
“Pa été! Jai été!” are Frantz’s final
words. They are taken from Sartre’s
major philosophical work, L’Etre et la
néant. They mean that for the indi-
vidual, as well as for nations, all choices
of freedom or failure must be made
this side of death.

“BEST PLAY cieicc:
Critics’ Award

a raisin in the sun

A new play by LORRAINE HANSBERRY

starring CLAUDIA McNEIL
OSSIE DAVIS * RUBY DEE

BELASCO THEATRE, 111 W. 44 St. N. Y. C.

Now Available

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ART

Maurice Grosser

TWENTY-FIVE new landscapes by
Leonid are on view at Durlacher until
Christmas—principally scenes from the
rice fields of Asia and the clam flats of
New England. The paint is dry and a
little powdery, the colors pale and nacre-
ous, the texture matte. The whole effect
is gouache-like and luminous. The New
England pictures follow Leonid’s more
familiar pattern of great horizontal
stretches of sky and beach. More un-
usual for him are his Tuscany farm
lands, and his Manila rice fields with
their severe geometrical perspective and
native laborers in angular costumes. The
finest are two vertical zigzag composi-
tions painted as if seen from somewhat
above—the one a floating tangle of Bang-
kok market rafts, the other a string of
Philippine fishermen lined up on a tidal
flat casting their circular hand nets—as
easy, charming and exotic as a chinoiserie
though certainly much
more serious as painting.

Marshes and beaches are Leonid’s
characteristic subject. For him the edges
of the sea are neither vacation land nor

stage. He sees them rather as a vast and

aqueous farm, intensely cultivated, each
of whose products—the oyster, the mus-
sel, the seaweed used for fertilizer—
serves him in turn as the theme for a
series of pictures whose elements are the
weather, tides, geography, people and
particular methods of cultivation, and
whose basic subject matter could be de-
scribed in the language of science as the
riparian ecology of man.

NO ONE is as skillful as Leonid in aerial
perspective—in making things retreat
into the distance by painting the inter-
vening air; his landscapes extend miles
into the canvas. And no one knows as
well as he how to seize the color of
light and sky peculiar to each place. But
despite 1 their air of specific accuracy, the
pictures are not, as in Impressionist
‘painting, views of particular places
‘taken, like a photograph, from a_par-
‘ticular spot. They are generalizations,

not painted from nature, but done in

‘the studio from memory. This non-
Impressionist approach, like that of any

“apatical landscape painter of the seven-
teenth or eighteenth century, is the one

characteristic Leonid holds in common
with that highly diversified band, the
Neo-Ramantiss, of which he is an im-
portant member.

~The Neo-Romantic painters first ap-
red in Paris in 1926 as a group ex-

> net 2) ae

position at the Galerie Drouet. The band
consisted of Christian Bérard, the
Dutchman Christians Tonny, the Rus-
sians Pavel Tchelitchev, Leonid and his
brother, Eugéne Berman, and for a
short time, Pierre Charbonier and The-
rese Debains. The name Neo-Romantic
was invented by the critic Waldemar
George to describe the poetic and in-
trospective quality of their work. The
styles and subject matters of no two
were alike; all that united them was
their youth and talent and a common
revolt against the academic Impression-
ism which in 1926 held something of the
dominating place in art instruction and
official expositions that academic mod-
ernism holds today.

Impressionism was essentially a form
of realism. The painter painted on the
spot’ without sketches of preparation,
transcribing directly on the canvas the
subject before him. The painters were
for the most part upper- and middle-
class people and the subject they painted
most readily was the upper- and middle-
class world—the flowers from its gardens,
its pretty girls and well-dressed women,
its handsome houses and the countryside
around them—all the prosperous appur-
tenances of a comfortable way of life.
This subject they exploited so well and
so thoroughly that no subsequent paint-
er has wished or dared to use it. The
absence of rich or upper-class subject
matter has become one of the most
striking characteristics of the painting
of our own time.

In revolt against Impressionism, the
Neo-Romantics painted principally in
the studio and carefully avoided in their
subject matter any reference to the
prosperous externals of middle-class life.
Their pictures were for the most part
dark, influenced in color and tone by
the blue period Picassos. Their mot
d ordre, invented by Cocteau, was “mys-
tere’ which he demanded as the essen-
tial ingredient of a work of art. Mystére
was used to mean the work’s poetic con-
tent, the double take that gives an extra
emotional dimension, a thread leading
from the particular to the general,
small window which looks out on the
universe. Under this banner, Bérard
painted large uncharacterized portrait
heads which somehow managed in their
intense intimacy to express a tenderness
for all humanity. Tehelitchev, through
his still lifes of oversized eggs and his
Siamese-twinlike human bodies and dou-
bled faces, conveyed a glimpse of t e

France its leade ‘ was ne

restless sensuality underlying all nature.
Berman’s night scenes of quay-side stock
piles gave a concrete image of loneliness,
Tonny’s. drawings—Neo-Romantic only
in that they were imaginative and in- 4
no way abstract or Impressionist—of
hordes and battles of insect creatures, 1
showed him to be a sort of modern Bosch, |
nearest of all the group to the Sur- —
réalists but without Surréalism’s essen-—
tial malice. Leonid himself painted very |
much as today—boats and marines in |
muted colors, the compositions corrected J
in the studio according ‘to the pre-Im- fF)
pressionist rules of art. A
FROM the mid-twenties until the war, —
Neo-Romanticism and its bitter rival ©
Surréalism were the only schools of paint-
ing to oppose the triumphant progress —
of abstraction. Both were schools of —
poetic painting, and for the most part
were representational. Apart from that,
the two movements were different in
every way. Neo-Romanticism was po-
litically neutral and its subject matter
was a form of personal poetry addressed _
to upper-class taste. Surréalism, on the
other hand, was sharply revolutionary
in politics oa an impersonal subject v
matter derived from advanced psycho-

logical theory and subversive in intent. —
Surréalism, though esesntially a literary —
and not a painting movement, was the
stronger. It was better cueanigatl and
its- doctrine of subversion had wider
popular appeal than Neo-Romanticisiay
rather nebulous humanism. Its working
methods of automatic association were
adopted by many painters not connected
with the movement, and the images it
invented had enormous success in co
mercial art. Dali, its principal painter
(popularly considered a Surréalist long
after he had been officially excommuni-
cated from the movement) attempted,
as well as advertising, the conquest of
the stage. But his ballet designs and
costumes, though striking, were too ec
centric to establish an acceptable s
On the other hand, the stage designs 0
Bérard, Tchelitchey and Berman we
the finest of our time. Bérard was a a
responsible for much of the Romane ic
revival in interior decorations so char-
acteristic of the thirties, and his dravy
ings and ideas for costume design — rt
only molded the taste of his time but
later formed the basis for the great s SUC:
cess of Dior, ~

As a movement in painting, Neo-R
manticism was less successful.
tracted a few new adherents,
so much work based on y
icism, it lost all tp. quickly ts
tension and puri + Bécardig

“achieve the position in French painting
his great talent and intelligence seemed
to promise. Perhaps because of indolence,
perhaps because his energies were dissi-
‘pated by opium and high society, he
produced many fine beginnings but dis-
appointingly few works finished and im-
portant enough to sustain his reputa-
tion. Tchelitchey was a magnificent
draftsman, forceful, imaginative and in-
credibly able. None the less, all but his
earliest work, which is in rich grays and
blacks only, suffers apparently from a
faulty color sense. And many of the later
works, in addition to their garishness,
have an unquiet and unfortunate elab-
oration, all too obviously due to Sur-
réalist influence. Eugéne Berman, less
forceful as a draftsman perhaps, but a
much richer painter, shows also in much

of his later work a taste for over-elabora-
tion. This however is probably less due
to Surréalist influence than to a restless
diligence of mind.

Of all these painters Leonid is the
only one who has never touched the
theatre. He is also almost the only one
who has not been influenced in some
way by Surréalism. He is a man of great
intellectual distinction who has never
been interested in anything but his own
painting. And it is undoubtedly due to
this singleness of purpose that one finds
in the present show the same dazzling
light and straightforward poetry that
have always rendered his pictures so
enchanting. With the addition that now,
in his maturity and with complete mas-
tery of all his means, this is probably
his finest exhibition.

THEATRE

Harold Clurman

I WAS entertained by Anouilh’s The
Fighting Cock when I saw it in Paris,
but thought it rather too locally French
for popular consumption in New York.
As I said then in The Nation (June 20),
it was clever and on the whole a good
evening, though it seemed disjointed.
My reaction on seeing the Broadway
production (ANTA Theatre) is peculiar.
Though my mind or ear convinced me
that it was a play superior to anything
else presented here this season—except
Heartbreak House—I took little pleasure
in it as a spectator. The production —
highly praised even by those reviewers
who were cool to it as a play—is bad.
This surprised me because its director
Peter Brook is perhaps the most talented
of the regularly functioning English di-
rectors (Tyrone Guthrie’s work is rarely
to be seen in London) and did a superb
job with Anouilh’s Ring Around the
Moon in London some years ago.
The Fighting Cock is Anouilh’s apo-
logia pro vita sua. It is an unusual
apology in that Anouilh kids and ad-
monishes himself shrewdly even more
than he defends himself. The General
who is “the fighting cock” of the title—
he was a “scatterbrain” in French—is a
romantic, a roaring individualist, an
idealist and an ass. He is explosive in
denunciation of everything now happen-
ing in France (and to a Frenchman that
is tantamount to saying the world). He
has no faith in progress, in equalitarian-
ism, in science as a key to wisdom.
“Man has never changed,” he says, “and
he never will change despite what the
_ liberal journals say. He may blow up

er 26, 1959

;

our planet or reorganize it as he wishes,
the real problems will remain as they
were. One is handsome or ugly, intelli-
gent or stupid, one has ‘it’ or one hasn’t.”

The General believes in true love, in
fidelity, in honor, in honest work; his
conduct is a long, rude protest against
everything that sullies his vision of these
virtues. His bitterness, he explains, is
not hate, but pain. What he does not
see, but what Anouilh in his dialogue
with himself confesses for him, is that
he has no sense of reality, that his in-
flexibility bores his wife, that he has
little understanding of his children, that
he is out of touch with everything— in-
cluding the army, the Church and the
conservative institutions of his day.

All this is conveyed with considerable
humor of an acrid sort and with oc-
casional moments of tenderness. Anouilh
feels, as T. S. Eliot once wrote, that
“there is no such thing as a lost cause.
... We fight for lost causes so that our
defeat and dismay may be the preface
to our successor’s victory ... 3; we fight
to keep something alive rather than in
the expectation that anything will
triumph.”

Politically speaking, Anouilh is an an-
archist of the Right, which is hardly any
kind of politics. His dogged romanticism
is breached. His misgivings and hurt
create cynicism, sentimentality, laughter
and cunning. Most French intellectuals
hold him in contempt; he is none the less
one of the ablest dramatists alive.

The type represented by the General
is almost non-existent in our country.
Our reactionaries believe in exactly the

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495

kind of mechanical progress the General
despises. The little “underground” move-
ment he tries vainly to form to rid the
world of its “maggots” does not resem-
ble any of the subversive leagues we
know. The absurdity of the French breed
Anouilh depicts is almost charming in
its parochialism. I do not believe our
audience can identify itself (even in
opposition) with this aspect of the play.

The worst of The Fighting Cock is
that its production has been meaning-
lessly stylized. The cast—including such
a persuasive actor as Rex Harrison—is
made to disport itself with little relation
to any concrete reality, so that the
actors are prevented from striking a
recognizable chord even in terms of cari-
cature. There is shouting and some cute
stage business, but no atmosphere or
idea is established. It is as if a group
of separate masks were strung on a cord
and we had only the vaguest notion how
or why they all came to be hanging there.

Anouilh isn’t a realistic playwright,
but one can still make a coherent whole
out of his world with its own truth and
its own communicative values. Most of

the actors in this production are Eng-
lish, but they do not seem English and
they are certainly not convincing as
Frenchmen. They remain actors—im-
pelled by the whim of a willful director
who did not see the play as something
to be said but as a series of scenes that
were to be displayed as tricks. Very. few
of them come off, so that this play of
quality ends as more or less a dud.

I HAVE no real appetite for theatrical
parody; I was unable fully to enjoy so
famous and admirably produced a piece
as The Boy Friend. Still, Little Mary
Sunshine (book, music, lyrics by Rick
Besoyan), a take-off on American mu-
sicals vintage 1900-1910 (Orpheum
Theatre), struck me as very pleasant
for its first hour. Its spirit is amateur,
but it is done with a high degree of
competence in the direction of its cast—
Eileen Brennan as Mary is especially ef-
fective—in the choice of types, the musi-
cal delivery of the ensemble, the fresh
voices. As a production, Little Mary
Sunshine is one of the best I have seen
off Broadway for a long time.

MUSIC

Lester Trimble

ONE OF THE most disturbing events
of the present season took place at Car-
negie Hall recently under the direction
of Margaret Hillis. It was the world pre-
miere of a full-evening Christmas ora-
torio entitled For the Time Being, with
a text by W. H. Auden, and music by
a young composer named Marvin David
Levy, who was given a $3,000 commis-
sion by Miss Hillis to compose the score.
The performance involved the Collegiate
Chorale; the Symphony of the Air; a
solo panel of some of the finest voices
in the operatic world (those of Lucine
Amara, Maureen Forrester, Reri Grist,
Robert Rounseville, Martial Singher, and

_ Ezio Flagello); and actor Claude Rains,

as narrator. Production costs for the
evening came to $30,000. The oratorio
turned out to be a sterile giant.

From the quality of pre-concert ru-
mors and publicity, it early became evi-
oy dent that something extraordinary was
brewing. The composer, who is still in
his middle-twenties, had worked himself
into a gastric ulcer, which was not sur-
prising, considering the burden of re-
nsibility which rested upon his rela-
ely untried shoulders, But the actual
‘ofessional dimensions of the enterprise
re not fully revealed until the evening
concert. . Arriving at Carnegie, Hall,

one saw that a vocal score of For the
Time Being had already been printed
and was on sale in the lobby. This rep-
resented an act of daring so rate among
music publishers that more than a few
eyebrows coasted right up to the tops
of heads. When, inside the hall, you
opened the program, there was a little
slip of paper announcing that Everest
Records was going to record the entire
performance, and requesting the audience
to be quiet. Nothing had been neglected
to give the oratorio a send-off befitting
a work of major significance. By virtue
of Everest’s efficiency, the record will
probably be on sale by the time this
column is in print. And that, too, is re-
markable, for months tsually elapse be-
tween recording and merchandising.
What of the music that occasioned this
extraordinary round of professional ac-
tivity? It was exactly what anyone who
had heard some of the composer’s pre-
vious work, who had taken into consid-
eration his youth, his demonstrated
proclivity for facile composition, and the
size of the project, might have predicted
—a mild, “competent,” no-idiom score
of the sort I have deplored here Oni
other occasions. There es “happy”
sections, which were not cons ply
happy, atid “Hie evions 9 which were

}

|
‘4 i
~ ae {
an |

not ‘tragic. The orchestration was att”
right; the harmonies progressed prop- —
erly; there was a conventional kind of —
melodic contouring which unfortunately a
passes with some people and critics for |
melody itself. But there was no genuine — a
life in the music, no real expression of |
mind or viewpoint, no vision. y
The composer does not bear primary iat
responsibility for the aesthetic debacle
this $30,000 evening turned out to be.
What twenty-seven-year-old would not
leap at the chance to write a work for
such magniloquent forces; to be pub-
lished, recorded, publieied, feted and
financially supported while he worked?
(Even in these years of prosperity, $3,000
looks to most American composers about
the way $10,000 would to any other
American professional.) Some, with a
different sort of courage, or a more ma-
ture and self-demanding attitude toward
the act of composing, would have done
the job differently. But I cannot think
of one composer in that age group who
is capable of writing a significant Christ-
mas oratorio of such dimensions.
‘It seems to me that Miss Hillis was
the one who erred in the commissioning
of this score; that she made a miscaleula-
tion of a sort that is too prevalent these
days, and which became noticeable in —
this case only because of the extrava-
gance of her generosity. Everyone seems
to be searching for a Mozart, a talent:
who will spring full-fledged right out of |
the cradle with a damp sheaf of master- —
pieces in his hand. Prize-giving organi- —
zations, universities, privaté donors, all
find the idea of discovering youthful —
genius so séductive that they throw most —
of their weight into the attempt. But —
in the twentieth century there are not —
going to be any Mozarts. Music is not as
simple to write as it was two hundred —
years ago, and those individuals and in- |
stitutions that wish to nurture the art —
would do well to tailor their gifts and
requests to the abilities of the recipient.
The artist, since he is performing un=
economic labor, needs to be stipported —
by his society at every stage of his —
career. But a slow development in depth
is preferable to a hot-rod beginning and
subsequent decay or neglect. In the end,
it would have been of far greater value
to the composer and to the culture at
large if Miss Hillis had requisitioned:
two small cantatas for her $3,000, and
stipulated that the composer should
work slowly, self-critically and with an
eye to discovering his own uniqueness,
if any there be. It does no good to e
courage the young to prattle along”

alter year. Ev en the huge perfe
mecha ism of moe ern co cert f
pave d gus 2 mus Ci | vacw :

£ ,

_—

ca
ea
th

ACROSS:

1 Certainly not a false note brought
in. (4,4)

5 Drive forward at full gear for the
race, (6)

9 Equal to a goddess almost, but new-
ly arrived. (7)

10 ee Go back, and then go ahead!

11 one” but not from native stock.

12 They might work for passage. (7)

13 One might make a good start by
- mothering Kate. (6, 3,

15 With feeling - of flattening
around the Sheriff’s men? (13)

21 Seeing it here today, you’ll find it
- in addition. (7) fs

22 Equal representation. (7)

23 Stretehand cut*off an enclositire. (7)
24 Run for the boss!.(7) 0” te

25 Toren: seem a very happy belief!

out

26 Stys, perhaps. “Styes, certainly. (8)
DOWN:

perhaps,.causes some motion. (6)
2 ie possibly grand! (7)

BS
= es

ile

1 What might be turned on Rover,

Crossword Puzzle No. 847

By FRANK W. LEWIS

Pee

(ab ae

a PRE
Bee

6 A number in good voice still act
afraid. (7)

7 What Walt heard singing. (7)

8 What the Japanese do in their
» equivalent of cellars, in remem-
brance. (8)

10 Friends, perhaps, should be culti-
vated here. (6,7)

14 Grave statements, no doubt. (8)

16. Straightened out people -indeed,
when wrong! (7)

17 One turns sour, given such duty. (7)

18 How one shuts up when I’m bring-
ing up the serious fluid! (7)

19 rar like Ethan Allen’s mountain.
7)

20 Has eonfidence in what are some-
times busted. (6)

SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 846

ACROSS: 1 Tetrameter; 6 Scab; 10
Orpheus; 11 Federal; 12 and 18 Pains-
taking; 13 Agerandize; 15 Ragings; 16
Scallop; 17 Nestled; 20 Tremolo; 22
Pharmacist; 23 Pelf; 25 Reigned; 26
Imitate; 27 Sage; 28 Astringent.
DOWN: 1 Troop transports; 2 Topping;
3 Ages; 4 Ensigns; 5 Efforts; 7 Cor-
dial; 8 Bullet-proof vest; 9 Edentates;
14. Inclement; 19 Decides; 20 Tastier;
21 Operate; 24 Finn,

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